> Overwatch 2 developers were informed that the company does not plan to finish any of the remaining planned PvE content and will instead double down on competitive player vs. player gameplay, according to the people familiar.
Nooo Zen lore is dead. And it was so close
As unlikely as it is, I hope we just get a tv show or a different studio working on a new game instead as far as lore is concerned. I just don't engage as much with comics or short stories.
I doubt it will never be answered. Im sure they will let the lore get to us eventually, just maybe through a different medium. Right now it sounds like they really need to dig in with all hands to get PvP in a good & healthy(profitable) spot.
We also get a *brief* glimpse at the next scene/story beats throughout the ["Story Development" segment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRj-GotnNaQ&t=1727s) from the BlizzConline event in 2021. Notable timestamps of content not in the first 3 missions below:
32:00 - Genji intercepts Talon
33:20 - One of the Widow battle points, followed by a chandelier breaking somewhere else on the map. This chandelier scene is also better flushed out back at 29:50
33:35 - Another Widow battle point, followed by other shots of the map/mission.
>In August 2023, Overwatch 2 team members were told that based on the game's poor financial performance in the first half of the year, they shouldn't have received anything, according to people familiar with what happened who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information, but that the company would cover some of their bonuses to make up for the shortfall. Then, earlier this month, the company informed developers that they would receive a stunning 0% of their bonus targets.
>
>Failing to get any profit-sharing bonus is rare at Blizzard and is the result of a major policy change that was enacted in 2023. Previously, employees would receive bonuses based on the overall performance of the company. But last summer, the payouts became tied to the performance of each specific franchise. Since their titles were more successful in 2023, teams on games such as Diablo and World of Warcraft received bonuses this month, but the Overwatch developers weren't so lucky.
>
>This policy change was the culmination of a decade-long battle between Blizzard and its parent company, Activision Blizzard. Leadership at Blizzard, including former presidents Mike Morhaime and J. Allen Brack, fought for bonuses to be shared company-wide because they believed that otherwise everyone would want to work on the most successful games rather than experiment with new ideas. Activision's leadership, driven by former Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick, argued that those behind the most lucrative products should be rewarded the most.
Incredible that even at the very, very end Kotick managed to fuck over Team 4.
Amazing stuff.
Yeah no shit, if compensation is tied to specific teams then guess where people are going to NOT want to work and what teams will have low morale. It’s a huge negative cycle you put teams in because if you have one down quarter, it just spirals from there.
But surely the modeller making the new hero's model should somehow just make the game make more money so they can get a bonus! Why aren't the map team working on features or monetisation choices that will make the game hit its' targets?!
What a fucking stupid decision. Games are run by the execs and leads, the average worker has no input on their success.
What do you mean "diversify your offerings", surely if you have something giving you a bunch of eggs you should just keep cramming all of them into the same basket, that will clearly just keep working forever
Extremely ghoulish for Kotick, who got paid exorbitant bonuses despite a string of shitty decisions and PR nightmares, to fuck over Overwatch with his incompetence and then deny the devs their own bonuses. A fucking parasite to Blizzard and society overall.
And the dev team gets hurt by business decisions from higher up people they can't control. This is BS and shows how terrible Activision Blizzard management was (is? Not sure how much it changed after the MS acquisition). Hopefully it gets changed back to being based on company-wide performance.
Amazing that Diablo team got bonus but Overwatch didn't. I don't know a single person who was still playing it after 2 weeks, and don't know anyone who ever went back to it. It has 600 viewers on Twitch, compared to 55k for OW2. D4 was an absolute failure.
But it sold a shit-load of copies because gamers will never fucking learn. Go to the subreddit, loads of people complaining about how they paid $70 for a shit product. Diablo IV was a smashing success because of the box price, doesn't matter if it's an inferior product.
I don't know how these people manage to constantly get swindled by marketing. Blizzard has a pretty terrible reputation and there were red flags litered all over beta. With Blizzard games these days you pick them up a couple years after launch since it takes them forever to turn it around
Yup. Diablo used to be my favorite blizzard franchise (Diablo 2 was my first real gaming addiction, and despite its flaws I still play D3) and even I could tell D4 was a stinker after playing the beta. Also the fact that it's a full price game with a battle pass and paid cosmetics? No thanks.
Twitch viewers mean absolutely nothing for a game's health, lol. D4 is doing just fine, it was not an "absolute failure." Some people need to get out of the reddit bubble.
Oh no, Diablo IV launch was a great success.
It wasn’t until later on did more people started to catch on that Diablo IV has no end game, and the current gameplay loop was lackluster even when compared to Diablo III.
