. In February 2012, game developer veterans from
Rockstar,
Riot,
Blizzard, and
Insomniac founded Super Evil Megacorp in
San Mateo, California to make a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game for tablet devices, and thus began development on their first game,
Vainglory.
Apple chose the game to demonstrate the graphics capabilities of their
iPhone 6 and
Metal graphics
API at the iPhone 6's announcement event. The game was soft-launched for six months prior to this September 2014 event, On March 5, 2015, at the
Game Developers Conference 2015, Super Evil Megacorp announced that
Vainglory would be getting an
Android version. After undergoing a closed beta, the game was fully released on July 2, 2015, on the
Google Play Store. Vainglory's artwork was produced by a team directed by Carlo "Chainsaw" Arellano. Players are also invited to guide the development of Vainglory by interacting with the developers through live streams on
Twitch. Update 2.8 (September 2017) added Keyboard and Mouse support in addition to Samsung's partnership with SEMC for Samsung DeX, a docking station for Samsung S8/S8+/Note 8 to connect listed device to a PC. Super Evil Megacorp announced in early 2017 that a 5V5 mode was under development. The mode was released on February 13, 2018. A desktop version was released on
Steam for PC and Mac users on February 13, 2019. It has mappable keys and similar mechanics to other desktop MOBA games like
League of Legends. Players using the PC and Mac client can compete in matches against mobile users as well as fellow desktop players, making it a cross-platform game. A spin-off game Vainglory All Stars was developed by Bazooka Tango in 2020. On April 1, 2020, it was announced that Rogue Games (formerly both temporary publisher and developer of the game) would no longer continue development of
Vainglory and intended to shut down the game. This caused
NetEase (the publisher of
Vainglory in China) to lose all faith in the project and determine to shut down the game in China as well. As a result, SEMC announced that
Vainglory servers would be transferred to the community, removing expensive servers with player data and making the game "client authoritative". This means there will be no future centralized game updates as well as a reduction in services such as party play, the friends list, leaderboards, and in game chat. This also brings other opportunities such as community organized balance adjustments, community built and run APIs, and long term stability of servers. However, as of March 6, 2023, the software for community servers has still been awaited by the dwindling community. Despite this, SEMC has continued to run servers, but with the lack of previously mentioned features. However, since the release of Catalyst Black on May 25, 2022, a sole developer, Loquori, has closely worked with the community to bring updates and patches. In January, the first potential patch list in almost 2 years (the latest version of Vainglory, 4.13 was released on March 14, 2020) was proposed by the community. On April 30, 2020, Super Evil Megacorp revealed their next project after Vainglory,
Catalyst Black — a new cross-platform battleground shooter. == Reception ==