Gabe Newell: "I've played Dota 2 for about 800 hours"

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At the GamesCom trade show in Cologne today, Owen managed to grab hold of Valve CEO Gabe Newell to ask about their new game: Dota 2. It's a team-based online game based on a hugely popular community-made game mode for Warcraft 3. Valve debuted their take on it today with a $1,000,000 tournament at the show.

What's been Gabe's personal experience of Dota 2? Quite a freaking lot, it turns out. He and the team have been playing it more obsessively than any other game they've made.

"I've played Dota 2 for about 800 hours. The cool thing about Dota 2 is that it's probably the game that we've made that we're most obsessed with playing. As a games developer, you tend to get pretty tired of the thing that you're developing, because you had to experience all the flaws and the difficulties all along. You sort of reach the point where you're like 'Let's just be done with this.' Dota 2? Every day, after we're done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till 2 or 3 in the morning."

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