Trivia / Heroes of Newerth

• Contest Winner Cameo: Lord Salforis is named after someone who won a hero naming contest. The winner of the contest was Salforis.
• Dueling Games: When the MOBA genre was in its infancy, HoN was a competitor to League of Legends, one of the earliest adopters of the genre, and then Dota 2. One of HoN's biggest draw early on was that it was pretty much DotA Allstars on a dedicated engine and servers, but League drew in more new players by being a free-to-play game and having a lower skill floor. Once Dota 2 was released, players migrated en masse to Dota 2 by the virtue of having the name and brand recognition of the original game with a reputable company (Valve) behind it. This included even the pro teams, most notably Fnatic making the jump to Dota 2, not surprising if you consider Dota 2's record-breaking prize pools. Following that, it struggled to stay competitive with other B-list MOBAs like Smite and Heroes of the Storm due to being too rooted into DotA, and opportunities to branch out to international markets being met with failures. While ultimately HoN failed to make a big of an impact as its competitors, it still exists as a Cult Classic and was relatively successful in SEA servers, and dozens of other MOBA games have lived and died within its lifespan. It eventually died for real at 2022, but for its time, it has the record of the MOBA with the longest lifespan when others died way too earlier.
• Open Secret: IceFrog's involvement in the development of HoN was not highly publicized, especially considering the fact he's a Reclusive Artist even to this day, but it's clear he was involved simply by the fact the game was conceived as DotA with the Warcraft Serial Numbers Filed Off and included a myriad of hero ports. Allegedly, he distanced himself from S2 Games due to not being given complete creative control over gameplay design and balance and was then picked up by Valve, which led to the creation of Dota 2. Valve then attempted to file a cease-and-desist against S2 Games to remove the DotA ports from the game, but was allowed to keep them in the game due to the fact IceFrog effectively gave them permission to use those heroes in the game.