Dendi Talks About Streamers Casting Tournament Games and How it Affects the Scene

^{Image Courtesy: B8 Esports}

• Dendi gave out his opinion on the recent 'stream exclusivity rights' drama and stated that streamers are essentially stealing content.
• As a result, he believes that we will be left without tournaments, sooner or later.

A lot of opinions have been shared back and forth ever since Kyle "Kyle" Freedman spoke about ‘stream exclusivity rights’. Henrik "AdmiralBulldog" Ahnberg and Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski have all stated their points. Unfortunately, the discussions went nowhere.

(Read: AdmiralBulldog Deletes Tweets After Kyle Replies with a Detailed Post on Content Exclusivity)

Perhaps, one of the only players who can genuinely claim to have been in both sides of the fence is Danil “Dendi” Ishutin. He has been a successful streamer, caster and a player and hence is one of the more well-informed Dota 2 personalities around.

In his B8 Esports Podcast, Dendi spoke about this issue. He said that he did not understand why Valve has allowed this to go on and that these streamers are essentially ‘stealing’ content.

"I'd like to understand the reason why Valve allowed us to do this. Because I can really see that if this goes on, sooner or later there will be fewer and fewer tournaments. So it's going to be harder for the tournament operators to run these tournaments. Because they don't get the exposure they're counting on. It's gonna go down. 

So people are stealing, essentially, the content. You could say they're not stealing because they're watching on DotaTV. But in fact, they are stealing, because these tournaments are organized by someone else. And sooner or later we will be left without tournaments…

… when you stream the tournament, I think this is completely wrong. The guys do not understand that someone is insanely investing in this. In fact, this is the growth of esports, and we are all interested in it - players, spectators, commentators, streamers. ”

While ‘stealing’ might be somewhat of an extreme terminology to use in this situation, Dendi has made his sentiments about streaming tournament games clear.

Despite, all these discussions, Valve is yet to respond to these recent statements from both sides.

Note: The Podcast was published in Russian on YouTube. This article has been written by using tools like Google and Deepl to translate the quotes and as such, might contain translation errors.