S2 Games explodes as its roster of heroes expands

At any given time an average of 30,000 people are playing Heroes of Newerth online.

The online, multiplayer, action-based role playing game made by Kalamazoo's S2 Games just celebrated its one year anniversary. The year started out big for S2 Games and never slowed down.

Heroes of Newerth, or HoN as it is known, launched in May 2010 and in its first week of retail (including preorders) sold about 200,000 accounts. A year later, it has 420,000 unique active players. Peaks for the number of daily concurrent users online at any given time regularly hit 50,000 plus. About 40 percent of its players log-in and play daily. And 90 percent of registered HoN accounts are active players.

With that kind of demand it is easy to see why the company has had to double the number of its employees in the past year. It now has about 55 people working for it, three of them added in the past month.

"We are growing at a strong pace right now and we're always looking to add qualified people to the staff," says Laura Baker of S2 Games. Even so, the company still considers itself small and works to maintain a feeling of family within its staff, she adds.

Except the art team in California, the company's employees are all in Kalamazoo. The local staff works on game design, programming, business development, marketing, web development, and everything else needed to keep the company growing.

S2 Games celebrated the birthday of the game that pits two teams of players against each other -- the Legion and the Hellbourne -- by offering an 11-day free to play session, free goblin coins for all players and a revamped set of tool tips. The number of heroes keeps growing, which is necessary to maintain the depth of game play and strategies that make it more than a multi-player online battle arena game.

Considering this success, are there any plans to offer new titles? "Heroes of Newerth is our primary focus," Bakers says, "and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future."

Writer: Kathy Jennings
Source: Laura Baker, S2 Games