Summer trends in gaming like Pokémon GO or Ark Survival Evolved have always been something that our author Schuhmann has observed from a distance. But in 2019, he is right in the middle of the trend frenzy and plays the latest hit game Teamfight Tactics every day. He is fully in the summer hype – and does so without spending a dime.
This is why summers in gaming are so strange: Since we started the site MeinMMO and I have been following the online gaming market, I’ve noticed how odd each summer is. The other seasons are always the same:
- In spring, the first release window comes, with AAA titles that are not quite mainstream but from which developers have high expectations – sometimes a The Division, sometimes a Monster Hunter World
- In autumn, the big release window opens with the annual blockbuster titles, featuring FIFA, Call of Duty, Destiny, and the major new releases of a year like Red Dead Redemption 2
- The winter is usually quiet; players stick to what was new in autumn. Expansions and DLCs come out.
- But summer is always somehow different
Every summer, a gaming hit comes out of nowhere
What’s going on in summer? Usually, in early summer of a year, it’s so quiet that it feels like the summer hole reaches to the earth’s core and nothing will ever happen again. Gaming sites report about TV series like Game of Thrones or cats throwing up in streamers’ fans.
But then something happens that no one anticipated. A hype erupts:
In 2015, “Jurassic World” hit theaters and suddenly the survival game “Ark Survival Evolved” became the big thing on Steam, which many PC gamers talked about. A chaotic indie studio created a massive hit with dinosaurs and a complex game system.
In 2016, Pokémon GO emerged out of nowhere and drove everyone crazy. Television channels and newspapers suddenly reported about the game that utilized augmented reality, a blend of the real world and a video game.
Back then, it seemed like Pokémon GO could change the world and how gaming is perceived as a whole.
In 2017, there was actually nothing happening in gaming. PUBG had started its triumph in spring. Until suddenly Fortnite “Save the World”, then still a PvE title, appeared. This was a long-lost game from a studio that hardly anyone remembered anymore.
For a few weeks, Fortnite “Save the World” was a major topic until it quickly faded. It was only later in autumn that Epic started its mission to conquer the world, which continues to this day.
The summer of 2018 was somewhat different, as Fortnite Battle Royale completely dominated online gaming, even though it had already been on the market for three-quarters of a year. But even here there were small trends: With SCUM, a strange hardcore game came to prominence on Steam for a short time, that too was a surprise.
This is how summers went for me: I had little to do with all these summer trends. Well, I enjoyed playing Fortnite “Save the World” in 2017, but that was a matter of a few weeks until the game got too grindy for me with its Asian mobile ideas.
Otherwise, summers and their gaming hypes always passed me by.
The summer trend in gaming 2019 is totally niche and I love it
This is the trend in 2019: The summer of 2019 clearly belongs to the “auto-battlers” in online gaming. These are strategy games where players buy heroes, place them on the battlefield, and they fight against each other without the player’s intervention.
The trend has been discovered by MOBAs and they are applying this formula to their selection of heroes.
What seems completely absurd and lame to someone who doesn’t know it, gives me the total gaming kick this summer.
I haven’t played and sweat this much in the last few weeks. I am in the summer gaming hype.
I love the gaming summer of 2019
This is how I feel about auto-battlers: I only caught the trend out of the corner of my eye when it started with Dota Auto Chess. That was far away – some mod from a game I never played. I tried to ignore it. To me, it sounded somewhat lame: auto-battler.
Then it became more accessible and came out as a free-to-play title on Steam. There, an auto-battler shot up the charts immediately. I became curious – I had to check it out.
I then jumped into Dota Underlords for a weekend. I just wanted to take a look, but I ended up playing from Friday evening until Monday morning.
Ultimately, I became completely hooked on Teamfight Tactics, the LoL auto chess, that came out shortly after. I know the heroes and the items from my time when I regularly played League of Legends.
Teamfight Tactics is brief, intense, and tactical.
Each round is a bit different – and the strategy I won with half an hour ago can fail badly the next time because the items and heroes available mess up the plan.
I had phases where I felt like I finally understood the game, only to then perform much worse than in the previous days because I desperately wanted to play a tactic that luck simply didn’t support.
I even started with ranked matches, which I never do, and managed to reach platinum level.
I’m not super proud of it, but tracker sites tell me I currently belong to the upper “1%” of played games and I’m number 28,988 in the world. Yay!
Hundreds of hours of gaming for 0 cents
Why am I so susceptible to the trend? The auto-battlers revitalize old “strategy ideas,” pack them into a brief format, and constantly demand important decisions from the player.
As a result, after losses, one feels that with a bit more luck or different decisions, it could have gone totally differently. After victories, one feels like a tactically brilliant general.
What is particularly cool? Although I’ve probably spent over 100 hours on Dota Underlords and Teamfight Tactics in the last few weeks, I haven’t paid a cent. I haven’t even considered spending money anywhere.
For me, 2019 is the best gaming summer in a long time. For many others, it’s probably, like many trends of recent years: hardly comprehensible.
