The Most Popular Online Game Genres in 2023

The world of online gaming is fast moving, with many novel innovations and exciting franchises coming along to shake things up. Now, with the rise in popularity of esports, more people are opting to play and compete online than ever before.

This raises the question though, of what the most popular online game types are today. If you’re casting about, trying to arrive at a conclusion to this quandary, then look no further.

MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas)

The MOBA has an interesting history, as it started life as a mod of the popular Real Time Strategy game exemplified by StarCraft, Red Alert, Age of Empires and Warcraft. MOBAs were effectively the result of attempting to forge the RTS format into a compelling multiplayer game.

To this end, maps became standardized and balanced ‘arenas’, and there came a growing emphasis on the use and combination of specific hero or champion characters by team members. The end result is a bombastic and action packed game type that has a strong cerebral element – so much so that it has been occasionally likened to chess.

More accurately one could relate its tight team-play, emphasis on tactics, and range of player modes to the very best of the sport of gridiron football. This, perhaps, helps explain why it has proven so incredibly popular, both as a spectator spectacle, and as a game to play.

The most popular MOBAs today are also the most successful esports – Dota 2 and League of Legends. Each places a unique emphasis on this genre’s many facets, but the core gameplay experience that makes this genre so compelling, is common to both.

MMORPGs

The MMORPG – short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game – occupies a special place in online gaming history, being as it was the first major successful example of this innovation.

The idea was simple – take the thrill of an RPG game, and place it in a large online world populated by other players. Suddenly gamers could team up, form quest parties and tackle dungeons, or battle it out against one another in Player vs. Player (PvP) matches.

Early examples of the genre, like EverQuest and RuneScape, served as a powerful proof of concept for this game mode, but it was Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, which released in November of 2004, that brought the genre mainstream appeal.

WoW had millions of players in its early years – something never achieved before in a game, and it still remains popular today. It has spawned many successors and imitators, from Guild Wars to The Elder Scrolls Online and Age of Conan.

The contiguous digital worlds of these games made them the perfect staging point for a range of diversions, in-game activities, social events and even mini-games. Some RPG minigames emulated the immensely popular format of online slots, and served as a first point of interaction with this legacy game-mode.

So much so it’s arguable that leading platforms such as Vegasslotsonline UK, which offers thousands of unique titles in this genre, would not have established itself as a go-to resource for welcome bonuses and sign-up offers for one-armed bandits were it not for the success of titles like WoW.

Battle Royale

The battle royale genre has taken the world of online gaming by storm by successfully offering all the thrills of an MMO (massively multiplayer online) game, with the tactical gunplay of an FPS.

Battle royales are named after the 2001 Japanese film of which they share a premise. That premise is that players are left on a large map – often an island – and must battle it out until only one player, or team, remains. Battle royales typically feature 100 players in a match, but some include 150 or more.

The first major battle royale was PUBG, and this game remains among the best and most widely played today. Another incredibly popular battle royale is Epic Games’ Fortnite, which combines the last-man-standing objective with a fun cartoonish aesthetic, and novel fort-building mechanics.

More recently, major studios and franchises have sought to get in on the action, from Square Enix’s now cancelled FFVII: The First Soldier, to Microsoft’s well publicized forthcoming Halo battle royale.

Without a doubt the most popular of this Triple A battle royales is Activision-Blizzard’s Call of Duty Warzone I & II. These games take all the brilliance of the mainline CoD series, and serve it up as a free-to-play, massive battle game.