Monday 9 September 2013

Stop Making MOBA Games

If there is something which could quite easily be described as pointless, it would be making a new MOBA game right now.

So we have DotA2 which is the big one, one of the most played games on steam and has a massive user base that includes people who have been playing since the days of the old Warcraft 3 mod and people who have recently picked it up.  On the other side of that you have League of Legends, a similar game with simpler mechanics and a more newbie friendly approach to things and this game also has a massive userbase.

Before that we had Heroes of Newerth, which was a game that was basically trying to be DotA but with it's muddy art style, crap characters and awkward transition into a free to play model, it was quickly forgotten.  Then on top of that there have been quite a few other titles which have been trying to take the crowns from DotA and League.  Stuff like Bloodline Champions, SMITE and a few others are all there and available to play but very rarely do you see anyone talking about them.

So you would think at this point people would be like "well shit, guess we're not taking them down anytime soon, guess we better go make a different kind of game" but you'd be wrong.  There has been talk for fucking ages of "Blizzard DotA" although I have no idea what that's going to be like and then more recently we have this thing called Strife made by the same guys who did Heroes of Newerth.

This is a terrible idea because what do you expect happen, really?  These games will get released, be played for a few hours by a small group of people before being binned and ignored for League or DotA.  These developers should be channelling their efforts into making something different, something new or original, but instead we're just getting shit games that'll be forgotten within a few months.

We've seen this exact same thing happen with MMO's thanks to World of Warcraft, and it's happening again now with this shit.  Stop making these games because getting people to switch or even just take interest isn't really worth the time or money.  Maybe in the future, once DotA and League have lost some steam, but doing it now is the epitome of pointless.

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