Dota 2 Review (2026): Is It Still Worth Playing?
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Updated November 5, 2026. Hero counts and patch dates come from dota2.com, player numbers, reviews and requirements from Valve's Steam pages, and the League of Legends figures from Riot's own Data Dragon files and support site, all read that day. Any figure measured in hours is a calculation made for this article, with its assumption spelled out beside it.
Short answer: yes, if you can give it five to ten hours a week — and no if you cannot. Dota 2 is free, all 127 of its heroes are unlocked from the start, and Valve's own Steam chart showed 599,895 people in the game when this page was checked on November 5, 2026. The catch is the relearning. Ten gameplay patches landed in the twelve months to November 5, 2026, so someone who dips in for two hours a month spends most of those hours catching up rather than improving.
Key takeaways
- Free, and the roster is free too. Valve's store page states plainly that "All heroes are free" — all 127 of them, with no character to buy or unlock.
- The beginner stage runs about 60 hours. Three easy heroes at roughly 30 matches each is 90 matches; at about 40 minutes a match that is 60 hours, or twelve weeks at five hours a week.
- Ten gameplay patches landed in the twelve months to November 5, 2026, two of them numbered (7.40 and 7.41). The newest, 7.41f, is 51 days old.
- Still crowded, no longer the biggest. 599,895 playing and a 717,007 24-hour peak put Dota 2 third on Valve's own Most Played chart, behind Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds.
Figures checked: November 5, 2026.
Dota 2 has a reputation for taking a thousand hours to learn, and the reputation is lazy but not wrong. The more useful way to look at it is as a ledger. Some of what you learn stays with you for years. Some of it is taken back every few months by a patch. How much you get out of your hours depends on which column most of them land in, and the numbers on Valve's own site let you estimate that before you start.
How big is the job, in Valve's own numbers?
| Fact | Figure | Where and when |
|---|---|---|
| Heroes in the game | 127 | dota2.com hero list, September 21, 2026 |
| Heroes rated complexity 1 / 2 / 3 | 55 / 59 / 13 | same hero list, Valve's own complexity filter |
| Gameplay patches in the 12 months to Nov 5, 2026 | 10 (7.40 on Dec 15, 2025 through 7.41f on Sep 15, 2026) | dota2.com patch list |
| Of those, major numbered patches | 2 (7.40 on Dec 15, 2025; 7.41 on Mar 24, 2026) | same |
| Players online / 24-hour peak (Steam) | 599,895 / 717,007 (third place) | Steam Most Played chart, November 5, 2026 |
| Recent reviews | 69% positive of 21,666 (last 30 days) | Steam store page |
| English reviews, all time | 87% positive of 843,381 | Steam store page |
| Minimum PC | dual-core 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, DirectX 11, 60 GB storage | Steam store page |
| Days since the last gameplay patch | 51 (7.41f, September 15, 2026) | dota2.com patch list |
How many people play Dota 2, and who is counting?
This is the question new players actually type into a search box, and it has two very different answers depending on who does the counting. Valve publishes one figure and one only: concurrent players on Steam. On November 5, 2026 that was 599,895 in the game at the moment of checking, with a 717,007 peak over the previous 24 hours — third on Steam's Most Played chart behind Counter-Strike 2 (1,034,382) and PUBG: Battlegrounds (760,138). Valve's own store blurb still opens with "The most-played game on Steam", a line Valve's own chart no longer supports.
Anything bigger than that number is an estimate made by someone other than Valve, and the estimators do not agree. SteamDB, a third-party tracker that records Steam's public data over time, puts the all-time concurrent peak at 1,719,828 and counts 2,810,848 Steam reviews in all languages — more than three times the 843,381 English reviews the store page shows, which is worth knowing before quoting either as "the number of reviews". On the same page three ownership estimators put lifetime owners at roughly 62.6 million (PlayTracker), 98.3 million (VG Insights) and 211.5 million (Gamalytic). A 3.4-fold spread between trackers is the honest answer to "how many players are there": nobody outside Valve knows, and the trackers do not pretend otherwise.
For the decision in front of you the concurrent figure is the only one that matters. Roughly six hundred thousand simultaneous players on an ordinary Thursday afternoon UTC means queues fill at every skill bracket in every major region, and that is the one player-count fact that changes what your evening looks like.
Which of your hours stay with you?
