Released barely two days ago, Portal 2’s latest DLC offering, the Perpetual Testing Initiative has turned out to be a pretty massive success, as heralded by a press release from Valve in which they announced some of the PeTI service’s early statistics. Apparently, over 35,000 custom puzzle levels have already been created and published over the Steam Workshop. In total, the Portal 2 playerbase have already consumed over 1.3 million test chamber downloads.

In celebration, Valve is holding a Weekend Workshop sale on the Steam Store, during which Portal 2 will remain at its Midweek Madness discount of 66% off (about 6 dollars/5 euros), Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim will be 33% off, and within Team Fortress 2’s in-game Mann Co Store, many of the officially released, community-created Steam Workshop items will be available for 50% off their regular price. Now that’s science for you. Quick, go buy things!

And if you haven’t had enough science within the PeTI, then allow me to provide you with some of my recommendations: CaretCaret’s “12 Angry Tests” series, which contains some of the greatest level design, puzzle gameplay and bizarre humor I have ever experienced; Jaxe’s excellent “Decay” mini-series, sporting some incredible level design, built for intermediate to skilled Portal players; Motanum’s A La Tag series, with unique and innovatie gameplay strongly focused on gel gameplay; and the Podcast 17 Community Chamber collection, encompassing all puzzle levels created by my brothers in arms and colleagues: the Podcast 17 community members.

Last year, Dota 2’s world debut came to us through “The International“, the first ever Dota 2 tournament. It put 16 of the world’s most elite Dota teams up against each other, competing for a grand prize of $1 million dollars. It was a huge success, especially for the championship’s winners, team Na’Vi of Ukraine. There definitely was some crazy Mortal Kombat-type stuff: in fact, Shang Tsung himself drained the bandwidth out of the championship’s LAN, resulting in some wacky lagging issues for both spectators and players alike. Don’t get me wrong – it was a great tournament, but hopefully Valve has learned from the mistakes they made in both streaming and organization.

Well, they’d better have, for this year, the International is coming back, this time taking place at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Washington; smack-dab in the middle of PAX Prime. An interesting choice, sure – but I’d say Germany was a far more accessible location for the eponymous international Dota fanbase. Still, it’ll make for added exposure, which is a good thing.

The 2012 International will be held during the last weekend of August: from the 31st of August to the 2nd of September. No details yet on how many millions of dollars the grand prize will contain – maybe it’ll be more this year. There will be 16 teams, just like last year, although we don’t know the full roster yet. The defending champions, Team Na’Vi of Ukraine; and this year’s newcomers: Team DK of China, are both the first teams to have been invited so far, although we’ll surely hear more about the other 14 teams soon.

Valve have already set up a teaser webpage for the championship, just like they did last year. Be sure to stay tuned to the official Dota 2 blog for more info on the event!