There might not be a more competitive space than MOBAs right now, and while Electronic Arts gave the genre a legitimate shot with Dawngate, it's pulling the plug. Dawngate will officially shut down in 90 days.

EA was pretty open with Dawngate's development, having managed a lengthy 18-month beta period. The last six months, however, were open to everyone.

"Whenever we begin a game project, we do so with great hopes and expectations," said group general manager Matt Bromberg on EA's blog. "In this case, we chose to enter a new genre for EA in MOBA, one that we knew going in was extremely competitive. We built a game in Dawngate that wasn’t simply a clone of existing MOBAs, but one that truly pushed the genre forward in many ways. Dawngate has been in beta for almost 18 months, including a full open beta for the past six months. Through that time, we’ve taken a lot of feedback from players and delivered lots of new features and innovations. And although the game has grown, we’re not seeing the progress we’d hoped for. This isn’t the outcome we wanted, but beta testing is about learning and improving, and ultimately, about making difficult decisions about how to proceed."

Anyone who spent money during Dawngate's beta period will be refunded in the next coming days. If you don't have payment information currently entered, updating that will help EA timely process your refund.

DOA

Did a control-f search for "gonegate", got nothing.

Where has the journalistic low hanging fruit alliteration gone

Didnt expect EA to do this. Though there are way too many mobas out there already.

But is Smite OK?

@bargainben: More like Donegate am I right?

Is the "MOBA-space" really competitive? I know that everyone and their grandma is trying to make a DOTA clone, but are any of them any good / successful (competitive)?

LoL and DOTA2 are at the top - is there anything that could be considered 'third place' or are all these games just fighting over scraps and doomed to die?

SMITE WILL RULE SUPREME!

The UI of this game is disgustingly League of Legends like! Look at the two side by side, it's kinda nuts.

Hadn't heard a damn thing about this game since they showed it at E3. Didn't even know it was in open beta.

Good on them for recognizing when to pull out in a genre already dominated by a small handful of juggernauts. Also, it's probably telling that I might have forgotten this game existed in any fashion until this news story.

Smite seems to be the third place from what I've seen/heard. Heroes of Newerth also still regularly gets 50K players, which is bad relative to Dota and LoL but still good.

For most of this game's existence, I assumed it was a browser game, because that's the vibe the ads gave off.

Anyway, it's like watching the MMO boom all over again, with LoL playing the role of WoW and DOTA 2 clinging on as a solid second-place.

I had a lot of fun with this when I played it for about a month last year. Unfortunate, but you can't expect to compete with League and Dota at this stage. (Watch out Infinite Crisis, you're next).

This is the first time I have heard of this game. The must have a awesome advertising campaign

The latter. We'll see where Blizzard's project ends up though. People care about their name...

I didn't even know this existed. Bummer?

I thought the game was cool, but it wasn't enough to catch the grasps of others. RIP DawnGate

I submit MOBAs for the most visually homogenous genre of all time. Yes even more than modern fps.

@nakirendral: damn straight! #playSMiTE2015 #itsfreeyouknow #SMiTEgate

This was at their E3 press conference right?

@giovanni: It goes over 100k most fridays and saturdays still.

Anyway, I feel bad for them but this was a bad idea from the beginning. If you want to invest money wisely there are two things you shouldn't make more of in the next twenty years: MOBAs and Zombie Survival Crafting Open World Roguelikes.

They probably just didn't want to deal with all the "it's actually about ethics in MOBA journalism" jokes.

I guess this MOBA is a NOBA.

I love how they say that they pushed the genre's boundaries with this game, like somehow the innovative aspect of the game is a reason it failed. Yet you look at the screens and it's obvious that the game is heavily derived from League of Legends. Why would those players switch to a game that is so similar?

This is disappointing. Not because Dawngate was mindblowing, but it did have some interesting ideas and I really do think think there are more places you can go with the MOBA genre (which basically just takes action RPG mechanics and puts them into a more structured competitive, team based environment) beyond the framework that LoL and Dota have laid out.

note to self, never get too into any EA online games...ever again

I did play Dawngate and found it to be a very polished and entertaining MOBA. Regrettably though it's not DOTA/LoL and all MOBAs are compared against these two behemoths of the genre.

Well, they broke the meta alright...

Heroes of The Storm seems to be popular with YouTube personalities. I suspect it has a lot to do with loyalty to Blizzard + Blizzard's reciprocal loyalty to fans.

That said, HoTS does seem to have the appeal of being a pick-up-&-play-quickly MOBA that doesn't take as long to learn or to play a match. Also, the art style and engine are pure Blizz, which meant that what they were calling an alpha build was already more polished than most developers' final releases.

Anyone know what was innovative about it?

I didn't know this existed.

@baka_shinji17: I think HiRez is still making money on Smite. Dawngate was never interesting enough for me, even though they tried some neat stuff.

