A few days ago, I accidently googled Moba and was somewhat surprised about the search results. So, I took the time to go through the result. Actually, I even checked the 2nd and 3rd result pages – which is apparently very uncommon.

Besides this community and the Moba company websites, I found the Museum of Bad Art, which presents art too bad to be ignored. If you have a few minutes to spare, I think it is worthwhile to have a look on their website with very interesting paintings.

However, the most search results I got, have been around Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas. This peaked my interest even further. As I figured out, Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas are a relatively young online game genre. In a nutshell, teams of usually 3 or 5 players play against each other and try to destroy the other team’s base (the light colored quarter circles in the picture; to claim victory the blue & red corner structures need to be destroyed).

Map of MOBA by Raizin, SVG rework by Sameboat. - Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

To make it a little bit more interesting a base is protected by towers (the red & blue dots), which attack any enemy. Besides the (human) players, so called minions are constantly generated at the team base. These minions are usually much less powerful than the human players and travel only across predefined lanes (the yellow lanes) and try to attack the enemy (players, minions, towers, base). The in-between area of the lanes is called the jungle. Usually un-allied monsters live in the jungle.

By destroying these monster or enemy minions, players, towers players can gain experience, money or healing, etc. which allows then to improve the game character and proceed. A more thorough explanation about the gameplay can be found here.

In general, this genre has become a large industry with 28 million people per day actively playing MOBA games (in May 2015). Quite some players take this game very seriously and there have been discussions about bad manners (especially against newbies and weak players) in the players’ community.

Actually, there is World Championship tournament for League of Legends, a very famous game in this genre. The championship was held for the 4th time this October and the winning team got US$ 1 million. The players are professionals and make a living based on the games (They earn between € 5,000 – 8,000 + prize money and sponsoring contracts).

So, you might wonder what this has to do with this MOBA Community, the company MOBA or our industries in general. Actually, I think quite a few things:

• If you have kids and start talking about the MOBA Community, you might get an idea why they stare so surprised at you.
• Almost all of these games are based on some kind of Science Fiction or Fantasy. Imagine a game with a construction or waste disposal setting, I could see this as a very nice extension to this community.
• From all I know, everyone in the community and everyone within (the company) MOBA have very good manners and yes, we take our business serious as well.
• And besides all these aspects, most games in this genre have a very interesting business model. It starts free, but as soon as you are involved, you often have to pay for additional features for your game character. As computer games and especially online games have been in the forefront of new business models in the last decade or so, I think it is worthwhile to keep an eye on MOBAs.

Let me know, do I missed any other MOBA meaning or can we learn anything else from this game genre?