A huge shoutout goes out to Ruffy Heredia, CTO and Co-founder of Reminisense Corp., for the inspiration to do this article. – Brightroar

When this year’s Compendium was released last May 1, netizens quickly slammed Valve’s in-game rewards for buying and supporting the year’s biggest Dota 2 tournament.

The Compendium, a digital achievement booklet that functions as an accompaniment application to Dota 2, gives players a set of freebie rewards per purchase, as well as incrementally released goodies per each level of funding achieved.

The Compendium acts as the main crowdfunding tool for The International, Dota 2’s grandest tournament. Each purchase of $10 in-game item adds $2.50 to The International’s base prize of $1.6 million. As of the time of this writing, the current total prize for this year’s event is $7,294,640.

To entice players and fans to purchase the booklet, Valve also packages a series of in-game rewards in the form of cosmetic items, emoticons and long-form graphic novels that expand the world of Dota 2.

The Compendium also features a level up system done through fulfilling certain quests and activities in the lead-up to The International 5, or through buying more points through Valve. The higher the level of The Compendium, the more rewards are given to its owners.

Compared to last year’s Compendium however, this year’s digital booklet is remarkably harder to upgrade without having to buy levels directly from Valve.

Even if one were to buy levels from Valve, the denominations for compendium points makes it hard to reach certain level thresholds without buying extra points.

At level 175, compendium owners receive an item that turns Enigma’s Black Hole skill into a golden maelstrom of dying stars.

But in order to get to level 175, one is forced buy levels in increments of 24 per $10. If one started with a level 50 compendium for $25, one would have to buy six installments of 24 levels at $10 apiece instead of 5 installments.

Because of this, netizens speculated that this year’s The International 5 would be lucky to hit a total prize point that’s within striking distance of $10.9 million.

The power of gold

Golden Items from the Compendium stretch goals.

But an interesting connection has proven speculations about the performance of the Compendium in the market wrong. Within 9 days, the base $1.6 million prize pool for The International 5 has reached $7 million and steadily climbing.

But how? How has the 2015 Compendium performed better than expected in the face of online disgruntlement? For that, we look into a different company, engaged in a different product altogether: Apple.

“China, honestly was surprising to us…We thought it would be strong but it went well past what we thought. We came in at 26% of revenue growth, including retail and if you look at the units, the unit growth was really off the charts across the board. I found 48% growth that compares to a market estimate of 24%. So growing it two times the market.”

That was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, during an Earnings Call report with analysts last July 22, 2014. He was talking about the iPhone 5S, 2013’s flagship model and one of the company’s best performing handset models in recent years.

But he isn’t talking about the traditional black and space grey models of the iPhone 5S. Ultimately, what doubled Apple’s market share in China in 2013 was a triumph of market savvy and local understanding, immaculate timing and a color palette decision.

The Champagne Gold iPhone 5s was the company’s first foray into gold-colored mobile devices that formed the crux of their long-term campaign: to capture China’s 1.3 billion strong consumer market and solidify their hold in the Asian market.

The gold iPhone 5S was a huge hit in China, immediately selling out in Hong Kong and the mainland when the phone went up for online pre-orders in September 17, 2013.

The demand was clearly there and it isn’t particularly hard to see why; gold has been traditionally favored in China as it represented wealth, luxury and prosperity. From a symbol of prestige since China’s ancient past, gold has become the standard of China’s nouveau rich.

At the time, Apple seemed like it had a pulse in not only cultural preferences for the Chinese and Asian market, but for the market trends of the day as well.

The falling price of gold in April of 2013 kick-started Apple’s approach of the Asian market. By the end of 2013, the price of gold fell by as much as 28%.

What this did was allow jewelry designers and accessory makers to cheaply buy up the shiny metal and mass market it to Asia. By the second quarter of 2013, the volume of gold jewelry sold in Hong Kong alone was up 66% compared to 2012. In mainland China, demand for golden anything saw 50% growth.

Gold was clearly in.

Courting China

So how does all of this tie into Dota 2, Valve and this year’s The International? It seems that Valve’s lofty goals of achieving a $15 million grand finals that will surpass The International 4’s record-breaking $10.9 million total prize pool aren’t as far-fetched as they may appear to be.

Following the success of the Dota 2 Asian Championships (DAC) held last February at Shanghai, China, it seems that Valve has found that the demand for golden status symbols extends even to the virtual space.

In-game cosmetic items and screen display options for the DAC tournament were noticeably gold-colored. Fans and audiences obtained these items through buying the DAC 2015 Compendium — an online booklet companion application that functions as a souvenir booklet and a crowdfunding tool for the tournament’s final prize pot.

Sales of the DAC 2015 Compendium performed so well that the tournament managed to surpass even past The International tournaments’ prize pools at $3,073,451.

And that brings us to this year’s The International 5 Compendium; the gold-colored digital booklet, its gold-themed animation effects and its gold-colored cosmetic item incentives.

It seems that Valve’s ace-in-the-hole for a better, bigger and grander culminating event is to take a page out of the Apple marketing playbook. By marketing the 2015 Compendium to the gold-obsessed Asian and Chinese market, Dota 2 is reaching its funding targets without having to release obscene amounts of developer promises for new content.

The push for gold extends to even the by-products of this year’s Compendium challenges. Golden coins are awarded for completing challenges or are given as end-of-game random drops.

While Valve has not released any statistics on who is buying and where the Compendium for TI5 is being bought  (I doubt they’ll be doing an earnings results calls via Skype anytime soon. Believe me, I’ve tried.), it wouldn’t be a bad wager to say that China may be the best performing market for the Compendium. The Chinese scene is literally paying for most of The International 5.

Despite outcry in the West that this year’s Compendium offerings are lackluster, the Asian market may very well set the trend for future design and marketing decisions for succeeding Dota 2 tournaments — just as Apple has followed up on its success in China and Hong Kong in 2013 by offering golden Macbooks and iPads.

In the end, Valve has done what it does best: taking a good hard look at the economics of demand and taking the best route into marketing a product. The net result is a shiny golden book made of 1s and 0s that will turn the spectacle at Seattle this year into another bona fide record-breaker.

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