Tuesday, Valve announced that it will create its own version of Dota Auto Chess, a hugely popular, player-made mod of Valve's team-based strategy game Dota 2. At the same time, the team that created Dota Auto Chess is working on its own, mobile version of Dota Auto Chess that will exist independently of the original Dota 2 mod.
Fuck Valve but at the sane time the team behind Auto Chess blatantly stole assets from people and charged money to get access to them in their mod so they get a fuck you as well.
Hopefully at least Valve will have at minimum a workshop similar to their other games so some people get paid.
Sounds like Valve made an offer for buyout or publishing and the modding team declined. Building a clone independently is plan B.
It looks to me like Drodo, the mod’s original developers, got the better end of the deal. They basically agreed to split the market: Valve can have Auto Chess on PC while Drodo owns it on mobile. But this kind of lite short-session strategy game is huge on phones, and the design of Auto Chess is already a great fit for the format.
Speaking of mobile versions, has anyone else played Red Tides? Ben Pack played it on a Giant Bomb UPF last week (?) and I decided to check it out. I’ve been enjoying it a lot even if I haven’t played Auto Chess. It’s so easy to pick up and play and has that “just one more game” sort of flow. I assume the real Auto Chess is similar. I just wish the matches were shorter.
