- Dota Auto Chess creator Drodo Studio has partnered with ImbaTV and Long Mobile.
- The developer will produce an independent Auto Chess mobile game—pre-registrations for it have already broken 327K.
- ImbaTV will support Drodo Studio in building a global esports tournament system, in both Auto Chess and Dota Auto Chess.
On March 14, Drodo Studio, the Chinese game developer of Dota Auto Chess, partnered with Chinese production company ImbaTV and Long Mobile. In this deal, Drodo Studio will independently develop a mobile game version of Auto Chess. Long Mobile will provide R&D technical support, and game publishing. ImbaTV will support Drodo Studio to develop Auto Chess’ global esports endeavors and tournament promotion.
According to the announcement, the mobile game Auto Chess has already been developed and will be released soon. The pre-registration has started, with over 327K players having signed up at the time of writing. However, Drodo Studio did confirm the registration website of Auto Chess was attacked by hackers, just 10 minutes after it was announced.
Related Article: Dota Auto Chess Breaks 300K Concurrent Players, Razer Partners with SN Gaming
Dota Auto Chess is a new Dota 2 custom game mode created by Drodo Studio, styled somewhat after the game Mahjong. The game was first released on Jan. 4, and – according to Dota 2’s in-game stats – has reached more than 338K concurrent players and 6.17M subscribers at the time of writing. On Feb.22, ImbaTV and Douyu 
hosted the first Dota Auto Chess competition, which featured a ¥45K RMB ($5K USD) prize pool. In addition, there are eight companies currently applying for the trademark registration of “自走棋” (Auto Chess in English), including Tencent Games , which expects to apply for eight “自走棋” relevant trademarks.
It was reported by several outlets that the esports league for Auto Chess would feature a ¥10M ($1.49M) prize pool. It should be noted that Drodo and ImbaTV have not officially announced the amount of the total prize pool. Instead, a sentence on the Auto Chess landing page uses the Chinese term “千万奖池”, which means a prize pool of more than 10 million, and it does not state a specific currency.
The Esports Observer reached out to ImbaTV and “Toto”—one of five members of Drodo Studio—to confirm the prize pool. ImbaTV declined to comment as of the time of writing. Toto said: “We will put budgets in esports tournaments, more details will be announced soon.” He added that: “the esports tournament will not only include Auto Chess on mobile, but also Dota Auto Chess on PC.”
