Frostivus custom game winner released with new treasures, fresh controversy

With the holiday season finally upon the world, Valve brings Frostivus to the masses—and, this year, they bear gifts for players.

The start of Frostivus marks the conclusion of the hotly-anticipated custom game contest, in which dozens of aspiring developers showed off their most clever holiday spirit in the form of their creations. One game chosen by Valve will act as the official game of Frostivus 2017 and bring its developer a nice holiday treat of $30,000.

The winning custom game is Frostivus Festival by VicFrank, a larger game mode featuring a slew of Pokemon Stadium-like mini-games. Players rotate through a series of challenges featuring different players and goals, from survival and Pudge assassinations, to tree-chopping and Chain Frost-dodging. Developer VicFrank takes the grand prize for being the custom game chosen by Valve.

Along with the game release comes a new community-created treasure set, the Frostivus Treasure, with 18 winter-/holiday-themed Workshop items for players. Players can earn a free Frostivus Treasure by winning three games of Dota.

Questioning quality

The announcement of Frostivus Festival brought some controversy, as many felt that Valve did not treat the contest with utmost seriousness.

Well-known outspoken content creator and developer Baumi also explained his thoughts and the general controversy in a video of his own. He claims many of the core issues lie in Valve’s communication, or lack thereof, in regards to certain rules and questions for the contest itself.

A long, in-depth post was made by Arhowk, discussing the confusion and frustrations of the contest itself, many of which were discussed by Baumi in the video. In threads like this and others, Baumi and others suspected Valve chose a game that only became popular because it was streamed by professional Dota 2 players and reached a “#1 subscriber” spot.

These developers reflected the sentiment of some content creators and players that spoke on primarily Reddit. One popular thread called “Valve this event is a joke, right?” reached the front page, complaining about the over-simplicity of the game itself.

This controversy also caps off a contest filled with anxiety as developers attempted to crunch their games out at the last second. A number of patches brought a series of development frustrations to the creators-in-progress, which eventually prompted Valve to push the submission close date back five days, as announced on Twitter.