Valve has set an Auto Battler RPG Fest for November 16–23, a week when Steam pushes one genre to the front of the store. If auto battlers have sat on your wishlist untouched, here is an excuse. First comes what the genre asks of you, then where it came from.
What an Auto Battler Asks of You
Picture chess where you never touch a piece once the fight starts. You prepare, press go, and watch your little army win or fall apart without you. Coaching from the stands, basically, minus the headset. The luck lives in a shop, where you pay to reroll and promise yourself the next one will be the good one.
Sound familiar? Anyone who has spent an evening on SlotOnline Studio knows that itch, but in an auto battler a plan has to back up the luck. Treat a bad roll as a puzzle, not an insult. Around that shop, every round follows the same loop, and that loop is the whole genre:
- A shop offers a random handful of units, and you spend your gold on them.
- Placement comes next, with tanks up front and fragile damage dealers behind them.
- The fight itself, with zero input from you.
- Gold and damage get tallied, and the shop reopens.
How a Dota Mod Turned Into a Genre
It started on January 4, 2019. Drodo Studio, an outside team, added a custom mode called Dota Auto Chess to the arcade section of Dota 2, and by the end of March players had downloaded it more than seven million times. Seven million, for a fan-made mode. Hard to argue with that.
Riot Games announced Teamfight Tactics on June 10 and admitted that Dota Auto Chess was very often played in its own office. The mode went live inside League of Legends later that month, and Valve shipped Dota Underlords in June too. By September, reports put Teamfight Tactics past 33 million monthly players, though a figure that tidy deserves a raised eyebrow.
The Bag Version That Sold 640,000 Copies
Auto battlers soon stopped needing a board. On March 8, 2024, PlayWithFurcifer, a two-person German studio, put Backpack Battles into Steam early access. Your army is your inventory there, and you win by packing the bag well. The pair had been busy with a different game and treated this one as a side project.
Then the numbers arrived. Backpack Battles sold 100,000 copies in under two days and 640,000 in its first month, according to figures the studio and its publisher shared. Forty-eight percent of those sales came from China, helped by early Chinese, Japanese and Korean translations. A run stretches up to 18 rounds, but some battles end in 10–20 seconds, so one round barely interrupts your coffee.
How to Spend the Fest Week
Mark the dates first. Valve lists the fest for November 16–23, with Black Friday highlights later in November and the Winter Sale starting December 17. The schedule gives dates, not games, so any lineup floating around before the opening is a guess.
Teamfight Tactics works as a free warm-up, since it lives inside the League of Legends client and has a phone version too. Riot earns its money from cosmetics and season passes, so the warm-up itself costs nothing. Once the fest opens, grab a few demos and put each one through a short test:
- Does losing the first run teach you something, or just annoy you?
- Round length, because a slow shop phase ruins everything else.
- How much a reroll costs, and how many units the shop shows you.
- Synergies that change your plan instead of padding the same units.
Run each demo three times before judging it, because a first run mostly teaches you where the buttons are. Three is a rule of thumb, nothing scientific. Pick one game, not five. Wishlist whatever stuck and let the Winter Sale do the rest.