Gawd, I’m sick of all these MOBAs coming out. I can’t believe there’s enough of a player base or lucrative enough market for the devs to plow resources into this genre I hate. …there has to be some sort of inevitable market correction at some point in the near future for some of these games. Even existing IPs are being spun off into MOBAs like Magicka, Dead Island and…Sins of a Solar Empire? I guess space opera RTS doesn’t make money like it used to. These are the are the ones I can think of–I’m probably missing Asian ones.
In beta:
Arena of Fate (Crytek)
DawnGate (Waystone)
Infinite Crisis (Turbine)
Sins of a Dark Age (IronClad)
Strife (S2)
Transformers Universe (Jagex)
Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard)
Dead Island Epidemic (Stunlock)
Magicka: Wizard Wars (Paradox)
Existing:
Heroes of Newerth (S2)
Smite (Hi-Rez)
League of Legends (Riot)
AirMech (Carbon)
Guardians of Middle-Earth (Monolith)
AwesomeNauts (Ronimo)
Arena of Heroes (Sneaky)
Solstice Arena (Zynga)
DOTA 2 (Valve)
Super MNC / Monday Night Combat (Uber)
We need some sort of generic MOBA name generator…Fate of Arena, Age of Strife, Champions of Combat…
If there’s anything that the ridiculous glut of MMOs has proved, it’s that the MOBA craze won’t die until something else comes along that fools the development community at large into thinking they’re going to win the lottery.
Honestly, a lot of those games are pretty different from each other. And a lot of them are total shit. I would definitely not put Wizard Wars as a MOBA, it plays absolutely nothing like a moba AT ALL. Solstice Arena is crap. Infinite Crisis is crap. Etc etc.
The only really good ones are probably League, Dota, Dawngate, Smite, and maybe Strife. The rest are probably really bad, or they are not really mobas.
And I hope they don’t stop! Moba’s are really fun and they are basically endless enjoyment. People will keep making them, but I really doubt that unless you have a large team with a lot of talent and money, you will absolutely not best Dota and League. I think you probably haven’t really played them, or if you did, you didn’t put a lot of time into it to get to the point where the game really opens up. You could try watching some Dota 2 casts of professional games, they are really really fun to watch and can help you learn the game.
Thematically, a lot of them are really obvious clones where they sex up mythical/fictional characters as champions: Smite, DawnGate, Strife, LoL, DOTA2 even Heroes of the Storm . That’s the really lame seemingly repetitive stuff that seems the most “clonish” to me in terms of game design. Also, I paid $5 for Guardians of Middle-Earth and the terrible interface made it feel like a ported F2P browser game that it is, lacking basic setup options of a PC/console game.
I am not too in-touch with the state of the art in MOBAs or the details of how these various games resemble each other or not. But I have to believe there are rich varieties of team-based, single-session-centric, real-time strategy game designs out there waiting to be tapped that don’t have lanes and jungles and creeps and whatever.
Hilarious decision on EA’s part, since Sega just proved a few months ago that there’s a 3DS market in at least one territory that wants Tetris. And that was with a retail title, not a $15 download.
On topic, I’m just waiting for some enterprising indie dev to combine a MOBA with a procedural death labyrinth or a survival sandbox.
Actually, the list isn’t as long as to say the market is saturated with this genre… the problem is they are F2P, so they need much more players than a retail game to be profitable, therefore if you are a developer interested in doing one, then yeah, the market is almost saturated.
League of Legends and Dota 2 aren’t clones of each other, and barring a few exceptions, “sexing up mythical charactars” doesn’t describe them. Smite and Dawngate did jump on the hype of F2P mobas after League became popular though. Dawngate is basically league with some improvements.
I can see why you dislike Mobas, if the main one you played was GoME. That’s primarily a console game! Mobas on console… no thanks please. It’s easy to see how you could think Mobas are repetitive by looking at their basics, but there are actually quite a large amount of differences between league and dota 2 (and to a lesser extent the others) They really are varied games in terms of character design, meta game, interface, gameplay, basically everything except the basic premise.
Dead Island: Epidemic and Transformers: Universe aren’t even close to MOBAs really.
I’ve played and would not consider these a moba in the slightest. They may borrow one or two thigns, but gameplay is different enough there aren’t.
the controls worked great in GOME, I wish more MOBAs would allow the twin stick shooter type movement instead of click to move. It’s part of why I really enjoy Smite.
If there’s anything that the ridiculous glut of MMOs has proved, it’s that the MOBA craze won’t die until something else comes along that fools the development community at large into thinking they’re going to win the lottery.
Or a whole bunch of studios go bust because they spent vast sums on a game nobody plays. I suppose the upside is that MOBAs cost a lot less to develop and maintain than MMOs, especially if like Valve you offload content creation to the userbase.
Magic Sphere Ball Fatal Error: Sphere not present.
MOBA’s are a strange creature. Like a alien that grown inside their host ( DOTA inside Warcraft 3) to steal the shape of the host, but still retain their new alien powers.
They are more powerfull than RTS where, because they add a social element. Social anything seems to be about 10.000 times more loud than single-something.
What we have now, is a group of developers making a lot of clones, to see if they have luck and become the next owners of a gold mine. Most of these will thin and die. MOBA is not really a genre, more like 2 or 3 popular games.
