DotA in the world of computer games

In this post I'll talk a bit about the history of DotA, the impact of its emergence and it's future.
There's a dispute when and where exactly DotA originated. I don't intend to take sides, so the only person I'm going to give credit is the current developer - a person known as IceFrog. There are a whole bunch of people before him, but IceFrog is not only the one who have worked most on the development (he's an author of approximately 70 versions), but he's the one under who DotA emerged as the most successful Warcraft 3 mode. That's right - DotA is not a separate game, but a modification of Blizzard's famous Warcraft 3 (the predecessor of World of Warcraft). If a person want's to play DotA he has to install Warcraft 3 and load DotA through it. There exists thousands modifications of Warcraft 3, created by different developers, but is the last years 95% of the people who play Warcraft 3 do it to play DotA. Currently DotA is the only reason Warcraft hasn't fallen in oblivion and still receives support from Blizzard (like Blizzard is still maintaining the servers that people use to play online with each other, instead of using them for World of Warcraft for example).

Just for a few years DotA has turned from "just another weird game, played by the geeks" into a worldwide phenomenon. It's by far the most popular modification of any game in the world. It has millions of fans, the majority of which play from China, The Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Russia but there are also substantial amount of players from Europe and the US. It is played locally (the people who play with each other, sit next to each-other), nationally (for example China has huge domestic servers due to the large amount of Chinese DotA fans) and internationally. Blizzard's system of servers called Battle.net is only one of the options you can choose from if you want to play a game with people from Timbuktu, Vietnam, Canada and Norway at the same time; the servers of Garena (another online gaming platform) are currently used by the majority of international DotA players, due to overall better gaming experience (plus the fact that Garena is for free).

The popularity of the DotA and the originality of the gameplay make some people claim that DotA is an establisher of a new ganre of PC games. The idea of DotA has inspired the emergence of a couple of games, the most successful one of which is League of Legends, which won a lot of prices, including the best free-to-play game of the year in 2011. Also, Valve (major video game producer) contacted IceFrog in 2010 and hired him to lead a team that would produce an entire separate game called Dota 2. In this way DotA will become independent from Warcraft and Blizzard and will have the chance to evolve in more freely. It is a big moment for the whole DotA community - Dota 2 might lead into the world of the games of this ganre, but it can also be it's epic and ridicilously expensive downfall. Nobody knows weather DotA will contunie to grow, or weather it has reaceh its peak and will finally step down from the PC gaming scene, leaving the future of the ganre in the hands of Riot Games (the developer of League of Legends).