Valve as a developer is almost always a crowd pleaser, and their recent announcement regarding DotA 2 will be no exception. Because of high demand for the game (and possibly because of leaks), Valve has moved the launch date up from its original 2012 date.

Project lead Abdul Ismail, or Icefrog as players of DotA may better know him as, stated” We’re going to take the current version of Dota 2, which has The International set of heroes, and get it out there as fast as we can.” The team initially wasn’t planning on launching the sequel until the amount of in-game heroes matched the number in DotA 1. Instead of rolling up the heroes slowly to lead up to the game launch, they’ll now appear in post-launch updates.

The game will remain invite only for now, though the hope is that the time period for that will be short. There is still no word as to whether the game will be free or not and if it will utilize a similar model as League of Legends, but as the launch day moves closer hopefully more of this information will be revealed.

[Source]