![]() ![]() ![]() The company has built its legacy on mods created by players - the Counter-Strike series, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 all started off as community-made games. The most important absentee in this story seems to be Valve. Dragonest is responsible for technical support and publication. For Sun, the choice was pretty simple : “Dragonest was one of the first companies to contact us,” he says, also noting that Dragonest’s plans for Auto Chess looked promising to Drodo’s team “The communication was really good.” Interestingly enough, Sun says that the team hasn’t noticed too many changes in Auto Chess’ development since Drodo’s partnership with Dragonest: “ We are still focused on developing the game itself. Why Dragonest though? Surely, bigger companies were interested in a new game that’s creeping up on the market. There’s a catch: Dota 2’s characters will be replaced by Dragonest’s lookalikes. With Dragonest, a mobile version of Auto Chess is being built. Facing this development Drodo Studio acted swiftly, and partnered up with mobile games developer Dragonest to stay ahead of the competition and continue expanding its checkered empire. On the video game market, a range from poor to reasonably well-developed clones have begun spreading. Multiple China companies (including giant Tencent) are filing for ‘Auto Chess’ trademarks. Already Auto Chess has spawned many a copycat - and not just other mods in Dota 2’s Arcade mode. If the common saying is true, and idea theft should be seen as a form of flattery, Drodo Studio is soaking up compliments left and right. It could even be taken one step further, if the roster is split in four and any 2 parts are picked at random, making six different possible roster combinations. Perhaps the roster can be split in two at some point, and let players have access to either roster A or roster B in a game. How exactly this will be done remains a mystery for now. Besides that, we have a few other ways which we will use in the future to make the game balanced. Sun is well aware of that: “ As you see, we removed 3 least popular heroes from chess pool in the recent update. Should Drodo Studio really want to incorporate that full roster, some measures are gonna have to be taken in order to avoid games that take an hour and a half to complete. Dota 2 has a whopping 117 heroes in total - almost double of what Auto Chess has incorporated so far. As of now, with just over sixty heroes available, games of Auto Chess easily stretch beyond 40 minutes of playtime already. With an oversaturated chess piece pool, these combinations are going to take ages to find. Auto Chess revolves around maximizing the odds to finding the right pieces, leveling up heroes and figuring out the best synergies to defeat your opponents. “The process of adding new heroes includes brainstorming, designing and testing.” If at any point a problem arises, a hero is put on hold longer. ![]() ![]() We don’t have a fixed schedule that how often to do that,” Sun says. “ Normally we add 2-3 heroes in each time. Just last week Zeus and Mars were introduced, adding the ‘God’ race to the list. Heroes are balanced or even completely overhauled, and every now and then new heroes and items join the roster. Part of Auto Chess’ success as a title on Twitch is the high amount of patches Drodo Studio keeps pumping out at regular intervals. From Dota 2 to Hearthstone to even CS :GO pros - many have succumbed to Auto Chess’ unresistable, charming atmosphere and high replayability. But now we even have a lot of players from other games.” Indeed, the game’s relatively calm pace with quite a bit of downtime, combined with multiple layers of strategy, has attracted gamers from various other titles. We got to ask the CEO and founder of the company, Chao “ Toto” Sun, a man who has donned a cloack of mystery, a couple of questions about Auto Chess, its popularity and what the future holds for it.Įven to Sun, the numbers supporting Auto Chess are somewhat unexpected: “ Originally, we just thought it would popular among Dota 2 players. With a strong, growing community behind it, and a recent partnership to develop a mobile game, everything seems to be going Drodo Studio’s way. Streamers picked up the game quickly too, to the point that Twitch even made it its own category. A few days ago, Auto Chess crossed 7 million installations - viewed in the Steam Workshop as ‘subscribers’ - averaging growth of over 80,000 players per day. Skip forward three months, and what once was seen as just a mod has grown into quite the phenomenon. ![]()
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