What’s With all of These DotA Clones?

Oh, Defense of the Ancients.  With your humble beginnings as a new Warcraft III map based on Aeon of Strife, to being an E-Sports favorite.  Having derivative gameplay is not news for you.  So why is it a surprise that THREE new clones of DotA are coming out this year?

Demigod, League of Legends, and Heroes of Newerth are three games that are coming out (or in the case of Demigod, are already out) this year.  Why the sudden interest in a stand-alone DotA-esque game? It’s happily lived as a Warcraft 3 custom map for almost 6 years. Why the sudden need for a new, stand-alone version?

Well, for one thing, the Warcraft 3 version isn’t the prettiest thing to look at.  These new clones (Demigod especially) are graphically superior to the original, adding modern graphics conventions like bloom (everyone loves that, I hear), better textures, and better models for the heroes. Not just re-skinned ones from Warcraft III.  More robust friend lists and stat tracking are also a much touted feature for these clones, as DotA fans have been clamoring for them since people realized that Battle.net wasn’t as good as services like Steam for managing a community.

With all of the popularity that DotA has garnered, you’d think the developer would’ve wizened up sooner and made it a stand alone game so he could make some money off of his baby.  That’s what some of the developers ‘” Steve “Guinsoo” Feak and Steve ‘œPendragon’ Mescon ‘” are doing at Riot games with their upcoming title League of Legends.  The modder and community manager are taking what they learned developing a mod that’s more popular today than the original game, and are making their own product.

With the recently announced Free-to-play model of League of Legends, it’s sure to attract a good chunk of the DotA community, but will it be enough to get them all?  DotA itself has been pushing on for years and years. The current developers are not likely to stop development with 500 members currently logged into their forum.  Sure, the gameplay will be almost exactly the same, but they’ll still have to relearn all of the heroes and item recipes. They’re crucial to strategy in the game, and take a long time to master because there are so many.  Relearning a game of such depth would not be a task I would want to undertake if I was a professional DotA player.

And then there’s Demigod.  Sort of a red-headed step child of the group, developed by Gas Powered Games (makers of the lauded Dungeon Siege games), this one was more of a surprise to me than the others (good devs should get paid for their work) but I suppose it wasn’t unexpected.  Good, popular concepts get copied.  Much like the recent boom in fighting games coming out, a bunch of these type of games coming out at the same time could be a good thing. Developers could examine what the other is doing and improve on their product.  There could also be such a thick saturation that none of the games will sell well, especially since the genre is so niche, keeping the development teams very small (and in the case of DotA, non-profit) might be for the best.

Magnifying the case for these games being a flop is Demigod‘s problem with piracy during its release.  Stardock, the game’s publisher, has long been a proprietor of the “No DRM leads to happy customers” mantra.  This caused a large amount of people to pirate the game, which was all right in their eyes, those pirates wouldn’t have bought the game anyway, or would eventually buy the game.  However, they didn’t expect that many extra people to have pirated the game, and it caused tremendous stress on their multiplayer servers. This made the game unplayable for the people who actually bought it until stardock did some major overhauls server side to accommodate all of the extra traffic.

So there are, of course, conflicting business models within the genre.  People who are interested in these new games that are experimenting with the DotA-style gameplay want to try it for free (18,000 of the 120,000 online were legitimate users when Demigod’s servers were crashing), which is why I think League of Legends being free-to-play from the start is a great idea, and why it will succeed in getting more of the DotA audience than most of these other clones will. Save Heroes of Newerth, which is still in beta, and a price point hasn’t been announced yet.

So in conclusion, there’s a market for all of these games in the same genre.  Not everything has to be super unique, if there’s a demand for it people will buy it. It will do well and cause more of the same types of games to be released.  This isn’t necessarily bad for creativity if you take a Michel Ancel approach, and make games like Raving Rabids to get some funding for some real games (Beyond Good & Evil 2, which no one thought would ever come out due to the poor sales of the first game).  I’ve played Demigod and Heroes of Newerth, and they both have an interesting take on the DotA formula.  The artistic side of me wants to point fingers and shout  because these games that basically just copy old ones are really unoriginal and bland. But, the side of me that sympathizes with the E-Sports scene enjoys the update to the formula.   I used to have friends that played CAL in Counter-Strike, and almost joined CAL open for a number of games but didn’t have enough confidence.  These types of organizations require insanely balanced and fine-tuned games that don’t differ much from their original.  Hence, the very derivative, easy to pick up and play remakes.

Image Source: Kunukka on DeviantArt