This is the first part in a new series looking at contemporary multiplayer gaming and the e-sports phenomenon.

Since Steam’s inception, just a handful of marvellous gems have topped the Steam Stats page. Games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Sid Meier’s Civilization V have earned accolades, snared players in their thousands, and then hovered around the 50,000 mark. For Valve’s Dota 2, now just wrapping its beta period, that figure currently sits at 500,000 concurrent users (not including China and South Korea). Five hundred thousand!

More users play Dota 2 simultaneously than the nine other ranked games combined and it is only going up from there. Why?(more…)