#DawnGate #notallmobas

It failed cause brad didnt have a daily stream of it.

Beyond smart of them imo. Mobas are pretty much in the same place MMOs are now Where there is one juggernaut(in this game there are two with Dota and League) and nobody has a chance of trumping it. Heroes of the Storm is the only game that stands a chance and I think that's only because it's a Blizzard game.

@beb: League has 89% of the MOBA market cornered. Then there's Dota which despite having (comparatively) much less of a player base, still enjoys 7 million active users a month. One is pretty much a household name while the other enjoys prime placement on the internet's largest games marketplace.

I don't know that 'competitive' is the right word. It's certainly a ruthless market for any game trying to break in because the top 2 games pretty much have the entire MOBA market sewn up tight. The best any new game could hope for would be 3rd or 4th place.

F2P is a extremely lucrative genre if you can attract players but that's probably the biggest obstacle facing any new challengers at the moment.

Dawngate was pretty good, it just kind of felt like it was going nowhere feature wise for a really long time. They had a weird system where shapers (their word for characters) had a chance to drop at the end of a match from one of the chests. its not Dota 2's everyone is free, but it at least solved some of the issues with LoL's system. Some of the map control ideas were interesting as well, although it focused way more on teamwork since everyone only had a single ward. There would be some situations where a player would either place a ward in a place that isn't very helpful, or not place it at all.

I think this basically leaves Strife, Orcs Must Die: Unchained, and Heroes of the Storm as the only major unreleased mobas?

I remember hearing about it a bit ago but it feels like no one was talking about it at all. Didn't know it was even in open beta. I don't remember seeing it anywhere on origin, or in ad's around the internet. I guess they couldn't get the word out enough. Hopefully the people that were working on that find work within the company.

or like Yawngate am I right?

It's such a shame that these online only games just totally cease to exist. Gaming is the only medium I can think of like that outside of say, unrecorded oral tradition.

kinda sad to go. The way they handled kit and shaper (hero) design, objectives, roles, it felt like a moba but enough differences that it wasn't a straight up clone (such as Infinite Crisis let's say). But there were some problems:

• 1)It's EA. They like money and they want it now. They don't culture or breed games, that shit has to sell and pronto.
• 2) It barely got advertised and many didn't even know it existed, let alone getting shut down.
• 3)No bundles. There was no way to say, mass purchase a group of shapers to get you going, everything had to be bought individually so their last shaper, Lillin....if you wanted her but didn't have the account currency, you had to buy her, her release skin, and her announcer pack separately, no bundle or discount for you.
• 4)The reward/karma system at the end of matches sucked. Flat out.
• 5)It took them so long to even get sales or discounts of any kind which kind of made the real money purchases a bit alienating.
• 6)The game had a system similar to LoL's rune system but it was poorly explained and to be honest, was kind of unnecessary.

Just throwing out there my thoughts since my moba experience isn't strictly League/Dota. Sad to see it go while IC still gets to stick around.

It's a shame because I thought it was a really polished new spin on the standard MOBA mechanics. The role system is really smart, and I liked the streamlined item system. But ultimately it doesn't surprise me that EA would shut it down.

DO(T)A

At this point, if you want to make a MOBA and it's not LoL or DotA 2, it's orders of magnitude worse than in years past if you wanted to make an MMO that wasn't WoW. Except Smite, that black sheep of the genre that seems to do relatively well since it's 3rd person and sets itself apart.

Really, a major characteristic of this genre is that it is pretty much classic DotA with a new coat of paint and that goes for both LoL and DotA 2. This is a space more crowded than the competitive FPS space which consists of... I guess CoD, Battlefield, and CS:GO?

Totally forgot this was even thing, but I am not surprised to hear this news. Between the competition being what it is and EA being who they are, I don't feel like this game ever really had a chance to succeed. The most tragic part is it actually seemed like a really good game, but...oh well...

Technically, EA products invented the genre, but I guess nobody knew what they had back in 1998 with Future Cop and Sole Survivor, it wasn't until someone remade Future Cop's Precinct Assault mode in StarCraft people started taking notice.

This, so goddamn much. You could put any of things in front of me and they all look the same. Its the same perspective, the same hyper saturated but not quite cartoonish style, and the same sort of UI layout. War FPSs are a close second, only because they rely on reality as a base in the first place.

Felt mediocre to play anyway.

Wait a minute, I was fallowing the artist of the comic. I forgot this was a game, just reminded he was one of those super talented artist from 38 studios who worked on Copernicus and his art was amazing.

A lot of the people commenting haven't even played the game. I've put in hundreds of hours into Dota2, LoL and Dawngate, and I can say that Dawngate was a good game with some interesting ideas. Mobas are like MMOs, you just go where your friends are.