What Moonton's Firesale Tells Us About Squad RPG's Collapse
ByteDance bought Moonton in 2021 for about $4 billion, and is now shopping the developer to Savvy Games Group. The problem is not Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which is still the no. 3 mobile MOBA in the world and throws off cash. The problem is the second leg of the portfolio: squad RPG.
Moonton's RPG bet rests on four games: Mobile Legends: Adventure, Watcher of Realms, One Punch Man, and the seemingly (?!) abandoned Acecraft experiment of turning a Western Steam hit (Cuphead) into a live service. Acecraft never cleared the runway! Watcher of Realms has seen monthly revenue sag since 2024, while Mobile Legends: Adventure (MLA) went from $27M in 2023 to $16M in 2024 to $6M this year. Y-I-K-E-S.
I say this as someone who has spent $5,000 in MLA. Few games have built a more progressive runway than MLA, but it's also a clear demonstration of why squad RPG is out of new ideas. A SINGLE hero has four different progression verticals and two shared ones: Soul Vessels (2 slots), Orlay Cards (9 slots), Glory Gems (8 slots), the Wheel of Time Nexus (four currencies), shared Artifacts and Companions (one each per team).
In practice, it all collapses into a single scalar: power score, but only as a function of attack, health, defense, penetration, or damage reduction. MLA shows how far you can stretch a stat economy without ever solving the underlying design question: how do squad RPGs create fun problems for players to solve instead of the next thingamajig that adds +100 attack.
The current answer has been to build 4x mechanics, which add much stronger coop-PvP gameplay than squad RPG ever has. We saw early streaks of this in, say, Marvel Strike Force's Alliance War, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes' Territory Wars, or Walking Dead RTS's Faction Wars. Of course, the answer here is much more literal, which is to shove a squad RPG inside of a 4X game, which is precisely what White Out Survival and Tile Survive have done.
My great hope was that DC Dark Legion would take off, which is a much more moderate integration of 4x mechanics into a squad RPG core. Unfortunately, the game has fallen off a cliff and looks like it'll be shut down within the next six months.
There's an emerging second answer that has been around for over a decade. With the release and success of Where the Wind Meets, there might be a real opportunity for power resets to maintain squad RPG without it becoming 4x.
In seasonal reset economies like Diablo, FIFA Ultimate Team, and Tarkov, gear is lost, and players earn it back over the course of a season. There are numerous downsides to this model, the most obvious one being that time invested now does not provide long-run benefits. But the design flexibility and the never-ending chase also offer players a new opportunity to enter the funnel without facing a daunting progression system built over ten years.