After 11 years in development, the Heroes of Newerth, the second-generation MOBA, is being formally closed. While Heroes of Newerth will not be played anymore, HON’s legacy lives on in current-gen MOBAs such as Dota 2 and League of Legends.
In 2015, Heroes of Newerth was acquired by Garena, the Singaporean publisher, and esports tournament, in what seemed to signal new life for the game. Heroes of Newearth saw an almost immediate surge in its competitive scene, with many DOTA players switching over to the game to seek competitive glory. While Heroes of Newearth peaked with an estimated 30 million unique accounts, hovering at about 150,000 simultaneous players per day, it has remained solidly third-placed or below.
HON launched back in 2010, one of the first standalone successors to Warcraft IIIs original Defence of the Ancients mod. In a post to Heroes of Newearth’s official Facebook, the developers announced that HoN will be going offline on June 20, 2022. The developers would slowly close official media channels once HoN servers went offline.
In a bittersweet announcement, the developers decided to stop supporting the game, and shut Heroes of Newerth completely. Today was announced way back in December when developers Frostburn Studios laid out their plans for sunsetting the once-popular Heroes of Newerth MOBA. Despite its unique features and engaging gameplay, its fall from being one of the most played MOBAs in history to being basically a dead game was not unstoppable, and now developers Frostburn Studios officially announced they are pulling the plug and closing the servers after just six short months.
Developers Frostburn Studios announced on 13th December that they would cease supporting HON in 2022, with servers ceasing to function permanently on June 20, 2022, over 12 years after the game was officially released. To ensure Heroes of Newerth goes out with a bang, the team at Frostburn Studios set up a number of ongoing events which continued right up until the servers are eventually switched off. There were events, of course, but the following transition away from HON was too quick, and HON went into an abrupt decline.
League of Legends and Dota 2s stranglehold over the then-burgeoning MOBA genre was well established at that point, and Frostburn Studios confirmed in a formal announcement back in December of 2021 that Heroes of Newerth will close. Heroes of Newerth enjoyed a brief period of popularity, as Dota players switched over to the new service, which offered better graphics, a reconnect function, Ranked Play, and other features the original custom Warcraft 3 game had been lacking. HoN was one of the most successful MOBAs in comparison with other titles that started up and closed within a half-year, such as MxM, which stands for Master x Master.
