Valve will be making a standalone Dota Auto Chess, original developers to focus on mobile development

Dota Auto Chess has grown widely in popularity over the past six months, and Valve has clearly taken note of Drodo Studio’s original creation

Valve’s behemoth of an esports title, Dota 2, while still being a juggernaut on the Steam sales charts has recently been seeing competition from a challenger that not many could have predicted. A custom map made within Dota 2 itself, Auto Chess sees players competing in a tactical turn-based strategy game against 7 other players, managing resources and movements to eventually prevail as the winner. The game shares a similar board to that of chess whilst the mechanics have been drawn straight from Dota itself. While daunting to initial dive into, the custom game mode has taken the world by storm with over 70 000 concurrent players choosing to play it over the core game itself, and Valve has clearly taken notice.

Announced yesterday, Valve has revealed that they will be taking over development of Auto Chess and launching a standalone title. The original developers of the mode, Drodo Studio, will cease development of the mod and focus on their own original mobile game that is currently out in beta. While many suspected Valve of originally just purchasing the studio and incorporating their efforts into this standalone product, it seems that the two studios “could not work directly with each other for a variety of reasons”. Whether this was a dispute over the rights to the content or merely creative differences was not clarified, yet Valve was insistent that the two companies parted on amicable terms, both dedicated to their standalone titles.

Studio Drodo made a statement regarding this deal over on Dota’s official website, saying “We appreciate the great encouragements, support and help that Valve offered on Dota Auto Chess and Drodo’s standalone game. Valve has been a great company, who gave birth to the Steam Platform and open community like Workshop, enabling millions of players to display their talents. Being a fan of Dota2, we have great confidence in Valve’s new game, and expect the next world-class game. In the meantime, with Valve’s support, Drodo will continue updating the DAC mod, and attempt to design new modes and adaptations in our stand-alone game. We endeavour to offer more to you, all the fans that like Auto Chess. Thank you, it’s you that are making this possible. We look forward to growing together!” 

Valve has made no concrete announcement on when we can expect to see their standalone version of Auto Chess or what it would even entail. Whether it turns out to dead on arrival like Artifact or soars to great success like the game that originally inspired this mode is yet to be seen, but fans can at least still enjoy the mod for the time being.

Last Updated: May 22, 2019