Dota 2 is one of the biggest games in the world. Helmed by the legendary and mysterious “Icefrog”, it started a whole new genre and continues to be one of the biggest games in the world in terms of playerbase, esports viewership and prizepool.

An interesting development just happened a few hours ago as Valve Corporation, the publisher and developer of Dota 2 has just filed a trademark for “DOTA UNDERLORDS”. What does this mean? Let the speculation begin.

With The International 2019 – the biggest annual esports tournament in the world, bound to happen in a few weeks, whatever Valve is planning won’t be a mystery for very long. The copyright classifications include everything under the sun such as “calculating machines, data processing equipment and computers; fire-extinguishing apparatus, mechanisms for coin-operated apparatus” so we really have no clue!

Fresh off the heels of the spectacular failure that was the Artifact card game, Valve really has to be planning something big to make up for one of their few blunders in company history. So let’s take a guess shall we?

• Could it have something do with the extremely popular custom map Auto Chess? (After all the event is in Shanghai and the developers of the map are from China)
• Is it a new single player focused game featuring the Dota character Underlord?
• A VR game to push the new Valve Index?
• An Artifact expansion? (probably not but who knows)
• A new console game using the Dota IP?
• Additional content for the new battlepass?
• Or *gasp* could it be Dota 3?

It’s not every day or every year, or even every 5 years that we hear something potentially big from Valve, so it’s definitely something worth talking about.

One thing’s for sure though, this isn’t going to the Epic Games Store.

The International 2019 just got a lot more exciting.