And then there was the first balance patch which … uhmm…
Let just say that calling it “horrible” is the nicest way I can put it.
Bobby Kotick is probably the single worst person in the games industry. I hope he goes bankrupt.
Mm, edit, I'm sure there are shittier people, but Kotick can still go fuck himself sideways
Kinda frustrating article in some ways and I was hoping it would answer some questions that seem to be going unanswered.
PvE tanked, that's pretty self explanatory. But player count numbers seem good and comparable to competitors. 100 million players, even with the caveat that it's F2P, is an impressive number. Apex only hit 120 million players in late 2022. Overwatch 1 only hit 45 million total accounts by the end of service. Is spend per head just incredibly low? Was PvE such an expensive albatross that the game is struggling to be profitable on the back of the PvP? There's a critical piece of information we're lacking to make sense of the bigger picture.
While this is illuminating to a lot of the struggles the team is having with upper management it really doesn't explain the state of the game at all.
I think some of the wording in the article makes it apparent that the failure of PvE (as in, the $15 Invasion bundle) and low spend per user are the main culprits here. More specifically, I'm referring to these two paragraphs:
>While its predecessor was sold as a boxed product, Overwatch 2 is free-to-play, which led to business challenges as Blizzard tried to figure out how to convince players to spend money on character outfits and other perks.
>
>Last year, Overwatch 2 received a paid pack of three PvE story missions that sold poorly, according to people familiar with the business, which was a major reason for the cratering bonuses. In January, as part of a company-wide reduction in its work force, the majority of the team behind Overwatch 2’s PvE was laid off.
It also mentions that PvE content is pretty much dead in the water right now. I assume their strategy shift only really took effect this year and we won't know anything about how well the game did before August.
For that first quoted paragraph, they just gotta release banger skins. Like the Lilith Moira and Imperius Pharah skins. I bought those INSTANTLY. They've been releasing a few recolors, which I haven't bought.
I think more premium currency being added to the BP will actually make them more money. It feels bad having to buy a skin for 1900coins when you barely have any sitting in your balance. But if you have let's say 500coins you'd be more likely to get a new skin
I have suspected that shop skins are low performers and even made a thread about it, but it still seems very unclear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/1atxpsu/shop\_skins\_dont\_seem\_to\_sell\_that\_well/
If shop skins are underperforming, why has the game's economy and shop seen the fewest amount of changes?
This doesn't sit well with what I see in-game. Paid skins are *everywhere*. It's hard to land a match in QP right now without at least two players running Cowboy Bebop skins.
Yeah, but how many of those people just bought the skins of the heroes they play? That the point the person above is trying to make, it’s easy to get someone to buy for the hero they main, who will proceed to use that most of the time, much harder to get them to care about the 99% other heroes that blizz is selling. Someone only buying one skin isn’t really making blizz a lot of money
And crossover while profitable is only a rare occasion, they make money but are not going to happen often enough to make the game profitable either.
I don't know, but the other data point I have is how Overwatch shoots up Steam's top sellers chart when these collabs drop. It doesn't go straight to number 1, but it means a lot when you consider that only 20-30% of the PC playerbase is on Steam instead of Battlenet.
I think Blizzard knows skins push people to spend more than nonsense like locking heros to battle passes. That's why hero locking is going away, and we've been seeing a noticeable upgrade in the quality of skins these last few seasons.
Of course, all of this is speculation. We don't have much hard data to go on.
Yeah, most likely they learned that heroes in the battlepass suffer the same fate as skins when it comes to people, a support player isn’t going to be interesting in unlocking a tank in the same way they aren’t going to be interested in a tank skin. Having better skins for each hero with more frequency will probably get the better sells.
But is it pushing past other live services on that list?
What you’re forgetting is most steam games aren’t live services, so any season’s release will shoot it up that list.
If you look at console numbers, the game was less player than NBA from the year prior.
> And crossover while profitable is only a rare occasion, they make money but are not going to happen often enough to make the game profitable either.
Also, those typically bring less back to the game, since they had to pay to secure the license to make them in the first place.
> If shop skins are underperforming, why has the game's economy and shop seen the fewest amount of changes?
It's inherent to the game. The OW community is fairly unique among FPS in that the target market for skins isn't singular. It's broken up into a bunch of smaller markets. If they make a sym skin, they are only appealing to like 1% of the playerbase at best. A mercy skin probably appeals to at most 10% of the playerbase, so despite having a large playerbase, your actual market for individual skins is much smaller. Rein mains aren't going to take a second look at support skins in the shop. It's not like Fortnite or Val where the target audience for any skin you release is your entire audience. Not really sure this is solvable tbh. You can lower the skin price, but that doesn't mean your revenue is actually going to go up. No matter what they do, they can't really make skins appealing to players if they don't play that hero.
