The Dota 2 championship tournament The International wrapped up its fourth year of competition yesterday live at Seattle's Key Arena, awarding millions of dollars in prize money.
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Team NewBee took home the largest prize as champions, earning $5 million for their Grand Finals victory over ViCi Gaming. ViCi still take home a sizable $1.5 million reward, though I'm sure the team would have rather the extra money along with becoming champions.
Teams split the prize money between the five players on the roster, meaning NewBee members earned roughly $1 million each. The lineups of both finalists consisted entirely of Chinese players.
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Meanwhile, third place finishers Evil Geniuses made headlines for the record highest payout for a U.S. team, $1 million. They were knocked out by ViCi in the semi-final, during which they took one win from the eventual runners up. Evil Geniuses are sponsored by Razer, whose equipment was used during the competition by the team.
Evil Geniuses' roster is entirely American, and gives hope to North American players going forward, even though ViCi were clearly the better side in the semi-final. The roster consists of Peter "ppd" Dager, Mason "Mason" Venne, Saahil "UNiVeRsE" Arora, Artour "Arteezy" Babaev and Ludwig "zai" Wahlberg.
"The tournament featured the very best Dota 2 players in the world, and it took an incredible amount of practice and teamwork for us to finish the way we did," says Dager, who serves as team captain. "Dota 2 is won and lost in fractions of a second. It came down to us being one of the most prepared and most skilled teams there."
