I can’t believe this abandoned Valve game still has players and is fun 4 years later

Dead games keep pulling me in. I refuse to bury extremely popular games from just a few years ago, and that’s why I don’t want to let Dota Underlords go.

Remember Auto Chess?

This Valve game, inspired by the Dota Auto Chess mod that released in January 2019, was popular for a year or two, when everything everyone could think about was autobattlers.

These games let you draft units, place them on a board, and build synergies between them via their classes, origins, or whatever their traits are called. Heroes battle automatically. You increase their power by getting duplicates as they’re randomly offered to you from a pool shared between all eight players in a match. Items you get every few rounds also make heroes stronger, but that’s about all you can do to increase your chances of winning. It’s a strategy game where you do the planning but let units fight as scripted.

Dota Underlords came out in June 2019, a few days before League of Legends’ take with Teamfight Tactics and two months after the original Dota Auto Chess became a standalone game with generic characters in Auto Chess. Other companies’ attempts to make autobattlers failed, like Tencent’s Chess Rush.

You could say Dota Underlords has also failed. The game went from 111,000 concurrent players in July 2019 to less than 15,000 in December. Valve hasn’t updated the game since November 2020. No new content, no balance patches, no stability updates or fixes. It’s even too generous to say that Valve put the game in maintenance mode, because that would mean they are at least doing something to keep the game healthy over time, like Blizzard is doing with Heroes of the Storm. But this is not the case. Dota Underlords has been abandoned.

Why do they keep going?

Still, for some reason, over 1,000 players are in Dota Underlords on Steam at all times, not counting mobile players. So, what happened here? Why are people still playing a game that Valve discarded and probably just kept afloat because they already have the servers to keep the game running?

My main guess, returning to the game in 2025, is that being abandoned ironically turned into an advantage. Dota Underlords has been the same for years, which means it’s a stress-free experience. Unlike Teamfight Tactics, which is the only big autobattler game that survived the 2019 hype, Dota Underlords has been the same for almost five years. There is no pressure to complete a time-limited battle pass or buy cosmetics that will be gone soon. Units are always the same, and no balance patches or rotations change them every few months like in TFT.

Once you learn Dota Underlords and its strategies, you can master the smallest details to get an edge, and that’s the fun part. Any knowledge you have gained in the last four years is still valid. This abandonment (or stability?) is what allows players to spend more time learning about each unit, developing new synergies, and becoming good at the game.

I don’t think Dota fans are keeping Underlords alive because this gameplay has nothing to do with the MOBA. Returning to Underlords as a non-Dota player, I see that some units that were overpowered when I stopped playing, like Kunkka and Tidehunter, are still just as strong. It feels familiar. I don’t have to relearn the game, and I like knowing I can stop playing and return in six months to find the same game.

Dota Underlords is an example that online games don’t have to be live service. You don’t need new content to keep a game afloat if you’re a big company, though I have no idea how much profit Valve makes from this title.

However, I only recommend playing Dota Underlords today if you want a game that will never change. If you want something current with dedicated development, then play Teamfight Tactics.