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Heroes of Newerth will finally be closed in 2022. The game’s developers announced this on the official social networks. The online game has been falling for many years and the interest of the community in HoN has long cooled, and content updates for the game are not coming out since 2019. The creators will be shutting down the game gradually.
Already on December 13, the developers are turning off the ability to buy gold coins. And since the beginning of the new year, no one will be able to create new accounts in the world of HoN.
Dear Heroes of Newerth (HoN) players,Heroes of Newerth (HoN) has been in service for a long time. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to everyone who has been on this journey, created special memories together with us, moved HoN forward, and created a lot of unforgettable stories for HoN, as well as making Heroes of Newerth become one of the most popular MOBA games in history.The Heroes of Newerth team regrets to announce that Heroes of Newerth’s service will officially come to an end on June 20, 2022.We, the Heroes of Newerth Team, would like to thank our players for all the support we’ve been receiving all this time. Please find the schedule and details of key dates for everyone below:December 13, 2021– Gold Coins will no longer be purchasable at 9am Eastern Time (EST, GMT -5).December 31, 2021– New accounts can no longer be created.June 20, 2022– Close down Heroes of Newerth’s services, and gradually close down other official communication platforms for Heroes of Newerth over time.Last but not least, even though the journey of HoN or Heroes of Newerth has come to an end, we believe that all the valuable memories of our players through all these years will never fade away.
On June 20, 2022, the game’s servers will be shut down forever on all official platforms, and the developers will no longer even communicate with the community.
We will tell why Heroes of Newerth is a truly epochal game and remember how it began as one of the first MOBA games in its own right. We will also recall the close ties between HoN and Dota 2 and their esports legacy.
How it all started
The first informal news about Heroes of Newerth from S2Games developers appeared in July 2008. An Internet user found a website that showed the logo of the game’s publisher S2 Games along with the HoN logo. Then the developer Mark DeFrost first announced the release of a full-fledged game. Notably, Mark immediately indicated that it would not be Savage 3, as many had expected. It was something special. The MOBA game market was already starting to develop. By that point, Dota Allstars, being designed by IceFrog, was no longer seen by the community as just a custom map to Warcraft 3. However, Dota was still not a full-fledged independent game. At the dawn of Dota’s popularity, developers from S2 Games knew for sure that MOBA genre was the future of competitive online games. The developers relied entirely on the base that the very map from Warcraft 3 called Defendence of The Ancients gave them. They made no secret of the fact that they were developing a game that would be an improved version of Dota. Moreover, in the beginning almost all the heroes, skills, and items were copied from the original Dota. But HoN featured better graphics, its own world based on the original lore, and improved mechanics that good old Warcraft could not implement.
As early as August 22, 2009, players could pre-order the new game Heroes of Newerth, and they began to test the new game. Of course, some were put off by the price. The player had to pay as much as $30 for the new game. The game’s official release was May 12, 2010. Then the community was already talking about the re-release of the classic Dota and the release of the second part as a stand-alone game. By the way, the development of Dota 2 also began in 2009, but the release of Dota 2 and the announcement of The International was still far away.
IceFrog and Heroes of Newerth
It is reported that the leading game designer, ideologist, and creator of Dota – IceFrog collaborated with S2 Games, engaged in consultations. Other sources say that IceFrog was fully involved in the development of HoN. His participation in the development of HoN’s game design was kept secret.
By the way, IceFrog still maintains anonymity, despite frequent attempts to reveal his identity. There is information on the Internet posted on a forum, allegedly by an employee of Valve. The anonymous person claimed that IceFrog’s real name was Abdul Ismail.
A little later, another anonymous source confirmed this, referring to the Blizzard Entertainment and Valve lawsuit documents. These documents also said that IceFrog was involved in the development of HoN.
Midas – the hero from HoN
Whether or not to believe this information is up to everyone. Of course, rumors cannot be a reliable source of information. However, the striking similarities between Dota and Heroes of Newerth are impossible not to notice. If this information is accurate, it turns out that S2 Games has provided IceFrog a platform for experimentation, which he fully realized by creating Dota 2. It seems, indeed, that he has worked out various mechanics and solutions in HoN.
