Dota Auto Chess map has more than 4m subscribers

Those who were not playing Metro: Exodus or Far Cry New Dawn last week (we're definitely not even talking about not watching our Valentine Madness tournament because if you haven't seen it — shame on you) could have tried the Dota Auto Chess custom map in Dota 2. The game's great, isn't it? Well, people all over the world think so, as the map's online has hit 300.000 players. Moreover, the map's total live-players count grew up from 100.000 to 300.000 in one month. During this time, the number of subscribers has also increased almost 2 times: from 2.5 million to 4 million people. The thing is, the most share of this map's popularity was brought by Chinese users. But it is still very popular in America, Europe and CIS — there are even specific tournaments and the map's top-rating on Twitch got 62.000 viewers at once. 

Also, this month was Dota 2's highest for a year and a half — more than 930k people played the game at a time. Do the maths — Dota Auto Chess has 1/3 of the whole game's audience. Also, Dota 2 now has more than 11.5m unique users. 

According to the creator of this custom map, he drew inspiration from the classic Chinese Mahjong game. Maybe, that's why it's so popular in China.

If someone told us that so many people would play our map, I would consider this person crazy.

Fortune is quite a funny thing. You can develop a worldwide-known game from a custom map in WarCraft 3, and then another game come out on top from your in-game custom map. Life cycle at its best. Somebody, ask Garry Kasparov what he thinks of the game!