Only a few years ago if you asked someone what a MOBA game was, they’d probably just give you a weird look, but today multiplay online battle arena (MOBA) games are the hottest new genre around. Even though it took a while to get here, starting all the way back with the Starcraft map Aeon of Strife which then became the inspiration for the Warcraft 3 mod DotA All-Stars, the MOBA genre is here now and it’s never been more visible than it has been in the last month or so.
Gamecom brought us a $1.6 million tournament for Valve’s newest MOBA, DotA 2, and EA announced their own title Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes. Before that RiotGames announced that League of Legends had hit 15 million registered players and due to the success of its Season One tournament, the prize pool for season two would be pushed up to $5 million.
Up until now there have only been an handful of dedicated MOBA titles, the biggest being League of Legends, but there’s also Heroes of Newerth, Bloodline Champions and Dimigod. Now it seems the secret is out and the MOBA genre is going to get crowded fast. There’s about a dozen or so MOBA titles that have been announced or are already in the works including the two name above, Smite, Realm of Titans and Rise of Immortals to name a few.
If you take into account all the MMORPG titles with instanced battlefields or warzones, whatever you want to call them, than you can get a feel for how big the MOBA genre has become. While those are obviously not dedicated MOBA titles, they’ve become a standard must-have feature in any MMORPG.
Competition of course is always a good thing as it breeds innovation so it’ll be interesting to see where the MOBA genre goes in the next few years. Of course if Blizzard decides to throw its hat into the market, they’ll probably dominate the market and everyone else will just copy them for the next 10 years ;)