There might be events and seasonal nonsense trying to tempt you back, but it's a lot less seductive if your friends aren't encouraging you to jump back in. You don't really get that with autobattlers. When I skip my regular Thursday session of Guild Wars 2, I know Phil is going to tell me about all the cool shit everyone got up to while I wasn't there, which means I'm sure to play again the following week. And there's no reason to be in a group with players I don't already know. Now, I play TFT quite a bit with a group, but we're playing separately and against one another, not as part of a team. Forced to work together, you can make new relationships, or turn it into a regular playdate with buds. In MMOs, MOBAs and battle royales, you're in teams and squads and parties. It's an unfair assessment that a lot of mobile games incorrectly have levelled against them, but could have absolutely been a factor in autobattlers' rise unfortunately stalling. Even before their respective mobile launches, they all had the air of a mobile game, designed for short attention spans and microtransaction gouging. It took me a while to embrace autobattlers because of a misconception: the automation sounded like it was cutting out a big chunk of interaction that I normally enjoy in strategy and tactics games, and the streamlining suggested a dearth of complexity when compared to traditional strategy games or MOBAs. But why did its popularity peter out when so many other multiplayer trends in a similar position managed to hang on for longer? The genre doesn't have any pull, even if a few specific games do. People just don't care that much about autobattlers. Teamfight Tactics is the stronger game, but I don't think that's the main reason for the difference in player numbers. Steam stats don't give us the whole picture, since there are mobile versions too, but it's a significant decline for a game designed to keep people coming back daily. It's been well over a year since it was able to even hit 10,000. Underlords was Valve's attempt to capitalise on Dota Auto Chess's success, and with 200,000 concurrent players shortly after its Early Access launch on Steam, it seemed to be in a good position. We only have to look at other notable games like Dota Underlords to see that a hunger for autobattlers is not what's driving players into their arms. They don't speak to the health of the genre, only their own success. Like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, it benefits greatly from being attached to an already hugely popular game, making it so much easier to convert the slightly interested into obsessed players. Last year, it hit a new daily peak of 10 million players (opens in new tab). It's more than healthy, and still growing. I still play Riot's Teamfight Tactics regularly, and I've never waited for more than a few seconds for a match. That's why it was so exciting to see New World appear last year, even though it's not very good. These games serve their communities well, but the broader genres are effectively in hibernation.
They're both very much alive genres, of course, but players have coalesced around a few giants and mainstays, with hardly anything that's new or novel appearing. We saw MMOs and MOBAs go through this gold rush too, but not with this much speed. Then the genre skipped the part where it becomes established and stable, rushing instead towards stagnation and decline. The incredible pace of expansion suggested great things for autobattlers.
#Tft vs auto chess mod
In less than a year we'd gone from a single mod to a bunch of high profile games, each boasting millions of players and big tournaments touting meaty payouts.
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