Valve’s Erik Johnson doesn’t speak about Dota 2 like it’s a video game. Dota 2 and its annual tournament, The International , are spoken of as though they’re the same thing.

“ It's like shipping a really big game every year.

“We hope every year that this tournament is better,” Johnson said when asked about Dota 2’s future. “That’s really the only goal we have. Every year needs to be better than the last.”Whether it’s Hero releases or tweaks to their stats, Dota 2 updates are intrinsically connected to competitive play. Improving the game means improving the tournament. Each is crafted with the other in mind. This is especially evident in the exceptional Valve-produced documentary, Free to Play -- but it's on full display at The International, where it's clear that Dota 2 has changed the way Valve works, and will continue to work, forever.At TI4 this year, cashiers at the Secret Shop merchandise booth knew Dota deeply, and asked customers for updates on the event they couldn’t watch. The head of marketing was hand-delivering figurines and apparel to Casters, who were too busy commentating professional matches to retrieve their items. Chet Faliszek, writer on Left 4 Dead and Portal, wrangled reporters from their seats for press conferences.“We really do approach this event like a game,” Johnson said. “It’s like shipping a really big game every year.”The notion of yearly projects is new to Valve, a corporation that only recently started focusing on iterative design rather than major, singular releases. Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are as much platforms as Dota 2 is, and their frequent, community-driven updates are core to how Valve adds to its games as platforms.Johnson explained that the Valve community, “does such a good job of telling us when we do a good job and when we screw up. That seems like the thing for us to pay attention to the most.” It’s for this reason Valve hasn’t built any sort of player association or sanctioned season for the professional teams in the Dota 2 eSports space. Some of that may come sooner than later, though.“We think the community will end up building that over time,” said Johnson. “We have some ideas and probably some experiments we’ll run over the next year in terms of other ways for professional players to sustain their careers outside of our specific tournament.”Valve becoming more deeply involved with its community outside of its games, in a way that benefits its games, is becoming the norm. The latest Counter-Strike: GO expansion included six community maps . Team Fortress 2 appears to operate automatically in the hands of its players, at least until Valve adds new features unexpectedly. It makes sense for Dota, a game that is much more than the installed software on player's PCs, to replicate this initiative on a grander scale.Johnson expects to see third-party tournaments, with their sizable prize pools, grow organically into something larger. “We’re really reticent to go and formalize a bunch of things for everybody. We don’t feel like, fundamentally, if you take all of us and our decision making skill, we can’t really compete with the entire community as a whole deciding how to break down a problem. They’re just going to be smarter than us and make better decisions.”This is what Valve is now.TF2 and CS:GO showed that community is king. The International gave Valve completely new ways to interact and work with its community to create something beyond the scope of Dota 2. Players longing for a Half-Life 3 may someday see that dream come true, but the focus of Valve now lies outside software alone. Making games isn't what Valve is all about anymore. It's the broader love of gaming.As time passes, as Steam grows , and as its games become more self-sustaining on an autonomous community, the developers drive other initiatives for its platforms. Naturally, Valve has games planned for the future -- but Dota 2 has effectively upended the workings of an entire studio that, against expectations, will finally release something every year.For more on Dota 2, read up on the history of The International , and for everything MOBAs, subscribe to IGN Arena

Mitch Dyer is an associate editor at IGN. He's trying to read 50 books in 2014. These are the 50 . Talk to Mitch about books and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch