Growing up, I played a lot of RuneScape and World of Warcraft. I threw myself into their worlds, but I never fell in love with the Player vs. Player systems within them. I wanted something with a unique sense of progression, where everyone started off on equal footing and every match felt winnable.

Back in 2009, I remember a YouTube advertisement showing off a new free-to-play PC game called League of Legends. To me, it was something brand new, a genre that mixed perfectly my love for RPGs and competitive, team-based games. You were able to pick from dozens of different characters with different abilities, run them down a lane or into a jungle, farm up some gold to build some items and fight the opposing team to win the match.

I was enamored with it, and spent a lot of time being awful in it. The tutorial unsuccessfully tried to teach you mechanics and even mislead you on what items were good to build on certain characters. Luckily I, and the game itself, evolved to understand what we were trying to accomplish.

League of Legends has grown exponentially over time.

It started as a mod of Warcraft 3, called Defense of the Ancients, more commonly known as DotA. Just a few years later, some of the mod’s creators would go on to help form Riot Games, where they would start work on what would become League of Legends. It became the first truly fleshed-out game of the multiplayer online battle arena, or MOBA, genre.

League of Legends hit an unprecedented growth spurt since then. At one point it advertised free beta keys to get to a miniscule 40,000 likes of Facebook (they have nearly 15 million now). Now it’s the most-played game in the world with up to 8 million players online at a time.

It’s the most popular MOBA in the U.S., and in 2019, it raked in $1.5 billion in 2019, according to SuperData.

With the success of League of Legends, the MOBA genre was thrust into the public eye, and with it came dozens of games, all trying to get a piece of a rapidly growing market.

MOBAs are lumped in with MMOs when factored into the gaming industry. In 2017, the MOBA and MMO market accounted for 25% of the $100 billion digital games market at the time, according to Statista. By the end of 2021, the sector is projected to reach $43 billion.

Just like with MMOs, the MOBA market became flooded with competition. But imitation doesn’t mean success, and the MOBAs still around today sit atop a mountain of failures.