After watching beta testers' reactions and fans' eagerness to play the game, Valve decided that its original plan of keeping Dota 2 in beta for another year was "dumb."
Now, the company's new plan is to release the game "as soon as possible."
"Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we'd release Dota 2 to the world," the game's lead designer, IceFrog, explained on his blog.
"But the feedback we're seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it, even though there's still a ton of heroes yet to be implemented," he added. "We've also seen that the folks who are already in the beta are chomping at the bit to show everyone else some of the fun games they've had. So we decided our original plan was dumb."
As a start, the current version of the game, which was used in the recent "The International" contest, will be brushed up a little and released ASAP via an invite-only system.