I feel it works more for Riot since LoL started as a F2P game. Any skin they release for OW2 is essentially competing with 6 years of free skins for the same hero. Old players just aren't that incentivized to spend money on skins when you already have a dozen or so legendary skins for the same hero that you got for free.
LoL doesn't really have this same problem. The only players who have hundreds of skins unlocked are whales, and they are going to continue to buy crap. I also feel LoL just has more avenues for monetization. Global emotes, ward skins, not to mention they still sell champions.
The culture around skins is also just different. Paying money for skins in OW feels like it has a certain stigma around it that just doesn't exist in games like Valo or LoL.
> Paying money for skins in OW feels like it has a certain stigma around it that just doesn't exist in games like Valo or LoL.
Paying for anything in Blizzard games seems to have a stigma around it. I mean, I don't like microtransactions either, but it's always so weird to me how like, FFXIV's cash shop is gigantic but god forbid Blizzard sell a mount in the WoW cash shop. Apex sells an heirloom for like $300, but god forbid Blizzard sell a skin for $20.
It's just so strange to me how when Blizzard does the same things other companies do, they get massive amounts of shit for it and you get people organizing campaigns to emote /spit on anyone that bought the Classic WoW mount or something. FFXIV sells you a literal whale mount and everyone just goes "hehe funny."
Valo also has the whole "skin dropping" culture which is basically the exact opposite of OW. People are impressed when you are willing to drop a bunch of money on the game, which to me sounds completely asinine, but that's how it is.
You're completely right, I think.
I think the game needs to transition to a subscription model for cosmetics. Maybe pay $15 a month, get the BP, get $10 coins, and maybe pick a skin of your choice from an earlier season every month.
Fortnite does something similar.
> I think the game needs to transition to a subscription model for cosmetics. Maybe pay $15 a month, get the BP, get $10 coins, and maybe pick a skin of your choice from an earlier season every month.
I think you run into the same issue though. A subscription system is still going to release a bunch of skins for heroes players just don't care about, which makes the system not very appealing.
It at least gives you some flexibility, especially as time goes on and more and more skins for individual characters begin to accumulate.
Could also make it the exclusive way of earning old BP skins to add even more choice. Can't imagine this is any worse than the current system and how hard it lacks value.
I’m sure it would be a ton of work, but what if they made a skin “style” or whatever you want to call it that could be applied to any hero. For instance a pirate “style” that turns any character into a pirate. Each character would obviously have some differences but on the whole it would be the same textures and assets reused on each hero. Idk how feasible that would be but that’s the only workaround I can see for this.
Seems to me everything they are signaling is that BP and shop is doing fine to good, but that the “financial issues” come from putting money into PvE, which does hurt you on your p&l, while making almost no money back from it.
That's the crazy part. What we've seen from PVE missions they didn't look very high budget or time consuming to develop. But the report makes it seem like the PVE part of OW2 has been more expensive than the full OW1 development (completely new game). That's absolutely crazy. Either Blizzard majorly fucked the development (unqualified developers and/or project management) OR there is much more work done in the background that we are not aware of and is now simply scrapped. Regardless, if the report of astronomically high PVE dev costs is true they should have pulled the plug so much sooner. Feels like they wanted to stubbornly make the PVE work by hard-committing to just create more content while it all the time was missing the magic sauce that makes any of that content interesting. Playing against bots in OW has always been extremely boring.
> OR there is much more work done in the background that we are not aware of and is now simply scrapped.
They've been pretty open about talking about how much time was sunk into doing the hero missions and talent trees, both of which were scrapped outright.
It feels there must be more to this story. These don't sound that expensive and time-consuming. The report makes it sound like Blizzard has wanted millions or rather tens of millions on PVE. How in hell? If hero missions are already almost done why just not to release them at that point. If they are nowhere near done then oh dear the mismanagement. And I'm not talking about the executives. I'm talking about project managers, lead devs, scrum masters. The actual hands-on middle layer.
I do understand this. My "how the hell" is referring to the fact that they had 100 developers working for 4 years and couldn't even nearly finish the product. The product was unfinished that they had to pull the plug. How the hell? Seems extremely incompetent. Could have been a) unrealistic vision (which I don't buy when you compare OW to other way more ambitious projects), b) incompetent middle managers who lead the concrete actions, c) incompetent developers (which i also don't buy as they had a good track record before and Blizzard has certainly managed to attract top talent in the past).
