Dota 2 developer Valve Software announced on Wednesday (Jan. 22) that this year’s version of the game’s annual global championship, The International 2025 (TI 2025), will take place in Hamburg, Germany.
In a post on the official Dota 2 blog, Valve revealed that the Barclays Arena will host the TI 2025 Finals weekend from September 11 to 14. The developer also showed that 16 groups will compete in this year’s Dota 2 World Championship tournament, with groups earning their spot on the occasion through direct invites and a series of regional qualifiers.
TI 2025 will see the return of Dota 2’s world championship tournament to Germany a full 14 years after the country hosted the inaugural event of the series. All the way back in 2011, the first-ever TI was hosted in the Koelnmesse in Cologne as part of Gamescom 2011 and served as Dota 2’s first official reveal, with Natus Vincere becoming the first team to claim the Aegis of Champions.
“The stars have aligned and the stage is once again being set for cosmic battle. And this time, that battle has returned to where it all began: Germany, the site of The International’s humble debut on the world stage, where it was watched in person by many tens of people. Now, fourteen years later, The International returns to Germany, to Hamburg’s Barclays Arena September 11 – 14 — in front of, we trust, a slightly bigger crowd this time around,” Valve said in its blog post.
Based on Valve’s teaser image and accompanying one, we can also expect TI 2025 to have a theme focused on stars and constellations. And with the way they learned the “circus” and “cathedral” themes for TI 2024 and TI 2023, respectively, we can expect the TI 2025 HQ to also serve as a beautiful backdrop for some other showcase of the best of Dota 2. esports.
Aside from the dates and location of the 2025 IT Finals weekend, Valve hasn’t revealed much else about this year’s Dota 2 World Championship tournament. But if TI 2024 is anything to go by, where Team Liquid was the third team in Dota 2 history to lift the Aegis of Champions for the second time, we can expect this year’s TI year to have 3 distinct stages ( the Group Stage, Decider Qualification and Main Event) organized over approximately two weeks of competition.
With TI 2025 still being many months away, Dota 2 fans can tide themselves over with the first set of tournaments for the year scheduled to take place over the next few weeks. The first LAN tournament of the year, FISSURE PLAYGROUND #1 in Belgrade, Serbia will kick off this Friday (January 24), followed by BLAST Slam II and DreamLeague Season 25 in February.
In addition to being our first look at what the hierarchy will look like in the competitive scene this year, the aforementioned tournaments will also be the first big opportunity to put in impressive performances and earn direct invites to TI 2025.
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Data will be updated soon
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