Dawngate

[Kong Wen]

EA have ceased development of their MOBA, Dawngate. Now, I didn't really know anything about it, and I'm not up on the MOBA scene in general, so I can't really comment on the implications of this. Does anyone have some better insight? What does this mean for EA? What does it mean for the MOBA landscape?

[Kiwi the Tortoise]

Ok, I'll bite

My impression is that the open beta didn't attract enough of a playerbase, leading to the decision to pull the plug on it. After all, open-betas tend to be less about bug-fixing and more about marketing/market research.

I would even go so far and call it a wise decision if my assumption holds true. A lot of CEOs may still be traumatized from the MMO hype and the countless failed attempts to compete with the market leader WoW. The MOBA scene is not to different from that scenario, Riot Games (LoL) has the market under their control and while several other major MOBAs co-exist incl. DOTA2 (Valve) or Smite (by Hi-Rez, apparently seen some growth in the recent months and was announced for consoles too) there is currently no chance that Riot stumbles anytime soon. Essentially the competition is hard and Blizzard's incoming Heroes of the Storm (currently in Beta) certainly won't make it easy either.

Dawngate had a couple of good ideas however it followed a similar design path as HotS or Strife (also in beta by S2 Games), which basically focusses on accessibility, turning them into direct rivals. Meanwhile Riot isn't sitting around either, reacting to the inbound competition with a lot of content additions, reworks, visual upgrades in the recent and coming patches (some of which incl. takes on elements you would find in these new MOBAs).

In general I consider EAs decision to be rather classy, especially since they even refund the beta-players. Though it denies the world a game featuring an Otter that whacks people with an electric eel

[Kiwi the Tortoise]

Some additional thoughts:

I guess what it currently takes to be somewhat successful in this genre would be either finding an own niche (e.g. Awesomenauts has one) or having an impactful, unique identity like e.g. Smite. While Smite is technically the same, it's identity is almost solely defined by it's third-person perspective. If this aspect is enough to warrant an own identity, it should tell you a lot about how stagnant the general design of the MOBA's trying to compete with LoL is.

While MOBA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplaye ... ttle_arena ) itself is kinda a restrictive and frankly not particular good definition in the first place. The main reason for it's existence is that Riot (naturally) didn't want to define their game as a DOTA-like (DOTA being Defence of the Ancients, the original Warcraft 3 mod it was based on). So Riot coined the term MOBA and defined it as, .... well as LoL, therefore it is a far too restrictive term. If you look around you would find games like Fat Princess, King Arthur's Gold or Evolved which wouldn't meet the definition, yet have quite a lot in common with the genre.

Occasionally you come across people that reject the term MOBA and still use DOTA-like, which in my eyes is an even worse term. What company would want to sell a Cola, marketing it as a Pepsi-like?