MOBA Crash

Falling Down

Yesterday we had an interesting bit of news released as the first big MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena if you are not familiar with the term, announced that they would be closing their doors.  Dawngate was the product offering by Electronic Arts and entered closed testing in May 2013 but quickly fell from the buzz cycle.  Quite honestly when I saw this announcement I had quite literally forgotten there was a game called Dawngate.  Some of the complaints about the game was that it felt like a rather lifeless clone of League of Legends.  Many of the Champions or “Shapers” as they called them seemed to have one to one relationships to league of legends champions.  However the game did try to fix some of the things that were broken with the existing Summoner’s Rift map type, adding in more interesting gameplay elements.

The problem is that no one that I knew was actually playing it.  There were a handful of people who got into the beta process last June and then I never heard anything again about the game.  For whatever reason they lost at producing enough forward hype for their game to drown out the other MOBAs or at least fight for a place at the table.  The game looked very pretty, but I just don’t think they did enough to excite players.  My only hope is that Riot will take some of the ideas that Dawngate had and try and incorporate some game modes that are similar to that into League of Legends.  I am not the biggest fan of MOBAs in general, but I have played enough of them to know some good ideas when I see them.  The fact that Dawngate had this mechanic where taking down each tower was essentially the equivalent to like 1/3rd of an inhibitor seemed like a cool idea.  Instead in League you reach a point where taking down additional towers is a waste of time… and I don’t think you would ever reach that point in Dawngate.

MOBA Crash

One of the interesting things about the games industry is how much it repeats itself.  When someone has a successful idea, it seems that the “investors” all get involved to dog pile on that genre and try and crack out as many look alike games as they can.  That is not to say that each of the new games does not have merit, nor is it to say that they are not good games.  The problem is there is a certain point at which the market has reached saturation and can support no new offshoots.  Unfortunately I think we have reached that point already with the MOBA genre.  Dawngate was really the first major game in the genre to call it quits, and Turbine the developer of Infinite Crisis does not look terribly strong right now after a round of layoffs in October.  I feel like we are just about to enter the same area we have been with MMOs for some time now… where there is no “easy money” left in the market.

Right now you have the juggernauts of League of Legends and DOTA2.  To a lesser extent Heroes of Newerth still has a bit of a following, but their latest product offering of Strife seems to be struggling to gain traction.  Smite on the other hand… seems to have found a niche in the fact that it is a WASD controlled MOBA and for folks like me that hate click to move…  it offers a new way to play this game genre.  Heroes of the Storm on the other hand has done what Blizzard does best…  polish a game to a mirror shine and lower the barrier of entry.  As such HoTS is a much easier entry point into the MOBA genre for non-MOBA players.  Personally of all of the titles it is my favorite in part because it leverages characters that I already know and love and just extends that nostalgia into another genre.  Apart from these few games though I think pretty much every other MOBA is suspect, fragile and vulnerable to be the next announced cancellation.

The Cycle Repeats

I think my first experience with this cycle of trying to cash in on the next hotness was the massive amount of vaguely playable games that came out after the release of Doom during the early 90s.  For every Dark Forces there were a few Depth Dwellers or Nerves of Steel that were barely playable.  Then Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans came on the scene… which itself borrowed heavily from the mechanics of Dune 2.  But immediately following was an equally confusing cavalcade of RTS genre games finally ending up with only a handful of series surviving.  We are seeing this same thing playing out currently with the string of “Minecraft clones” fighting for your dollar.  Essentially if a game comes out that is popular enough you can bet that somewhere in a back office someone is willing to pour money into something vaguely similar in an attempt to rush their version of the trend to market.  Eventually someone comes along with a box full of straight pins and the bubble popping begins.

The thing is that I don’t really even think this is a bad thing, other than for the folks who get caught up in the round of layoffs that almost always follows.  It is possible for a game to move the genre forward even if it doesn’t end up a success itself.  Warhammer Online for example had quite possibly the best quest objective visualization system I had played with, and many other games came through after its launch and offered a similar system for their own product.  The next release of World of Warcraft offered a version of quest visualization that looked almost exactly like this one.  So even though Warhammer Online turned out to be a failure, it imparted on the genre a few features that have stuck around.  As such I feel like if we are starting to head towards a MOBA crash, the ones that failed to find a niche will still have an impact on the games that ultimate end up dominating the market.  There will always be a market for MOBAs, just like there was always a market for Adventure games, FPS, RTS, Survival Horror, MMO, Sandbox Building or whatever the next big fad becomes in gaming.

Fuzzy Blankets

This month I am talking about something each morning that I am thankful for.  This morning as I am wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket while typing this…  I am reminded just how thankful I am for our array of very warm and very fuzzy blankets.  Oklahoma is an interesting place, in part because we go through this seesaw act with our weather towards the end of Fall.  Until a week ago it was pretty reliably 70*-80* days and I was mostly wearing shorts on the weekend.  Then a cold snap hit is and it has gotten down to the 30s.  The problem is I fully expect that we will be back in the 70s within a weeks time.  During this back and forth I am always reluctant to turn on my heating, just because I know it isn’t “really” winter yet.  As such we spend a month bundled up in blankets and honestly due to the weight loss I find myself more cold natured than I used to be.  So this year like so many years I am thankful that fuzzy blankets exist to keep us warm, when our weather is still deeply confused.