Spacetime Studios wants to bring MOBAs to smartphones

How do you take the fun, addictive, and lucrative League of Legends formula and make it work on a smartphone? Furthermore, can you make it intriguing enough for e-sport veterans — possibly as an e-sport itself? That’s the all-but-impossible challenge that developer Spacetime Studios has given itself with Call of Champions, which will make its public debut this week at SXSW. It’s a streamlined multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game designed to be played in five-minute-or-less spurts, and while it may seem casual in scope, the developer has also made this with professional gamers in mind. The MOBA genre, dominated by multimillion dollar ventures like League of Legends and Dota 2, pits two teams against one another across multiple pathways of combat. Each player controls a single character that gets more powerful as you kill enemies, destroy checkpoint towers, and defeat waves of computer-controlled henchmen (or “creeps”) that each team’s home base sends out on a regular basis. The goal is to reach the enemy base through at least one of the three lanes and destroy it.