Dota 2‘s Kiev Major ended over the weekend with one of the most exciting series in Major history, a back-and-forth game-five thriller that saw OG claim their fourth Major championship over the hometown favorites Virtus Pro.
And then it ended on the video below… a strange, if not voyeuristic montage of several different women who were in attendance at the Kiev Major. Considering that the last Major ended with a trailer for Dota 7.00, this seemed especially out of place, and, without context, can only serve to send the message “some women also care about Dota 2.”
The video picked up some controversy, even beyond the expected accusations of sexism, with many hardcore Dota 2 players thinking it placed them in a bad light, as a group of people who want to use women as tokens or are incredibly shocked by g … g … girl g … g … gamers.
But just before midnight last night, the organizers of the Kiev Major, PGL eSports, issued a public apology via Reddit. The unabridged apology is pasted below:
Hello everyone,
As producer and showrunner, I want to apologize on behalf of PGL for airing the clip that closed the broadcast of the Kiev Major.
A lot of people were disappointed and the high expectations set for us were not met. We let you down, and the clip does not reflect PGL’s values, team diversity or broadcast philosophy.
We have the utmost respect for the Dota 2 community and, going forward, the video production workflow will be improved with additional checks and quality filters to ensure that mistakes like this will not happen again.
Everything we do is for the community and your feedback is and always will be very important to us.
Thank you for helping us do better next time.
PGL is likely to still be handling the future Major events for Dota 2, unless Valve says otherwise, so we’ll all be paying very close attention to how the next big tournament ends.
