What is the deal with DOTA 2?

The only point to buying it on the steam store is for the items that are pretty much worthless

the price of dota2 in the store is because it's the early access and there are some other stuff included in it.
they get it because they play the game and steam gives them out periodically
no one that i know of. people think that they hold the value they see in the store. (one guy told me dota2 was worth 27 euros while l4d2 only 5)

1) Dota in the Steam store comes with extra items.

2) From Valve, to "spread the word", it will be F2P soon

3) Good question - who is still accepting them? I mean, for more than a TF2 scrap or a "thanks".

Fair enough. I failed to notice that the premium regular $29.99 price point was mostly for in-game content. It's very misleading. That's quite a bit of pocket for such little digital content for a FTP game.

They're so useless that I gave them all away, I somehow managed to trade 2 of them for Hitman Sniper Challenge though, which is worth about the same imo

Thanks for all of the informative responses. I myself was gifted the game by somebody I'm not overly fond of and I had wondered where this random generosity did come from ;)

DOTA2 will be a F2P game soon,
so make sure u trade it for another game before its to late :)

none is accepting it.It was valuable before 1 year or so,when it launched.
Price tag remained from that time.Back then it was worth,since there was about 20,30k of people in beta an invite was hard to get.
Now there is about 300,400 k players for sure,and from time to time Valve gives 2 invites to their members.So,beta key is easy to get now,so it has no value it had.