From 200,000 Players to a Few Hundred: The Story of Dota Underlords

Dota Underlords launched into early access in June 2019 and immediately looked like Valve's most promising new game in years. The auto battler genre was exploding — Drodo had sparked it with Dota Auto Chess, Riot had just shipped Teamfight Tactics, and Valve was finally competing in real time. Within weeks, Underlords had over 1.5 million downloads and was regularly hitting close to 200,000 concurrent players on Steam alone. That's not a niche game. That's a contender.

By February 2020, it left early access entirely.

Season 1 launched with City Crawl — a solo campaign set across the streets of White Spire — a full Battle Pass with over 100 rewards, new alliance and hero rotations, and genuine cross-platform play between PC and mobile. It felt, for a moment, like Valve was actually going to see this one through.

The last meaningful content update was published on August 6, 2020. It was called "The Update In Which Lifestealer Gets Even Angrier." That name turned out to be more prophetic than intended.

97%

That's how much of the player base was gone by early 2021.

From 200,000 concurrent players to under 5,000 in less than two years. Gamepressure ran the numbers and called it plainly: Underlords was tracking toward Artifact's fate — Valve's previous game that had also launched to significant hype and then been walked away from. The auto battler genre had cooled, Teamfight Tactics had locked in its audience, and whatever momentum Underlords once had dissipated fast once the content stopped coming.

But "content stopped coming" makes it sound like a natural slowdown. It wasn't. There was no announcement. No developer post. No community update. Valve simply went quiet, and the updates stopped arriving.

The 2031 Patch

In December 2021 — more than a year after any real content had shipped — Valve pushed a small update to Underlords. The gaming press noticed it because it was the first patch in so long. Steam Database showed what changed: the Season 1 Battle Pass expiration date had been extended to 2031.

That was it. That was the message.

Content creator Tyler McVicker read it correctly at the time: the patch was a soft confirmation that the planned Season 2 content — eight new Underlords, procedural dungeon modes, Source Filmmaker cinematics — had been cancelled. GamesRadar described the update as a possible signal that "Valve had indefinitely delayed its plans for new seasons and content." No one from Valve confirmed this. No one from Valve said anything.

A Steam Community discussion from 2025 opens with: "It's the year 2025, the game's last update was 5 years ago. Please Valve, #SaveDotaUnderlords." The post has engagement. People responded to it. Because people are still there.

5,496 player commented on https://steamcommunity.com/app/1046930/discussions/0/5156060518433122154/ for SaveDotaUnderlords tag.

Why Valve Does This

It would be easy to frame the Underlords story as a simple corporate calculation — the game lost players, so Valve pulled resources. That explanation is too tidy.

Reddit threads from the period paint a more complicated picture. Valve's flat organizational structure, which allows developers to move between projects freely, means some games get quietly deprioritized without any formal decision ever being made. Someone described it well in r/underlords: there's no "this project is cancelled" meeting at Valve, because there are no mandatory meetings. People drift toward bigger projects — Dota 2's Battle Pass, Steam itself, whatever the next thing is — and smaller games are left running on a skeleton crew until even that disappears.

Artifact went through the same thing. And the r/underlords community noticed the parallel immediately, which is partly why the frustration runs so deep. It's not just that Underlords was abandoned. It's that players had already watched Valve do this once before with a different game, and they watched it happen again anyway.

One Steam Community post from a player who had been around since the early access days put it bluntly: "Most companies would kill for 15 to 30 thousand active users. Valve left them without saying a word." (Steam Community, 2025) Hard to argue with that.

The People Who Stayed

Here's the part that doesn't fit the clean obituary narrative: Dota Underlords is still being played. Right now. Every day.

Current concurrent player counts sit somewhere between 500 and 1,000 on any given day. A YouTube video from 2025 — titled, with appropriate weariness, "I Found a Surprisingly Active Player Base in this Abandoned Game" — documents a creator jumping into Underlords for the first time in years and finding lobbies, finding matches, finding a community that had clearly been there the whole time.

This is where the story gets genuinely interesting.

Destructoid ran a piece on Underlords with the headline "I can't believe this abandoned Valve game still has players and is fun 4 years later," and the argument they made is worth taking seriously: being abandoned has, paradoxically, made Underlords a better game for a certain type of player. No rotating sets. No seasonal forced meta resets. No aggressive limited-time cosmetics demanding you log in this week or miss out forever. You load into the same game every time, and you know exactly what you're getting.

Teamfight Tactics — the genre's surviving giant — runs constant set rotations, a relentless competitive ladder, and the full live-service pressure model. Underlords is frozen in 2020, and for some players, that's actually a feature.

What Underlords Actually Got Right

It would be a disservice to reduce Underlords to a cautionary tale about Valve's communication failures, because the game itself was doing genuinely interesting things.

Cross-platform play between PC and mobile was seamless and real — not a theoretical feature but something players actually used. City Crawl was an attempt to give a competitive game a narrative reason to exist, which almost no auto battler has ever bothered with. The White Spire lore — the power vacuum left by Mama Eeb's death, the distinct criminal organizations led by characters like Anessix, Hobgen, Jull, and Enno — was rich enough to support fan-written speculation guides that still exist on Steam Community today. The game was building something. It just stopped building.

The Battle Pass design was also notably non-predatory for a live-service game: cosmetics and progression, not pay-to-win mechanics inserted into a competitive format. Players noticed that too, at the time, and appreciated it.

None of that saved the game. But it explains why the people who loved it aren't ready to let it go.

The Empty Throne

Dota Underlords is still downloadable. The servers are still running. The Season 1 Battle Pass runs until 2031, in the sense that Valve extended the timer and then walked away. Between 500 and 1,000 people log in on any given day, find lobbies, and play rounds in White Spire — a fictional city that its own developers stopped visiting years ago.

The game press calls it an abandoned Valve project. The community calls it home.

Valve will probably never explain what happened. But five years of silence while players keep showing up is its own kind of answer — and the community has decided to treat it as a challenge rather than a conclusion.