Dota Underlords will leave early access later this month

The auto-battler spin-off of the wildly successful MOBA will start its first 1.0 season on February 25th.

Honestly, I had no idea Dota Underlords was in beta. It always just seemed like the kind of thing Valve throws out into the wild already in a 1.0 state, steadily building on the platform that was established. One would expect that to be the case considering there has been zero monetisation attached to Dota Underlords since it first entered early access, which I’m sure hasn’t hurt Valve but they can’t exactly be over the moon about it either. With that being said, it seems like that story is about to turn the page to the next chapter as Valve has announced that Dota Underlords will be leaving early access on February 25th with the game’s first season starting on the same day.

Still no word has been given on what form of monetisation Dota Underlords will implement, but given that Valve has previously tried out a prototype battle pass system for the game and the terminology of the game’s launch specifically mentioning “season” I think it’s a safe bet that players will be able to splash out on a battle pass. We do know that Underlords will continue to be free to play when it leaves early access and will feature cross-play between PC, iOS and Android. According to Valve’s official statement, Underlords will launch with, “new content with City Crawl, new rewards with a full Battlepass, and a new meta with a Hero/Item rotation.” Before the 1.0 release, Underlords will receive one last early access update as new hero Enno is added to the game.

Despite the boom on enthusiasm for auto-battlers in 2019, recent reports have shown that general interesting in Dota Underlords has fallen in recent months. Data pulled from SteamCharts has shown that Underlord’s concurrent playerbase has dropped from a whopping 202,254 players at launch to just 14,783 in the last month which, to be honest, is still a pretty good amount. Although whether a 1.0 release will be enough to bring Dota Underlords back into the hundreds of thousands is still currently unknown, I’m gonna hedge my bets and say probably not.

Last Updated: February 3, 2020