Dota Underlords May Share Artifact's Fate; 97% of Players Left

Valve's auto battler Dota Underlords, which left the early access program a year ago, continues to lose players. Compared to its performance when it debuted in 2019, its user base has shrunk by as much as 97 percent.

Just a few days ago, we informed about the untimely demise of Artifact, a card game set in the universe of Dota 2. There are indications that a similar fate may soon meet another project associated with the popular MOBA by Valve. We are talking about Dota Underlords, which left the early access program a year ago. The numbers do not lie and since the debut of the title in 2019, its player base has shrunk by as much as 97%. The largest number of people have abandoned Underlords in the past 12 months. Compared to March 2020, as many as 80% fewer fans are currently playing the game. A similarly drastic drop in interest contributed to the death of Artifact.

The problem of the dwindling numbers of Dota Underlords players is not a new phenomenon and we already reported about it several months ago. As one fan on Reddit points out, in the first weeks after its debut, Dota Underlords was regularly in the top ten or twenty most played games on Steam, attracting an average of up to 200,000 unique users per day. In March last year, however, it was only 25 thousand people, and now the number does not exceed 5 thousand, which has made it significantly more difficult to find opponents for online play.

Recall that Dota Underlords belongs to a new genre, so-called auto battlers, which grew out of the popular mod for Dota 2 called Auto Chess. After its initial success, its developers created a standalone version of the mod, getting rid of any ties with Valve's production. Valve's creation of Dota Underlords was, like Artifact, motivated by the prospect of cashing in on a potentially very lucrative trend.

There are various reasons for the exodus of players from Dota Underlords, but the main reasons include lack of support from the developers, a decline in interest in the auto battler genre, and the ever-increasing popularity of Riot Games' competitive Teamfight Tactics. At the moment, Valve doesn't have too many ways to successfully resurrect the dying Underlords. The game has been running on free-to-play model from the beginning, so the only salvation would be a complete overhaul and further expensive investment in development and advertising. So it is highly likely that in the search for savings Valve will clench its teeth and allow another failure of its flagship project.