What is this game called 'Dawngate'?

            Now is the time when numerous online games are coming up to the surface. Due to a rising popularity of online gaming and its money-gathering ability throughout the world, game distributors are worried if they’re too late to take part in.

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What is MOBA?

            The hottest potato in the world currently, the majority among several genres of games, also the one that defines the world’s most popular online game, “League of Legends,” is MOBA.

MOBA is a genre of an online computer game, abbreviated from “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.” It has been about more than 15 years that online multi-playing game started to get a spotlight (Starcraft), but about a decade later, a team-playing centered games came up on the surface. Like the word says, “a Battle Arena”, players gather up as a team and fight against another group of players for a victory. It seems pretty simple, but there are way too much things to be fluent with to be a ‘pro’, some are even harder that you can’t be a ‘beginner’ before you spend time playing about 20 to 30 hours.

(One of the hardest, beginner-unfriendly MOBA game, DOTA 2)

          This kind of games are also categorized as an “AOS genre”, which is a sub-category of MOBA. AOS stands for “Aeon of Strife”, a name of an extremely popular map from Starcraft. The type of gameplay of this specific map itself originated a new genre. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_online_battle_arena/)


What is Dawngate?

“Dawngate” is also an AOS game, distributed by EA. Yes! That EA. Famous for their soccer video game and simulator, FIFA series.

          As I had been a closed alpha and a close beta tester, I want to introduce a bit more about this game and how it became now.

The fallacy of Dawngate

The news about Dawngate began to come up during April 2013, and the testing period began on May 24, 2013. The community beta, which is the part that I mostly spent time in, and the open beta was released on May 19, 2014.

Just like any other games, there were a lot of bugs and incompleteness in the game at the beginning. As time passed, some testers said that the progress of growth of the game was pretty smooth, but the others say that it was like a graph of a constant value. To be clear, new players weren’t increasing at the moment. Though, there was a reason. The advertisement of the game had happened only once at Gamescom, a famous game exhibition at August 2014. Also the manpower, according to a rumor, was insufficient, which means that EA had done nothing on growing their game.

The consequence of fallacy


On November 4, 2014, it was announced that the head dev is shutting down their game within 90 days because the game was not shaping up as the distributor had hoped. About the word “not shaping up as they had hoped”, one comment said that “It's not even out of beta yet. EA has literally done almost nothing for the game. And then they're surprised when it's not making waves” (http://kotaku.com/ea-gives-up-on-dawngate-their-take-on-league-of-legend-1654611218).

I wondered why a lot of ‘an ambition-full of dominating LOL and DOTA’ type of game are descending. Dawngate is based on an awesome lore, creative mechanisms, and most importantly, defined as MOBA and AOS genre, just like LOL and DOTA. I wondered why LOL is on the top of the most popular game list for about 2 years. I still got no clear reason yet. It is evident that one factor is an insufficient support just like Dawngate.


Conclusion

Another factor maybe would be the gameplay that wasn’t interesting enough. This is what I felt while playing several testing games during the community beta. (The most annoying part was the jungling- it had no point at all, and the routes were messy as hell, if you know what I meant.) I’m going to go in-depth about the gameplay problem in the next post- the difference between two successful MOBA games, LOL and DOTA2, from Dawngate. Anyways, there still are other factors that I didn’t see. Maybe experts will come up with more idea.

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