Lots of new and unique content to the Battle Pass this year.

The much-awaited crowdfunding extravaganza for Valve’s hit MOBA Dota 2 has finally arrived months before its biggest Esports event, The International. Now on its 8th year, The International, or to be more specific, The International Dota 2 Championships, will hope to break and set new records once again, as the launch of its Battle Pass also begins one of Esports biggest community challenges: topping the prize pool charts.

Known to fund Valve’s prize pool allocation for its biggest Esports event, the TI Battle Pass, which was originally known as the Compendium, has helped Dota 2 achieve crazy feats such as last year’s USD 24,787,916, which remains the biggest in Esports history for a single tournament. Ever since its launch back in 2013 for TI3, Dota 2’s fanbase has, ever since then, been spending ludicrous amounts to try and top the prize pool of each year with the Compendium or the Battle Pass granting different rewards based on levels or Tiers which can be unlocked by either directly purchasing points, or by completing in-game challenges.

The 2013 lineup of Esports team, The Alliance, was the first to taste the spending power of the Dota 2 fanbase as they took home USD 1.4 Million, a 40% increase from the original grand prize of USD 1 Million.

Now as another TI approaches, Valve has finally revealed this year’s TI Battle Pass, complete with your expected content and as well as new additions and even familiar voices. Aside from sparkly cosmetics that add swag to your Dota 2 heroes in-game, Valve has also added new custom game modes for Dota 2, one of which is the Underhollow game mode which will have players “Battle through a labyrinth filled with monsters, marvels, and many other three-player enemy squads as you search for Roshan’s rarest cheese and work to be the last team standing“, or in more simpler terms, Dota 2 Battle Royale. Apart from Underhollow, this year’s TI Battle Pass also includes a Mutation Mode for non-ranked games, which adds various ability modifiers for heroes, with one example stated being a Global Rupture, a modification of Blood Seeker’s ultimate ability.

As if one Rupture wasn’t bad enough.

But perhaps, one of the most interesting additions to this year’s TI Battle Pass is the Epic Voice Pack which includes a chat wheel voice pack featuring the voices of non-other than popular Filipino Esports shoutcasters, Marlon “Lon” Marcelo and Aldrin “Dunoo” Pangan. The voice pack includes some of the iconic lines picked by Valve from the duos shoutcasting feats such as “Echo Slamma Jamma”, and “Easiest money of my life”, with a few Tagalog lines also thrown in. Filipino fans might be a bit turned off though, as the Epic Voice Pack also comes with some epic spending effort, with an estimated cost of at least USD 500 to unlock instantly, that is of course if you choose to spend cash on Battle Pass points instead of earning them by completing in-game challenges.

Less than 24-hours after the release of the TI8 Battle Pass, the spending power of the Dota 2 fanbase is once again being gloriously put on display as the TI8 prize pool now sits well beyond the USD 5 Million mark. As far as predictions are concerned, and should the current trend continue it is expected for this year’s TI prize pool to sit at around the USD 30 Million area, making it once again the biggest in Esports history.