China's MOBA explosion is going to backfire

Chinese game developers are going gaga for MOBA games. It seems hardly a day goes by when I don’t read about some company with no history in the genre or even really in RTS games plunging headfirst into the world of MOBA games. One of the highest-profile offerings is probably Netease’s new MOBA game Heroes of the Three Kingdoms, but plenty of other companies are also getting in on the action. Just this past Friday, for example, Snail Games announced it was working on a new martial-arts-themed MOBA game.

It’s not hard to understand why there’s been an uptick of interest in the genre. League of Legends has been dominating China’s PC gaming charts for a while now, and this fall DOTA 2 has also advanced into the top ten most played PC games in China. The growing interest in China’s esports scene has also increased domestic developers’ focus on MOBA games, because League of Legends and DOTA are two of the most popular competitive titles.

But the outburst in domestic developer interest in MOBA games reminds me quite a bit of the early interest in the group buying e-commerce model in China from my time at Tech in Asia. After it became clear that group buying worked and customers were interested, everybody and their mother started setting up a group buying site. At the peak of the fad, there were more than 5,000 group buying sites operating in China at once. Of course, that was followed shortly by a brutal culling of the ranks, during which more than half of those sites went under in a single year.

China’s MOBA games market has not yet reached that level of over-saturation, but I suspect that for every game company announcing a new MOBA title right now, there are five more that are thinking, “Boy, those are popular, we need to start developing one.” But when everyone gets into the same genre at the same time, the ultimate outcome for most of them is going to be disappointment and failure.

MOBA games also present some unique challenges that, to be frank, some of China’s game developers simply aren’t ready for. First and foremost: any MOBA game with aspirations of being used in competitive tournament play (and they all aspire to that) needs to be exquisitely balanced but still full of variety. Even games that aren’t looking to take the esports stage will still need good variety and balance to keep players interested for any significant period of time because MOBA games are by nature competitive, and competition isn’t fun if one side starts at a disadvantage. But balancing games properly is really hard.

Perhaps more importantly, though, there are already more than a few MOBA games on the market, so any new offering will need to give players a reason to switch. For the most part, Chinese developers seem to be hoping that basing their games on Chinese history and mythology will give them a leg up in the quest to snare Chinese players, but if everyone makes a game about the Three Kingdoms (which seems to be more or less what always happens), then there’s still no differentiation. And at the end of the day, all the Chinese set-dressing in the world isn’t going to make gamers play a game that’s less fun, so the real question for Chinese developers is: can you make a game that’s more fun than DOTA or League of Legends? There may be a few domestic companies that could reasonably give that a shot, but there aren’t many.

I think most devs’ time would be better spent working on unique and original projects rather than trying to follow the trend until the market is over-saturated with MOBA games, most of which will end up being pretty bad. I realize that not being Chinese myself, I’m not the target audience for these games, but I think that everyone plays games in part because they want to see something new and different. Developing a MOBA game may seem like less of a financial risk, but if we see what happened to group buying sites happen to MOBA games, it’ll probably end up being a worse use of time and money for most studios than working on something unique would have been. I have nothing against MOBA games, but let’s not all hop on the bandwagon too fast. There are already some great MOBA games out there; do we really need a lot more?