The last patch for Heroes of Newerth arrives next week, at which point the game’s live support will be scaled back to nothing but essential changes as necessary. It’s a sad ending for the game, especially when you consider that this particular MOBA has been running for a decade now. There was a time when it was considered one of the big players in the arena, and it was certainly a staple of our own Not So Massively feature from its earliest days.
So what happened? Well, the game was always most popular in southeast Asia, and some four years ago the title was sold to new owners. Since then it’s struggled to really fully connect with its audience, with this quiet maintenance mode coming at the tail end of its slide in popularity. A sad ending to the game’s story, then, and a sign of what can be done when a once-popular game is mismanaged over time… or perhaps just a coda to the story of a game that had a good run and chose quiet maintenance over outright shutdown.