Heroes of Newerth Esports Legacy
Heroes of Newerth and Dota 2 are connected for a reason. Many people have forgotten by now, but HoN also once had its own esports scene. For example, in 2016, there was a rather large HoN Tour tournament for that time. The tournament final took place offline in Thailand, and the prize pool was $140,000. Of course, the Dota 2 prize pools was already breaking previously unimaginable records. That’s why many professional players switched from HoN to Dota 2. The scale of Dota tournaments at the time was staggering while HoN was slowly dying.
The decision to make the game free-to-play 5 years ago doesn’t seem to have impacted player attrition in that time. Heroes of Newerth just didn’t evolve.
But the professional HoN gave us more than just notable players. This game nurtured true legends – TI champions.
For example, N0tail started playing HoN when he was only 15 years old. At the time, he was one of the youngest professional players in HoN and played mid lane.
Fnatic EU Dota 2 roster consists of HoN pro players: H4nn1, Fly, N0tail, Era, Trixi
In HoN, Johan met his friend Tal “Fly” Aizik. They played for a team were soon taken under the wing of Fnatic, one of the oldest esports organizations in Europe. When N0tail and Fly went their separate ways, they met face to face at The International 8. Their handshake was one of the most dramatic moments of the entire tournament.
The dramatic handshake of N0tail and Fly at TI8 before their game
Another legendary player that HoN gave us is PPD. Before becoming The International 2015 champion and getting into Dota 2 in general, Peter was a solid HoN player. He played Heroes of Newerth professionally until 2013 and had a lot of success with Complexity Gaming. By the way, that’s where he met the Freedman brothers, Kyle and Zakari.
Yes, the Freedmans were also professional HoN players. And it was then that the beginnings of conflict and mutual antipathy between Kyle and Peter arose. Dager was ranked high in tournaments until he switched to Dota 2. Peter was runner-up at the DreamHoN tournament in 2012 and 2013 with Complexity.
Complexity Gaming HoN roster: Chessie, Demon, ppd and Tralfamadore are holding MoonMeander
The Blomdin brothers, better known as Limmp and Chessie were also professional Heroes of Newerth players before joining Dota 2. In interviews and videos about themselves, Rasmus and Linus often talked about going to tournaments at a very young age.
The Sunset
What caused the decline of Heroes of Newerth? This is the point where gaming analysts disagree. Many say that the high price at the beginning, and its availability of the cost in general, significantly affected the influx of new players to the game. This can even be seen by the number of players from Eastern Europe, from countries such as Ukraine or Russia, for example. The ability to pay is much lower than in the US or Western Europe, and gamers there preferred to play outdated Dota. Yes, the first Dota did not have high-quality graphics and became obsolete even by 2010, but players were simply not ready to pay for the same candy in a prettier wrapper.
In 2015 it was already clear that the game was stagnating. The spectacular TI5, which set the world record for the prize fund in esports – over $18 million, made everything worse. While HoN stagnated and continued to stand still, Dota was growing. Even with a lot of problems, other games have come a long way. New MOBAs like League of Legends and Heroes Of The Storm already appeared. People started to forget about Heroes of Newerth.
In 2017, the game developers just didn’t know what to do with it. The game became maximally unprofitable, and the studio bosses stopped paying any attention to it at all. In 2019, the game stopped its microtransaction processes. This sad state can be compared to a nearly dead patient being kept on a ventilator for formal life support. Everyone knows, however, that the outcome is foregone and that a sad end awaits him.
The studio that owns HoN has made the willful decision to end the game completely in 2022. However, just like in the movies, once one saga ends, we can always see a cameo by the main character in other movies in this universe.
Cameo
In 2020, there were rumors that Valve might buy the studio that developed HoN along with the project and do a merger with Dota 2. These rumors were indirectly confirmed by the fact that the new Dota 2 characters adopted several mechanics from HoN.
Also, in 2020, data miners found files saying that Dota 2 has a character under the test name Puppet Master. It is the same character that existed in the Heroes of Newerth universe. This news began to spread around the Internet, and all players were eagerly awaiting the release of this hero. However, Valve did not give such pleasure to fans and instead went their own way, creating brand new heroes.
Perhaps someday, we’ll see that same HoN cameo already in Dota 2, and the developers finally wrapped up the project for a reason. In any case, the echoes of this game will be in the air for all fans of the MOBA genre.