Valve Clarified Their Rules on Dota Broadcasting to Address the ESL Issue

The ongoing ESL One Genting minor tournament caused a lot of controversy in the Dota 2 community – ESL signed a contract with Facebook to stream their event on Facebook Live exclusively. Many fans didn’t want to watch the official stream on Facebook due to the lack of some features (such as clips) and the fact that you need to log-in with your account to watch the games. As a result, many users opted to watch third-party streams on Twitch instead of the official Facebook stream. To bring back the viewers, ESL started to ban these streams, sending DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices to Twitch. In response, Valve released a clarification of their rules, in which they made it clear that it is allowed to stream games from DotaTV (in-game watching platform) if the stream doesn’t use the unique content of the official broadcaster and if it’s not done by a rival company. The full statement can be found below:

We’ve been seeing a bunch of discussion regarding DotaTV and want to expand on what we’ve said before. The first issue we’ve been seeing discussed is regarding DMCA notices. This one is very simple: No one besides Valve is allowed to send DMCA notices for games streamed off of DotaTV that aren’t using the broadcasters’ unique content (camera movements, voice, etc). The second issue is regarding who is permitted to cast off of DotaTV. We designed the DotaTV guidelines to be flexible in order to allow for up and coming casters, or community figures like BSJ or Bulldog that occasionally watch tournament games on their channel, to be able to stream off of DotaTV. It is not to allow commercial organizations like BTS to compete with the primary stream. It’ll be our judgment alone on who violates this guideline and not any other third party’s.

The ongoing ESL One Genting is being held at Arena of Stars in Genting Highlands, Malaysia. The group stage of the event has already concluded with six teams – Newbee, Vici Gaming, Virtus.pro, Evil Geniuses, Team Secret, Team Liquid – advancing to the playoffs.