How One Mod Became A Multi-Million Dollar Genre - What Happened To Teamfight Tactics?

What happened to Teamfight Tactics and the autobattler genre?

It's the end of June 2019. This month Teamfight Tactics launched its beta, shutting down the PBE servers as hordes of players fight to get in and play. Top hearthstone and league of legends streamers have all switched for the week and the game is number one on twitch.

The week before, Valve launched Underlords to a similarly massive 200k player count launch. And the month before, Autochess, the Dota mod celebrated hitting 8 million players. Clear to see, the autobattler was the new kid on the block and was threatening to take over the whole gaming industry

But it didn't, and it quietly settled down in the following months a shadow of its former self. Was the hype too much? Was the replay value too low? Was it ever fun at all? Let's take a look at what happened.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

1:11 The Auto Battler

2:36 Auto Chess

3:32 Under Lords

4:48 Teamfight Tactics

8:25 What Happened

9:43 The Future