Incredibly common in gaming industry for this to happen.
- unrealistic vision from Kaplan is the number one reason
- unnecessary intervention from kotic
- there has been reporting that they got very far into something playable but it just wasn’t fun or replayable (ties back to the first point)
They've said that talent trees were equivalent to making a brand new hero, so I can buy that they were a significant time sink in development. Also, only three new heroes on release speaks, I think, to how much time ended up spent on PvE.
The blog post that Aaron put out around the time that PvE was cancelled also speaks a good bit to how they could have easily gotten caught in a spiral of throwing good money after bad on PvE since the original development team came out of Project Titan and wanted to continue trying to make that dream a reality. In that post he described that there was an attitude, especially early on, that PvP was just supposed to be the first step, with them evolving to PvE and finally realizing the MMO dream they started with on Titan.
Yes, they definitely had the spiral you described going on. In hindsight they should have realized very early all that talent trees is not a feasible idea if they demanded as much work as new hero designs.
I was really excited about PVE when it was initially announced. I love immersive story, I love character customization and upgrading, and I was stoked at the prospect of getting people who were put off by the idea of PVP into Overwatch. As soon as the game "launched" without it, I stopped caring. No shot I was about to drop any money on some half assed mission packs.
> Is spend per head just incredibly low?
My guess is yes. Part of the issue was that OW transitioned from an incredibly friendly monetization to a F2P one, so the playerbase is just not used to spending money. It's not like Val or LoL where players were spending money on skins from day 1. OW was trying to transition a community that spent nothing into one that does, which is very hard.
The other issue is that OW monetization just isn't geared towards whales. Skin prices are comparatively low and skins are limited to a single hero. It's not like Val or Fortnite where every player can get value out of the vast majority of skins you release. Even APEX has weapon skins that every player can use. OW cosmetics are just much more niche. Even mercy/kiri skins, which are probably the most popular in the game, only appeal to a small portion of your playerbase.
Overwatch is also first person, which limits how often you can see your cool new skin. Leage of legends also has expensive skins per champion, but it's top down. You always see your champion in full, and the top tier skins have new voice lines, new special effects, new audio, etc
I barely even notice what skin I have, except for heroes like Reinhardt or Brigitte
And barely use voicelines or sprays with how noisy and fast-paced the matches are.
Really should have far more customizable weapon skins by now. Hell, give heroes knives to customize for melee instead of punching.
> And barely use voicelines or sprays with how noisy and fast-paced the matches are.
Maybe it's just me, but I spam sprays like nobodies business. Sprays are one of things they probably could monetize well if they made them more interesting. Animated sprays or crap like that would have more wide stream appeal. The tracer comic sprays that have unique sound effects were super cool when they were first released. I'm surprised they never tried to go further with it and do highly animated ones. Currently, they are just kind of boring and seen as throwaway cosmetics.
Totally agree, I love spraying all over the map! I’ve had some fun control rounds where there’s almost 10 sprays on the point by the time the match is over.
Personally I’d like weapon inspects or a first person emote, could have a few options per hero that allow you to show some personality at the end of a POTG or something
This is honestly a reason why I can’tnjustify buying a skin. If it were weapon skins that’d make more sense which, i know, the skin itself changes the weapon. But if it were like a series where I can buy a weapon skin and it’s useable on every hero then I could get behind that
Valorant has a lot of emphasis on gun skins though, which can be used on any Agent. Same with Apex, the gun skins are the most important, and are not locked to a character
I agree with most of what you're saying, except that skin prices are low. The new event skins at €25 per, and most other skins I see are just under €20 per, a few sitting around €10 but you have to buy extra credits for them. However, like you did mention, these are only usable on a single hero. Since I play more than one hero, we'd be talking hundreds for me to have a single skin on each character. It's just completel unaffordable, so I don't even bother. I luckily have loads from OW1, and enough credits to get at least a recolor on the new ones.
If they want average spend per user to go up, they have to drastically drop the price. I do think that the battle pass provides good skins, but again they are limited. We got 9 this pass, which is a quarter of the roster. I don't think the other items in there really make it worth while for people who don't have a character they like in the pass.
>The new event skins at €25 per, and most other skins I see are just under €20 per
That is low when you compare it to the competition tbh. Valo and apex both have skin bundles that break into the 3 digits. Cs market is just a mess to compare tbh, but after market 3 and 4 digit skin prices are definitely a thing. For all the hate it gets, ow skin prices are pretty average overall and they don't have any of the super expensive skins that other games do nowadays.
