5 Years of Dotabuff
5 Years ago today we launched Dotabuff.com. It started with a very simple homepage that was driven by search. Compared to now the site seemed much simpler and was strictly focused on basic player statistics. Dota as a game was in a more of a speculative place, and quite a bit closer to Dota 1 in a lot of ways. Finally, at the 5 year mark we have been out of beta longer than Dota 2 itself.
We had our first git commit on July 18, 2012 and launched a little over a month later. Our small team set out to make the best statistics website for Dota 2, not knowing if we would be able to make it a full time job. It has been a long and difficult path with a lot of setbacks along the way, but one that has been entirely worth it.
Today Dotabuff is the largest community site for Dota 2 by basically every metric (as far as we can tell). We serve an extraordinary portion of the community, and 3 million Dota players visit Dotabuff every month. After all of these years we are still seeing record traffic months, and continuing seeing our community grow.
I have spent the past fews days trying to reflect on the journey it took to get here and a few interesting things along the way stand out. This is by no means comprehensive, and focuses on the older milestones I have more nostalgia for.
- We launched Dotabuff on Aug 23, 2012, just before TI2, which started on the 26th. Flew out to TI2 (which had a whopping $1.6M prize pool), and spent a lot of the tournament distracted and checking on the website.
- By October 2012 we were downloading and parsing 100% of dota replays. We didn’t have access to a lot of the replay data we have today, and the match volume was significantly lower back then.
- On December 11, 2013 we launched the Dotabuff Blog. Since then we’ve published over 700 posts!
- On July 11, 2014 we released the first beta of TrueSight, our replay analysis platform. To date TrueSight has analyzed uncountable millions of Dota matches.
- In July of 2015 the ayy lmao thread was created on our forums, changing meme threads forever at an impressive 1489+ pages.
- On July 23, 2015, hot on the tails of the Dota 2 Reborn beta client, we also redesigned Dotabuff with a new modern and mobile-friendly design.
- With a new game engine comes a new replay format. Anyone who has spent some time working in this area knows how terrifying it is. We were incredibly proud to be ahead of the game, launching Truesight Reborn on Aug 2, 2015. We also immediately open sourced it.
- Last year on June 24, 2016 we launched Overbuff.com as an experiment built out of our passion for Overwatch. It has gone on to become the most popular stats site in Overwatch.
We wouldn’t have been able to do this and make it a job without the support of the community. I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has used our website over the years, recommended it to a friend and especially those who have supported us directly by purchasing Plus. Dotabuff would not exist in the state it is in today without the support of Plus. I am so proud of what we have been able to build together, and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone on our team who has worked on Dotabuff in any way. We make this site better together and the accomplishments belong to all of us.
Dotabuff has been the largest focus of my life over the past 5+ years. I am constantly challenged by the complexity of the game, the sheer amount of data available, and the challenges we face as a company. I couldn’t ask for a better job. Thank you for letting me have it. <3
Some fun statistics:
- Over 3 Billion Dota 2 matches played
- Most popular countries that visit Dotabuff: Russia, United States, Ukraine, Indonesia
- We started on the cloud, and now we primarily host on bare metal with 100 TB of Dota 2 data
- 10 people work for our company, with most of those primarily working on Dotabuff
- Have a question for Dotabuff Staff? Join us in discord
Nice milestone and Congrats for nice work.
Best stats site for Dota 2! Very comfortable and friendly.
I cant believe this great site just have 10 staff :o . GJ dotabuff
i just love that the ayy lmao thread counts as a milestone
grats :D
in top 4 there is 2 russian-speeking countries, kek
well, спасибо, что благодаря вашему блогу я улучшаю свой английский. It is, by the way, as awesome as the all other site itself. The only one sight on things in dota, that is at least close to be scientific. Intelligent, ergo, elite one.
Congrats from Germany as well.
Keep up the good work!
Can't believe you are up 5 years. AWESOME!
Godspeed!