The durable column is bigger than people expect. Last-hitting, map awareness, when to fight and when to farm, how to read an enemy's items — these carry across every patch and every hero. Valve's store description points new players at two tools that build exactly this layer: co-op matches against bots and a hero demo mode for practising abilities. Neither costs anything, and neither costs you a loss in front of four strangers.
The 55 complexity-1 heroes are the other durable asset. Valve itself labels them as the easiest to pick up, and that label is the closest thing Dota has to an official beginner path. Learning a handful of them well teaches the fundamentals without the extra layer of mechanics the complexity-3 heroes add.
There is one more durable asset that newcomers underrate: your own conduct record. Valve's store description says matchmaking is both behaviour- and skill-based, which means the way you play in your first hundred matches — abandoning games, abusing chat, feeding on purpose — follows you into later ones. Because this layer does not reset with patches, it is arguably the cheapest thing to protect and the most expensive to repair. A quiet, finished match you lost is worth more to your future queue than a loud one you rage-quit.
What does the patch calendar take back?
Ten patches in twelve months, two of them large, means something you learned in March may be slightly wrong by June. Most lettered patches (7.41a through 7.41f in 2026) adjust numbers: damage, cooldowns, item costs. The numbered ones, 7.40 in December 2025 and 7.41 in March 2026, can move how the map or the economy works. For a new player this is mostly good news, because everyone relearns at the same time. For someone playing only a few hours a week it means a meaningful slice of the learning goes toward keeping up rather than getting better. The gaps are uneven, too: 7.41e to 7.41f was 47 days, and as of November 5 another 51 days have passed with no gameplay patch at all — the second-longest quiet stretch of 2026, after the 62 days between 7.40c in January and 7.41 in March.
The review figures fit that picture, though not in the way the September reading suggested. Recent sentiment sat at 69% positive on September 21, six days after 7.41f, and the obvious explanation was a post-patch dip. Checked again on November 5 — 51 days later, with no new gameplay patch in between — recent sentiment is still 69%, now across 21,666 reviews rather than 24,388. That is eighteen points below the 87% all-time English figure, and it has held there for seven weeks with no patch to blame it on. Read it as a steady level of dissatisfaction among the people currently playing, not as a spike.
How long does the beginner stage actually take?
Assume about 40 minutes per normal match including queue and draft. That is my planning figure, not Valve's; real matches vary widely. Then:
| Goal | Matches | Hours at ~40 min | Weeks at 5 h/week | Weeks at 12 h/week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Play each complexity-1 hero once | 55 | about 37 | about 7 | about 3 |
| Play each complexity-1 hero three times | 165 | 110 | 22 | about 9 |
| Play every hero once | 127 | about 85 | about 17 | about 7 |
| Master 3 heroes at ~30 matches each | 90 | 60 | 12 | 5 |
The last row is the one I would actually follow. Ninety matches on three heroes in sixty hours gives you a small, reliable pool and leaves the fundamentals as the main thing you are learning. Trying all 127 heroes costs about 85 hours and mostly teaches you what the enemy can do, which is useful later but not first. And at five hours a week, even the focused plan takes about three months — during which, based on the past year, you should expect two or three patches.
Who should skip it?
Worth it if you like strategy games where knowledge compounds, you are comfortable losing long matches while you learn, and you can give it at least five to ten hours a week so the patch cycle does not outrun you.
Not worth it if you want a game you can put down for two months and return to unchanged; with eleven patches a year you will come back to a slightly different game. It is also a hard sell if a 40-minute commitment per match does not fit your evenings, because leaving mid-match hurts four other people.
Compared with Counter-Strike 2: both are free, both are Valve, both have huge audiences. Counter-Strike changes more slowly and asks you to master one map; Dota asks you to understand dozens of heroes that keep being rebalanced. If novelty keeps you playing, Dota's churn is a feature. If stability does, CS2 is the calmer choice.
Dota 2 or League of Legends for a first MOBA?
Both are free and both are enormous, so the choice comes down to what each one asks of you. Every row below was read on November 5, 2026 from the publisher's own material — Valve's Steam pages and dota2.com, Riot's Data Dragon data files and Riot's support site — rather than from a comparison site.
