All Your History: DOTA Part 2 – Top Players

Defense of the Ancients Allstars was the culmination of a long line of mods, going all the way back to the Starcraft mod Aeon of Strife.  It mixed the perspective and controls of a Real-Time Strategy game with the feel and mechanics of an action game, all wrapped in a competitive multiplayer environment.  Despite being a fan-made offshoot of the popular Warcraft III from Blizzard Entertainment, Dota soon became a phenomenon, one of the most-played mods of all time.  But it was all a volunteer effort made by enthusiasts.  It had never been a commercial product.  It would take the industry a few years to recognize the power of this new genre, but once they did, the little mod became one of the hottest, and most contentious, movements in modern gaming history.

Top Players

In Two Thousand Five, the developer who brought Dota to prominence chose to pass the torch.  Steve Feak [Feek], who went by the name Guinsoo [Gin-soo], handed over lead developer duties to fellow modder Icefrog.  While Guinsoo had done a stellar job of zeroing in on exactly what made Dota fun, his efforts still didn’t feel like a finished experience.  The game was not optimized, meaning it took forever to load, and certain characters were far more powerful than others.  It was Icefrog who turned Dota into a beautifully balanced machine.  Under Icefrog’s leadership, Dota soon acquired a level of polish normally reserved for Triple-A commercial products.  The massive boom in active players largely happened under Icefrog’s watch, and in the minds of many Dota fans, it is he who is the true hero of the genre.

Indeed, Dota under Icefrog simply became too big to ignore.  Not only was the playerbase estimated to be in the millions, but it had continued its growth over several years, long after most mods fade away.  Eventually, professional developers wanted to take a crack at a genre that was simply synonymous with the game that invented it.  While it was never written down in words, the Dota genre was effectively defined by five basic principles: the player controlled a single character; that character leveled up as the match progressed; the match consisted of two opposing teams; the objective of the match was to destroy the other team’s base at the opposite end of the map; and weaker computer-controlled characters would constantly spawn and attack the enemy base.

So it was that in Two Thousand Nine, a number of studios released or announced projects that conformed to all of these principles.  In April, Gas Powered Games released Demigod.  Demigod took the basic Dota formula and added in much slicker graphics.  Unfortunately, Gas Powered found that they couldn’t replicate the success of Icefrog.  Demigod was a commercial flop.  This may have had something to do with the fact that, on release, the multiplayer didn’t actually work — which is bad for a multiplayer-only game.  Oops.

But then in October, a game released that got it all right, right down to its ambitious business model.  In terms of gameplay, Riot Games’ League of Legends clearly aped Dota to a tee, but did so with a passion and quality that equalled the original mod.  This was no coincidence, as Riot had actually hired Guinsoo as a designer early in the process.  The game had a somewhat more cartoony look, leading some to think that Riot was trying to skew its audience young.  But the real stand-out was the game’s price point: nothing.  Anybody could make an account, download the game, and play it to their hearts’ content, free of charge.  If players wanted to, they could spend years playing the game without paying a cent.

Of course, they could only play as one of a small rotating set of characters.  If the character they wanted to play as wasn’t in that set, then they could choose to pay a small fee for that character.  And that was it.

The idea was to go for volume by effectively giving the core product away, but then cleaning up on ancillary sales from a massive playerbase.  By all indications, this risky model has been a runaway success.  While Riot has never disclosed its revenues, Business Insider estimated they made anywhere from Twenty-Five to Fifty Million dollars in Twenty Ten, stunning for an unknown startup with a free game in its first year.  Over time, League of Legends would grow to rival the original Dota as the most popular entrant in the genre.  But what is that genre called?  Riot has offered an alternative name, to distinguish between the original game and the genre.  Riot wants it to be known as Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or Moba.  So instead of saying that Dota was the first Dota game, players would say that Dota was the first Moba game, and League of Legends is a new one.

Obviously, Guinsoo’s involvement with League of Legends gave it a certain legitmacy with long-time fans.  But the same month that it released, a separate announcement came from Dota’s current developer.  In October Two Thousand Nine, Icefrog publicly stated that he’d been hired by no less than the legendary Valve Software, makers of the hugely popular Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal franchises.  And while he didn’t say what he’d been hired for, he did say that it was good news for Dota fans.  Immediately, rumors of a Valve-made Dota game (or Moba game) ran rampant.  But Valve, true to their nature, said nothing.

But the industry wasn’t done with the Dota genre yet — or, they weren’t done with the Moba genre yet.  Anyway, in May Twenty Ten, S2 Games released Heroes of Newerth.  Like League of Legends, it stuck very closed to the original mod, right down to the art direction.  It was a continuation of their earlier franchise, Savage, which was also set in Newerth and was also a twist on the strategy genre.  Heroes of Newerth made decent if not stellar numbers, selling two hundred thousand copies in a week at Thirty dollars a pop.  Still, they had far more players when it was in its free beta stage.  Worse, their primary competitor was Riot Games’ League of Legends — which was free.  Newerth always struggled to gain attention from Legends, finally going free to play itself in July Twenty Eleven.  While its playerbase remains considerably smaller than Legends’, it does have a dedicated following of its own.

But in July of Twenty Ten, S2 found itself at the center of the first major scandal of the Dota world, or the Moba world.  Steve Mescon, who had for years run the community website for Dota Allstars under the name Pendragon, chose to close the site down.  In his final post on the site, he claimed that Dota’s current developer, Icefrog, had secretly worked with S2 Games to help them make Heroes of Newerth.  Pendragon was so upset by this, he wanted to distance himself from Icefrog and Dota forever.  However, he never said why this was such a bad thing, especially since Icefrog had publicly announced he was working for Valve anyway.  It is worth mentioning here that, by this time, Pendragon was working for Riot Games on League of Legends.  S2 has only said “no comment” about the situation, but it appears unlikely that Icefrog would have worked for S2 in secret, because there’s really no reason for him to have kept it secret.  Either way, the incident made plain that there was quite a bit of tension between the original Dota team, and also between Riot and their competitors.  As it turned out, this would only be the beginning.

Meanwhile, a shooter released on Xbox Live Arcade.  Monday Night Combat from Uber Entertainment hoped to take the art style of Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and map it onto a third-person perspective.  How does this relate to Dota?  Well, the gameplay revolved around teams trying to destroy a static enemy structure deep on their side of the map, while computer-controlled bots would spawn on each side… ah ha!

While it wasn’t magic-themed, and the perspective was a little different, and it had guns, it nevertheless had all the elements to make it a Dota game.  Or, a Moba game.  It proved that the genre had a broader appeal than just its setting, and Monday Night Combat went on to be a success, later coming to Valve’s Steam platform on the PC.

As something that came from the fans themselves, the genre was thriving, even if nobody could agree on what to call Dota, or Moba.  The original mod still saw huge numbers, and League of Legends was slowly growing into a juggernaut.  But in October Twenty Ten, Valve would finally unveil what they’d been working with Icefrog on.  And in so doing, they would ignite the simmering tensions within the Dota community into a conflagration.

Tune in next time to see Dota reach the big time

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