MOBAs are suddenly back in fashion, and one dev says it might be because of soulslikes: 'Now that more players understand that it feels great to master a difficult game, I think more are willing to take that journey'

2024 is feeling very 2016 all of a sudden. No, I don't mean because we're reentering the psychic maelstrom of election season; I'm talking about the MOBAs. In the back half of the 2010s, we watched the industry pack the market way past the MOBA oversaturation point as it seemed like every major publisher was racing to capture whatever lightning Riot and Valve hadn't already bottled with League of Legends and Dota 2.

Many of those efforts failed as, tragically, jungling as Batman didn't prove compelling enough to draw a sustainable amount of attention away from the biggest players in the space. The market moved on to chase the emerging battle royale zeitgeist, trailing failed MOBAs in its wake and leaving the genre to its handful of unchallenged titans.

But now, years later, there's a bunch of MOBA action happening all at once. It began in April, when the formerly free-to-play Gigantic returned from its 2018 closure as Gigantic: Rampage Edition. August, though, has felt like the breaking of some arcane seal that was keeping lane-based combat from reemerging into the world. Over the last few weeks, Predecessor—the MOBA built from the assets of Epic's defunct Paragon—got its 1.0 release, Smite 2 has launched its buy-in closed alpha, and Valve revealed Deadlock, its in-development third person shooter MOBA whose not-so-secret closed playtest had attracted tens of thousands of players.

Whether it's a temporary burst of activity or the beginning of a renaissance, MOBAs are back in vogue. The question is: Why now? For Alex Cantatore, executive producer for Smite 2, soulslikes deserve some of the credit.

«I've often described MOBAs as the 'soulslike' of multiplayer genres,» Cantatore told PC Gamer via email. «They're really hard. You're going to die a lot to learn the game.» While technically demanding games have always had their audience, we're now in a world where games like Elden Ring can casually brutalize their players and still sell tens of millions of copies. With