| What you are comparing | Dota 2 | League of Legends |
| Price to start | Free to play on Steam | Free to download from Riot |
| Playable characters | 127 heroes; store page states "All heroes are free" | 173 champions (Riot Data Dragon, patch 16.22.1) |
| Patch versions, 12 months to Nov 5, 2026 | 10 gameplay patches (7.40 to 7.41f) | 25 versions (15.22 to 16.22) |
| Newest version at checking | 7.41f, September 15, 2026 | 16.22.1 |
| Concurrent players published by the publisher | Yes — 599,895 playing, 717,007 24-hour peak | No figure published; third-party estimates only |
| Minimum PC | Dual core 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM, DirectX 11, 60 GB storage | Core i3-530 / FX-4100, 2 GB RAM, DirectX 11 feature level 11_0, 16 GB storage |
| Supported systems | Windows, macOS, Linux | Windows and macOS only; Riot states Linux and SteamOS are not supported |
Three rows do most of the deciding. Upkeep: twenty-five League versions against ten Dota gameplay patches in the same twelve months means League interrupts you more often with smaller changes, and Dota less often with larger ones. Transparency: Valve publishes Dota 2's concurrent players continuously, so anyone can check whether queues are healthy before installing, while Riot publishes no equivalent number, which is why every League player count in circulation is somebody's estimate. Hardware: the two are not close, with League's minimum at 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage against Dota's 4 GB and 60 GB, and League running on Windows and macOS only.
What would a focused first sixty hours look like?
If I were starting from zero with the numbers above in hand, I would install it, spend the first evening in hero demo and bot matches, and then pick three complexity-1 heroes that play differently — one that stays back and farms, one that roams, one that supports — and play only those for sixty hours. I would read the patch notes for my three heroes only when a new patch lands, and ignore the rest. The cost of that plan is that I will be surprised by unfamiliar enemies for months. The benefit is that almost every hour goes into the durable column of the ledger rather than the one the next patch takes back.
What to have ready before match one
- 60 GB free and a PC above the minimum list.
- One evening in bot matches and hero demo before any match with people.
- Three complexity-1 heroes chosen, one per role.
- A weekly time budget, checked against the table so you know how long the first stage will take.
- A habit of reading only your heroes' lines in each new patch.
FAQ
Is Dota 2 dying in 2026?
Not on the only measure its publisher publishes. Valve's Most Played chart showed 599,895 concurrent players and a 717,007 24-hour peak on November 5, 2026, third behind Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds. What has changed is the mood of the people playing: recent Steam reviews sit at 69% positive against 87% all-time for English reviews, and that gap has now held for seven weeks without a new patch.
Is Dota 2 free?
Yes, and so is the roster. The game is free to download on Steam and Valve's store page states that "All heroes are free" — all 127 of them. Valve frames this as competitive balance: the core content of the game is available to every player so that nobody buys an advantage.
Dota 2 or League of Legends for a new player?
If your PC is old or short on disk, League: its minimum is 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage against Dota 2's 4 GB and 60 GB. If you play on Linux, Dota 2 is the only one of the two that supports it. On upkeep, expect League to interrupt you more often (25 versions in the twelve months to November 5, 2026) and Dota 2 to interrupt you harder but less often (10 gameplay patches, two of them numbered).
How many hours before Dota 2 stops being confusing?
About 60, on the estimate in the table above: three complexity-1 heroes at roughly 30 matches each is 90 matches, and at 40 minutes a match that is 60 hours — twelve weeks at five hours a week, five weeks at twelve. Playing every hero once instead costs about 85 hours and teaches you mostly what the enemy can do.
Do I have to read every patch note?
No. Of the ten gameplay patches in the twelve months to November 5, 2026, eight were lettered revisions that move damage, cooldowns and item costs. Reading the lines for the three heroes you actually play, when a patch lands, covers the part that changes your own matches; the two numbered patches in that stretch (7.40 and 7.41) are the ones worth reading in full.
More from this site: our League of Legends review covers the other big MOBA, the Counter-Strike 2 review breaks down Valve's shooter by hours, and the 10 hottest games right now compares them all.
Tip: Dota is played almost entirely through hotkeys and mouse clicks, so a comfortable mouse with a couple of side buttons makes item and ability binds easier to learn. Gaming mice with side buttons are worth a look. (These are Amazon Associate links — we may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases.)
Checked on dota2.com, Steam and Riot's own data, November 5, 2026
- dota2.com — Heroes (127 heroes and complexity ratings)
- dota2.com — Patches (patch numbers and release dates)
- Steam — Dota 2 store page (reviews, requirements, new-player modes)
- Steam — Most Played chart (current and peak players)
- SteamDB — Dota 2 charts (third-party: all-time peak, review total, ownership estimates)
- Riot Data Dragon — version list and champion data (League of Legends patch numbers, 173 champions)
- Riot Support — League of Legends system requirements
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