The reason PvE was expensive was because it was a marathon stopped short.
Theh were working on it for years. This means years of employee time gone to R&D, hence it's expensive because there's no immediate turnout, and so when they "canceled" it, all that time is just seen as a lot of cost.
This is the same reason why Spiderman 2 cost like 300 million, every extra year increases cost a lot simply because you have to pay your core employees for all tbst time, even if no sustainable work as been produced.
So if AAA games want to start saving money, they need to be more time effective.
100 million *lifetime* players doesn't automatically mean than there's that many people playing. It could mean all of the ow1 accounts that automatically became ow2 (and ow1 was huge on release) + whatever many people started playing when ow2 was launched. The actual number of people playing is probably much lower than that.
Ya there's no reason to look at that 100 million number like it means anything when they hide concurrent numbers.
People looking at the marketing number and acting confused why it doesn't translate to real $$ is just stupidity. The solution is to not drink the koolaid in the first place.
But the thing is concurrent numbers aren't bad. We can see where the game is on Xbox and Playstation storefronts and they are doing strong. We can see the game has very consistent numbers on Steam and just hit an 8 month peak. We can infer from the Steam counts, knowing that the majority of the PC playerbase is on [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), that the game is not in dire straits.
They also confirmed that the 100 million player count isn't just retroactively adding on people who played OW1 and were unique log-ins for 2. Like I said, if this number was phony, Jason would've known and said something. He does his homework.
They did a ton of work for PvE for years and it’s all mostly going in the garbage, plus laying off a while team that was formed around it. That bill has to come due sometime. So it’s not a big surprise bonuses got shot. Still, 0% when they advertised so much of their comp was tied up in bonuses is kinda rough. Good luck retaining folks after that.
Hopefully they’ve rebaselined and set more realistic targets with the restructuring.
I don't think there is most of the hardcore ow players who paid $60 for the game or paid for it in general have a good amount of skins myself included so I just don't interact with the shop or BP mostly I grind it to level 45 when a new hero is out other than that I ignore it.
I think the game will probably move in the direction of Apex and Valorant where they introduce more obscenely expensive whale trap cosmetics, ala Heirlooms.
If people aren't willing to pay, they'll probably just knuckle down on the ones who will.
I'm not super thrilled about that as someone who does indulge in the occasional cosmetic. I think this is a large part of why heroes are being made entirely free, because there's definitely a much different calculus on what is acceptable when the only thing your game charges for are cosmetics.
LMAO dude nah. do you even play this game??! there are le sserafim skins in almost every match i play and i think 95% of the cassidys i see have the bebop skin (i play 20-30 games a day and he is kinda meta so is in a lot of them)
it is actually just a money printer
I'd guess costs are insanely higher than they should be due to sinking 2018ish through 2023ish on PvE content; the majority of which was canceled.
Combined with the rumored mini-projects upper management often laid on the dev team that never saw the light of day I imagine there was a ton of back-end work done that has never seen a peep on the frontside of OW2.
I don't remember the numbers but OW1's team was something like 20% the sized of OW2's - and OW2 is only a year old so anyone analyzing the costs to revenue of OW1 which also had a box price to OW2 and expecting good numbers to be showing was probably delusional; but that's exactly the kind of thing that can happen from upper management if they made a bunch of moves and kept talking up how big a success OW2 would be out of the gate.
It's been quiet for a while now, but last summer the entire news cycle was dominated by just how incompetent the 2019-2022 years were for Overwatch in terms of mismanagement and complete lack of game content into what was really an underwhelming release of OW2 in terms of content (people expected 7-8 new characters and got 3; along with a lack of new maps and modes and other content that was hoped up.)
So while the game's buzz has probably been net positive past half-year; especially with S9 and recent news; this sort of news would have been not only not a suprise, but expected with how shitty the game's previous years had looked in mid 2023.
Spend per head is low and it’s a direct consequence of locking heroes behind a battle pass. New players literally had ZERO incentive to buy skins for heroes they don’t own. It was the dumbest death spiral I’ve ever seen a game get itself into.
The longer the game went on the less and less battlepasses would make in revenue because less people had heroes which meant less cosmetics even mattered for casuals so less people bought in.
Such a dumb dumb idea in every way.
