Dota Underlords Has Lost Most of its Players

Near the end of 2019, people were on the lookout for the next big “genre”. After all, MMO’s have long fallen out of fashion, MOBA’s are passé, and while Battle Royales are still popular, you’re not really going to be able to compete with Fortnite (or its distant second-place rivals of PUBG and Apex Legends). Fortunately, the hunt seemed to end with DOTA auto-chess, which sprawled the first wave of “auto-battlers” that are vying for new players and views on Twitch. Specifically, Valve released an official DOTA auto-battler called Dota Underlords, while League of Legends developer Riot Games hobbled together Teamfight Tactics.

And while both games are still around, it seems Riot Games has, once again, taken an innovative gameplay mod popularized by another game and made it their own, because Valve’s DOTA Underlords has fallen hard.

According to the Steam Charts (and reported on Reddit), at its peak six months ago, Dota Underlords enjoyed 200,000 concurrent players battling it out. Recently, however, those numbers have fallen dramatically, and peak at around 11k on average.

And it’s not that some new update or content drove people away - the decline of players was steady across the past six months, and at no point ever really spiked or dipped.

Riot Games, for what it’s worth, claims to have a monthly player base of 33 million for Teamfight Tactics. But the self-report their own success, so while it’s unlikely they’re outright lying, it’s possible they could be omitting some important facts, like how much growth or shrinkage that base has experienced so far.

In either case, while Dota Underlords isn’t doing nearly as badly as, say, Artifact, Valve’s attempt at a DTCG, it’s still not doing great, either. One has to wonder if this failure will prompt Valve to double down on development, give it up entirely…

…or, most likely, just keep doing whatever the hell it wants.