Like Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and Dota before it, Drodo Studio's title was created by a small team toying around with an interesting idea - one that many of the big players in the games market want to capitalise on. Once again, Auto Chess shows that the next big thing is rarely going to come from the triple-A space. At E3 this year, during the PC Gaming Show, that company revealed that Drodo's version of Auto Chess would be coming to the Epic Games Store - something that the Fortnite maker likely paid a great deal for, given that this looks set to be one of the next big things. Meanwhile, both Tencent and NetEase are among the companies that have filed the Auto Chess trademark in China.īut Drodo is still hard at work on Auto Chess, removing the Dota branding from the IP in March and bringing the title to mobile devices with Chinese games firm Dragonest. League of Legends maker Riot Games has announced it will be bringing a version of this game type to its MOBA called Teamfight Tactics. Valve isn't the only company trying to jump on the Auto Chess bandwagon, either.

The Steam firm's take on the game is called Dota Underlords and rolled out yesterday, attracting over 120k concurrent users within 24 hours. This time around, Valve couldn't recruit this up-and-coming developer, with the two companies deciding they could work on their own versions of the title while offering each other support. The same was true for the anonymous Abdul 'IceFrog' Ismail creator of the original Defense of the Ancients (Dota) mod for WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos, who was hired to work on Dota 2. This isn't a new strategy for the Steam giant the company brought in Minh 'Gooseman' Li to work on a proper version of tactical online shooter Counter-Strike following that original Half-Life mod's success back in 2000. Seeing the massive popularity that Dota Auto Chess achieved in a relatively short amount of time, Valve met with Drodo, flying them to its Seattle headquarters. Up to eight players can select from more than 50 game pieces which have different abilities alternating between battling each other and creep AI characters.

By the end of the following month, the game had attracted four million players, hitting seven in April and eight in May 2019.Īccording to Drodo, the title was originally inspired by the Chinese game Mahjong - a famously complicated strategy game which incidentally is where the word 'Atari' comes from- while adapting the base concept for the Dota world. Originally created by Chinese developer Drodo Studios as a Steam Workshop mod for Valve's Dota 2 MOBA, Dota Auto Chess launched on January 4th, 2019. Like the MOBA and battle royale genres before it, the emerging Auto Chess game type has gone from a popular idea riffing off another game type, to gathering an audience to eventually becoming the hottest thing around.

Battle chess game design