We check out what’s happening with Valve’s answer to Auto Chess.
If you’ve followed the gaming scene in the last year, you probably remember the huge “boom” of autobattlers. Ever since Drodo studios released Dota 2 Auto Chess as a custom map, the world went crazy for it. Fast-forward a couple of months, and Valve, Riot Games, and Drodo Studios all had a stand-alone versions of the game.
What happened along the way?
Despite being extremely popular, it seems like the market just got over-saturated very quickly. As a result, many of the people who were super hyped decided to leave. It’s no surprise that Dota Underlords lost over 95% of the players it had in the first couple of months, despite constantly receiving updates and adjustments from the staff.
The numbers pretty much speak for themselves. From around 200,000 peak players when it was first released, Dota Underlords only had 14,000 this January.
The game is now out of Early Access
After around eight months in the development, Dota Underlords is now finally out of the Early Access. This happened a couple of days ago at a big launch party that gathered some of the biggest names in Dota 2, such as Jake “SirActionSlacks” Kanner, Kevin “Purge” Godec, and more.
In addition to all cosmetic changes, the official release of the game also planning something big. Judging by what they said, they will release massive changes with new items and starts. The idea behind this is to make Dota Underlords more appealing to the people who used to play it. Hopefully, this should bring some of the old players back.
In fact, judging by the stats in the stream charts, it does have an effect. The peak players have nearly doubled since January, which is a clear sign that Valve is on the right path.
What now?
The big question that everyone asks now is what will happen with this game. Sure, the first season of Dota Underlords looks to be pretty cool. However, this genre of games is not nearly as popular as it used to be a couple of months ago. Most people from Asian countries tend to play Auto Chess, which is very popular there and even has regular tournaments.
We can only hope that the situation will get better over time for Dota Underlords. This is really a great game and it will be a shame if it follows the steps of Artifact. As you probably remember, this was Valve’s response to Hearthstone but the game absolutely collapsed in terms of popularity.
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