Once you've figured out which rules to follow, continuing to follow those rules gives diminishing returns. The fun comes from working out what you need to do, rather than heart-thumping execution. Making it to the last few survivors in Plunkbat creates a high I chased for years, while Dunderlords and TFT can only offer a less-consuming, cerebral sort of pleasure. More importantly, though, autobattlers are structured around the creeping satisfaction of puzzle-solving rather than the exhilaration of a hunt. It helps that battle royales are better poised to tug in entire friendship groups, each person caving as they see their pals larking around together in-game. We're not seeing a repeat of the battle royale craze kicked off by Playerunknown's Battlegrounds in 2017, which grew for months before it started dwindling, and at a much slower rate.Ĭonceptually, autobattlers are a tougher sell than last-man-standing murderfests. Nevertheless, as a comparison, these paint a pretty clear picture between the two games.įrom these, it looks right now as if the autobattler genre can't sustain ridiculous player numbers in the long-term. It's also possible for a game to be more fun to continue playing than it is to continue watching, so viewing figures don't always neatly correspond to players. The first TFT Twitch Rivals tournament, for instance, explains Teamfight Tactics's viewer leap from June to July. It's important to bear in mind that these aren't actual player numbers, in particular because viewership is warped by tournaments. Take a look at the respective charts for Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords, pinched from analytics site SullyGnome.Īnd here's Dunderlords: Note that the scale has changed on the left axis between the two graphs. You can look at Dota Underlords' declining figures via Steam Charts, but with Riot being coy about their numbers, the best measure of popularity becomes Twitch viewers. Popularity begets popularity, but that's not where the story ends. There's also the fact that Dota Underlords needs to be launched separately to Dota 2, though that's partly offset by Valve being able to advertise the game to everyone who uses Steam. Riot are at a clear advantage, since they can wave TFT in the faces of so many people who are already invested in the game it's based on.ĭota Underlords can likewise steer Dota 2 players towards Underlords, but Dota's peak player count for August was a mere 826,000. That figure was up 30% from the June prior, when Teamfight Tactics launched. Riot don't regularly reveal their player numbers, but we do know that League had around 8 million peak concurrent players each day in August. The first, obvious, consideration is that TFT lives inside the League Of Legends launcher.
We normally don't pay player numbers much heed, but given autobattlers were last year's big new genre and Dota and League Of Legends are both long-term titans, it's hard not to ask the question: how come? Six months later, Teamfight Tactics seems relatively stable, while Dota Underlords is dropping fast.
An unknown number of millions flocked to TFT, while Dunderlords hit 200,000 peak concurrent players. By June we had Riot's Teamfight Tactics and Valve's Dota Underlords, squaring off against each other.
Dota Auto Chess shot to the top of Dota 2's custom games, enticing MOBA players with wizarding army management. Few realised at the time, but last January we witnessed the birth of a genre.
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