Valve auto fighter Dota Underlords' player count drops by more than 80%

The situation at Dota Underlords is worrying.

Since launching on Steam six months ago, Valve's Early Access Automatic Fighter has lost most of its player base.

As the sharp-eyed Reddit user Sharkylzrod found, Steam charts show that since it first launched in June, 200,000 users have played the game simultaneously, but only 15,000 players have played in the past day.

Dota Underlords' average player count has also dropped month by month, reaching more than 11,000 users recently, with a peak player count of less than 20,000. This means that the number of players has decreased by more than 80%, and the number of peak players has decreased by more than 90%.

After the success of Dota Auto Chess, a game mode built by the community within Dota 2, Valve developed games for mobile, PC, and Linux. DotaAuto Chess itself is a phenomenon, with 7 million players in the first three months of launch.

With these numbers, Valve naturally became interested in game modes. The publisher met with Chinese developer Drodo Studio to discuss potential cooperation on Dota Auto Chess, but failed to reach an agreement. As a result, Dota Underlords were born. The Chinese team has also been researching its own mobile phone derivative product-simply called "chess".