After 12 Years, Heroes of Newerth Shuts Down For Good
The game's service went offline on June 20.
Heroes of Newerth (HoN), the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game originally developed by S2 Games, has ceased operations yesterday (June 20).
In a Facebook post late last year, the HoN team announced the impending closure of the game and thanked fans for making it one of the most popular MOBA games in history.
"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.
"We, the Heroes of Newerth Team, would like to thank our players for all the support we’ve been receiving all this time," the announcement read.
HoN was derived from the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne custom map Defense of the Ancients but with vast improvements in graphics and gameplay.
The game was released on May 12, 2010, and re-released as a free-to-play game on July 29, 2011. When the game became free to play, it had accumulated over 526,000 paid accounts with 460,000 unique players.
The number of concurrent players online initially increased over time, peaking at 150,000 as of May 2013. In mid-2013, Heroes of Newerth was the third most played game in internet cafés in the Philippines.
However, amid dwindling popularity in the face of competition against the likes of other MOBA titles like Dota 2, Heroes of Newerth development duties were passed to Frostburn Studios in 2015, with the development team moving over to the new company.
Members of the MOBA community and professional esports organisations paid tribute to HoN yesterday. Team OG's Twitter thanked HoN for bringing two-time The International Dota 2 champion Johan "N0tail" Sundstein into the esports scene.
Sundstein began his professional esports career in HoN and won several championships with Fnatic before transitioning to Dota 2.
RIP HoN 🥲
thanks for bringing this little guy in esports pic.twitter.com/Thhz6heXOJ — OG (@OGesports) June 20, 2022
Team Secret, meanwhile, bade farewell to HoN in a short yet poignant post that read: "Today is the day. Farewell, Heroes of Newerth".
Today is the day.
Farewell Heroes of Newerth 🙏 pic.twitter.com/yGy9LHFlWU — Team Secret (@teamsecret) June 20, 2022
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