Gabe Newell Declares His Personal Love of DOTA 2

Mixed in with the veritable tsunami of gaming news coming from Gamescom comes a touch of light news concerning everyone’s favorite CEO, Gabe Newell. Apparently, the game publisher just loves DOTA 2 and has logged an absurd amount of hours on the RTS variant – approximately 800 by Newell’s count.

To give this number some context, 800 hours equates to 33 days if played 24/7. With a realistic schedule of five hours a night, that would equate to Newell playing DOTA 2 on 160 days of the year. Given this level of playtime, I would swear that Gabe wants to win his $1,000,000 back in the upcoming DOTA 2 tourney.

Newell generously amends this comment with a explanation that the game’s designers have logged just as much playtime:

“The cool thing about Dota 2 is that it’s probably the game that we’ve made that we’re most obsessed with playing. As a games developer, you tend to get pretty tired of the thing that you’re developing, because you had to experience all the flaws and the difficulties all along. You sort of reach the point where you’re like ‘Let’s just be done with this.’ Dota 2? Every day, after we’re done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till 2 or 3 in the morning.”

With Newell giving this much praise to a non hat-based game I would bet that we are no doubt in store for something special. That, or he has some motive to make the game sound awesome as possible within the coming month; however, I cannot even begin to imagine any reason why that would be the case.