League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of Newerth were all directly inspired from a Warcraft III map mod, Defense of the Ancients. Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, MOBAs, are now an entire genre.
Of the 10 most popular multiplayer games in 2023[0] seven of them owe their core mechanics to mods / flashes of brilliance from a handful of amateurs.
A more or less correct history of their origins:
- Four of the games on that list are battle royale games, which started life as a somewhat popular Minecraft mod and really took off with "Battle Royale" - a mod of "Dayz" which itself is a mod of "ARMA II". It's mods all the way down.
- Two are tactical FPS games, which owe a huge chunk of their mechanics to "Team Fortress" a Quake mod and "Counter Strike" a Half-Life mod.
- One is a MOBA, which started life as "DotA", a Warcraft III mod.
Of the other three, one is Minecraft. Created by a solo dev, and I expect its moddable nature has helped its multiplayer popularity significantly.
One is Roblox. Created by two devs, and is itself a game creation system.
The final one is Genshin Impact - something of a an outlier in terms of team size and genre origins.
I've never played the map, but Aeon of Strife from Starcraft is a custom map that has the origin of Dota mechanics... and the Protoss Photon Cannon brought about some earlier versions of Tower Defense custom maps.
A more or less correct history of their origins:
- Four of the games on that list are battle royale games, which started life as a somewhat popular Minecraft mod and really took off with "Battle Royale" - a mod of "Dayz" which itself is a mod of "ARMA II". It's mods all the way down.
- Two are tactical FPS games, which owe a huge chunk of their mechanics to "Team Fortress" a Quake mod and "Counter Strike" a Half-Life mod.
- One is a MOBA, which started life as "DotA", a Warcraft III mod.
Of the other three, one is Minecraft. Created by a solo dev, and I expect its moddable nature has helped its multiplayer popularity significantly.
One is Roblox. Created by two devs, and is itself a game creation system.
The final one is Genshin Impact - something of a an outlier in terms of team size and genre origins.
[0] https://twinfinite.net/features/most-played-games