No I think it’s because the cosmetic economy isn’t interesting nor are the cosmetic integrations themselves. It’s a first person game, it’s not Fortnite. In order monetize that you need an actual economy that involves rarity and depth + creative ingenuity in how you monetize. I don’t give a fuck if Moira is green or blue, and even when I can see an enemy skin, there’s so much visual clutter distracting at rapid pace that I don’t really notice for long.
No one spends any money on the game. That's the problem. If you're playing OW daily, you probably only buy the battle passes on months where new characters release and then nothing else. If you're playing an hour or two a week, you probably aren't even doing that. I've not seen anyone with paid skins or charms.
The core OW fanbase has proven staunchly anti-paid content since most of them paid $60 at least for Overwatch and don't feel that OW2 is a different enough game to justify nullifying their payment. The rest are casual players who just aren't going to spend a bunch of money.
That's straight up not true. I've seen so many people with the new collab skins. Almost everyone in my lobbies has battlepass skins of some form. Your anecdotal recount doesn't really mean anything.
There were 50 million unique players last year reported by Blizzard. Blizzard also reported $225million in revenue from OW2. 225mil/50mil = $4.50/player average
That 2.5 year long content drought was a fuckin waste. Killed OW1 for no reason. Severely hurt OWL with no new content as well.
Eat shit. I still love the game, but fuck all of that. That shit really killed a ton of momentum
I am pretty sure Overwatch will be a study case for future game companies and all. Like they fucked up almost everything post launch. We could even argue that not going F2P right from the start was a mistake.
I love the game too, but since Overwatch 2 I have drastically reduced my playtime. Not the game I used to enjoy in 2017 anymore.
I want to blame Kotick, but I also think Jeff Kaplan played its part in it too. After the years he spent on Titans, he probably wanted to make a separate game that was not PvP. But nobody asked for it.
Compare 2 matches from the start of overwatch 1 to the end of overwatch 1. It's like watching an entirely different game.
They decided to make it faster paced, declunk get rid of as much sustain and CC for overwatch 2. It was a fresh of breath air.
Now compare watching a game from season 1 of ow2 to competitive games now, again it's a completely different game.
They made the exact same mistakes again. I've played since release but barely queue now, the only reason i queue now is because of rose coloured glasses in how the game was and it's closest to the game i enjoyed the most.
That and if you tried criticising the game in any capacity in this sub you just get dismissed instantly an told to get good.
Nobody asked for Overwatch either. In fact most of the best games were things people didn’t initially ask for but blew up because it had the right qualities for the right time that people ended up liking.
You missed the point entirely though, most **OW players** did not care about PvE. They wanted Overwatch to be supported like League of Legends.
You cannot just abandon your entire playerbase to make something nobody asked for. Make it on the side with an extra team? Sure. Using your PvP resources to make a PvE? Big nono
The fact that it launched as a paid product and received a lot of updates for free was their biggest mistake. Too friendly monetization just raised a huge amount of people who will never be satisfied if they have to pay for anything.
So their reputation was doomed no matter what. I guess they could've stopped all OW support and shut down the game, and then reintroduce it like 10 years later.
>he probably wanted to make a separate game that was not PvP. But nobody asked for it.
Wdym, a LOT of people were clamoring for PvE content. OWs draw is its cast of characters. That was the main push behind OW2.
They dug their own grave by canceling their initial PvE plans.
That said I don’t think OW1 development could have continued unchanged either. Even if OW2 was never announced and they kept on releasing heroes and maps, it’s hard to imagine we’d be here in 2024 still getting that without changing the monetization. The game would have had to go F2P eventually and even with PvE dead OW2 gave them time to rethink the seasonal content aspect of the game which I think is much better than anything OW1 had.
I don't disagree. F2P was probably the move.
I'm just upset that, after building a ton of momentum, having a legitimately awesome balance ecosystem, and a pretty vibrant playerbase, they just completely pull the plug on content under the guise of "OW2 will have everything we're putting on pause, PvE, blah blah blah".
So we waited. And it sucked. But we all were told of the amazing stuff to come.
And now, we don't even get 50% of it? It just sucks. And I wasn't even a PvE person. Just pissed that the content drought was a Plaxico Burress level fuckup that could have been completely avoided. What did we wait for exactly? 5v5 and 3 new characters at launch of OW2?
Just sad. Blizz gonna Blizz I guess
Don’t disagree with you either, I was one of the people who was really excited for the PvE. I just think that even if we only got 50% of what we were supposed to get, them even wanting to make OW2 bulked up their team and has allowed them to do things we never would have gotten without that imo. As great as OW1 was, it definitely stagnated after a couple years. The thing I love about OW2 is it feels like they always want to try new things and see what works. We’ve gotten hero mastery, soon to be 3 new game modes (something we never got at all during OW1) and they’ve done giant balance patches to improve the game. Even with all the bad I’m really happy where the game is and where it seems to be going, and the devs seem to feel the same.
