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League of Legends has about an order of magnitude greater number of players. However, Dota 2 has until recently been in open beta, and League of Legends came out years earlier. Although the beta keys are essentially obtainable for anyone, the extra step in obtaining said keys may be enough of a disincentive for many people to not play.

Source for LoL numbers: http://www.riotgames.com/articles/20130312/700/league-legend...

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"open beta" is a bit of a misnomer - if you didn't get into the selective invite phase you had to buy a beta pass for $30. Later on (I'm not sure if dota 2 was already the most popular valve game at this point) people with accounts were given a large number of invites to give away. Now that it's been released, dota 2 is free.

Valve (or whoever is responsible for the beta keys) was giving out a huge number of keys to some gamers. One of my close friends received 32 (!) beta keys, if I recall correctly, a few months ago. He gave one to everyone in our circle of friends.

Not only that, but I told everyone who was interested (myself included) to apply for an invite, and we all got one a few days later, so it was definitely rather open to play.

The price of invites on the Steam Marketplace has been about $0.03 since January (and there were several bots that collected invitations and handed them out to applicants).

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