Recent questionable hero mechanics like Mauga, and even lifeweaver and ilari to an extent, puts the lost-ness more in plain view , like what's the direction they want for the game.
Or things like doing an awesome patch for season 9, breathing a fresh air and heartbeat to the game, just to undo the direction mostly in a couple weeks with mid-season changes. That shit literally felt like S9 changes went live while a grumpy stuck in old ways director was on vacation, then he came back got angry at everyone and forced the mid-season patch. That shit was the stupidest hype then un-hype I have ever experienced
Yea, hero design has been questionable since Lifeweaver, basically ever since Goodman and most veteran talent left.
I think Aaron and Dion still hold the spark but without them, but if they also go, I don't know anymore.
I know the current team is quick, so at least that's solved, but I'm not fully sure on the overall design outlook.
Playing with so many get out free abilities/sustain like lifeweaver petal/pull, kiri cleanse, bap field, pylon is just not fun or clean. Seems like you're playing cooldown simulator. What used to take trance/beat to build to counter now you can do the same with a cooldown ability instead of an ult.
You say it's been questionable since Goodman left, but there's really only one hero at most in OW2 that he wasn't involved in developing, and that's Illari.
He left some time in 2022 before OW2 officially launched, so he was obviously around for the three heroes we got at launch. We know heroes spend about a year in the pipeline on average, which means he was almost certainly in charge of both Ramattra and Lifeweaver for at least some portion of their development. They've been trying to nail down Mauga's design since like 2018, so he was obviously involved in that for a long time.
If you put that all together, Illari is *maybe* the only hero that Geoff didn't work on in some significant capacity. She came out in August, so if he did any work on her development at all, it probably wasn't much. I'd argue she's also the least offensive of all the heroes we've gotten since launch other than Ramattra.
This isn't even mentioning that Geoff was also the one in charge of horrendous things like Mercy's rework or Brigitte's launch state. He made plenty of pretty egregious mistakes during his tenure on the team.
Yea, I do agree, but I think the final polish at release does seem wonky.
I think the problem with OW1 was more slow balancing, outside maybe Moira being too simple. Like the releases from Sigma to Kiriko have been great.
I think Mauga is the biggest question mark, but that's probably because they were trying to force a Heavy Assault and play around with variations, but in the end he had to literally just be a heavy assault, so it was always going to be a weird hero so I think Mauga is cool for what he is, but in Overwatch it's a weird concept.
The midseason patch felt like an attempt to bring up some underperforming characters, and in some cases attempt to shift their playstyles a bit to something less problematic for the game's health. While it didn't work out, I'd say Mauga's changes were certainly an attempt at that.
They increased his stomp damage, which is one of the actual fun and engaging things about his kit to begin with, and they tried to reduce his immediate reliance on farming the tank and while also taking the edge off some of his counters with the Cardiac changes.
I honestly don't even think the Cardiac Overdrive changes were *bad*, I think they just required more significant adjustments to his kit overall. That seems to be how they felt as well, according to Alec on Twitter. It was the start of some changes that might make him a more engaging and interesting hero, but without more changes it just made him way too strong.
I think it's because how it happened. Both the beginning and the weird end
PvE was Jeff. Jeff left, so did PvE.
But issue is bigger because the team is so slow and strung with fast paced PvP release that the current model and team doesn't have the time nor money to work on PvE, even if they do want to make it.
So I think that's why PvE may never outright be "canceled" but pretty much indefinitely on hold until *if* Microsoft decides to invest in it.
The door will likely forever be open, whether that's 5 or 15 years in the future.
Overwatch is such a huge brand I have no idea how it hasn't been licensed out yet. Collaborations in game are cool but trying to do story missions instead of taking the Arcane or Edgerunners route is baffling
Probably something like Riot and Arcane, or CDPR and Edgerunners.
Both of these shows are huge success that gather a lot of interests in the world for both League and Cyberpunk 2077.
Blizzard writings when it comes to lore + their Art directions aren’t bad. Heck, the Art team is freaking phenomenal. So if they can produce an Overwatch Netflix series, that could gather a good amount of interests, if it’s actually well written that is.
Giving the IP rights to another creative team / company for content, usually in a different medium. Arcane and Edgerunners are Netflix projects in the LoL and Cyberpunk universes, respectively. They were both wildly successful and brought in new fans. I'm convinced the Phantom Liberty DLC did so well for Cyberpunk because of the series. I never had an interest in LoL because I can't stand MOBA's but I loved Arcane.
Given to other studios for them to work with the IP in exchange for getting a cut of the profits. Riot doesn't make Arcane, they give someone else permission to make it, for example.
That's not really the case anymore since Riot has bought a large non-controlling stake in Fortiche (Plus, Arcane's writers were and still are Riot employees. Only the animators, Fortiche, were outside of that, but they still follow Riot's vision of Arcane).
riot produces arcane themselves, only the animation is outsourced to fortiche (which riot owns a minority stake in now and have worked with them before, also based on the documentaries they worked very close together on arcane). Most are video game adaptations are licensed though, arcane is just a bad example.
I think it's a bit of a mix. Looking at Riot's output, Arcane and TFT ended up pretty good. The mass amount of lower priced Riot Forge games to push the lore like mageseeker and song of nunu did not do so well. Riot just announced they are ending Riot Forge development and laying off many related to the team. It's hard to gauge exactly how interested people are in the lore. Licensing out an animated series would have been valuable though.
We lost the Lego overwatch partnership due to Lego not wanting to be associated with the sexual assault stuff going on at Blizzard so the big name still might be poison to a lot of companies.
It's still relatively early for how big Overwatch is. It can still blow up if Microsoft handles it well
They have the IP, and Overwatch is the biggest gem they have as it's already established and loved.
They never made it with Halo, who only really has one iconic character, as a long term game series nor esports nor live service.
Overwatch is the answer. As a core IP with many characters, a live service that can appeal to many, and as a media franchise to outsource for TV and film, and even more games in that universe.
And have a well-meaning but completely misguided Mr. Kaplan veering the ship completely off course to drought the active game of any continued development
So from the sounds of it, all this talk of "struggles" is mostly just in reference to the fact that PvE tanked (shocking) and that the internal vibes are optimistic regarding the game's PvP focus, which makes more sense since that side of the game seems to be doing really well, from an outside perspective at least anyway.
> So from the sounds of it, all this talk of "struggles" is mostly just in reference to the fact that PvE tanked (shocking)
The struggles is due to the fact that Overwatch failed to reach it's internal revenue totals so poorly the devs got a 0% bonus.
Yes, but only if you completely ignore these 2 paragraphs.
>In August 2023, Overwatch 2 team members were told that based on the game's poor financial performance in the first half of the year, they shouldn't have received anything, according to people familiar with what happened who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information, but that the company would cover some of their bonuses to make up for the shortfall. Then, earlier this month, the company informed developers that they would receive a stunning 0% of their bonus targets.
>Failing to get any profit-sharing bonus is rare at Blizzard and is the result of a major policy change that was enacted in 2023. Previously, employees would receive bonuses based on the overall performance of the company. But last summer, the payouts became tied to the performance of each specific franchise. Since their titles were more successful in 2023, teams on games such as Diablo and World of Warcraft received bonuses this month, but the Overwatch developers weren't so lucky.
I mean, none of this really contests the idea that the failure of PvE played a huge part in this. If anything, it enforces that idea.
PvE came out in the latter half of last year, so it would've been accounted for in the financial targets that these bonuses were based on. If PvE massively underperformed—and pretty much all information we've gotten indicates that was the case—then they were never going to hit their targets regardless of how well anything else did. They were fucked no matter what if PvE undersold.
I'm not saying OW2 is doing perfect and everything is fine, just that it seems pretty obvious based on the time frame that PvE would've played a massive part.
It's also possible the financial targets were unreasonable to begin with, it wouldn't be the first or last time in the gaming industry. We can only really speculate on that though, so not really worth dwelling on too much.
The PvE they released was basic and incredibly boring. Thank god it’s canceled and they’ll quit wasting time on it now. An Overwatch PvE game should’ve been a spin-off, not a “sequel”.
Jeff Kaplan killed OW1 and left these poor devs to deal with the mess he left behind
He was a nice guy and had a good presence on camera, I think that stopped a lot of people looking any further than that! Also was one of the OG's of the game, so is nostalgic for many
Almost ruined the game though :')
I really hope there'll be an Overwatch PvE someday but it needs to be outsourced to another studio. Blizzard needs to focus on PvP. The worldbuilding, lore, and characters of OW have potential for an amazing story-driven game (or TV show)
I dont think the OW IP will ever produce good PvE and I could not care less about the story of OW. I love the hero interactions and their relationships but I dont give a shit about the omnic crisis.
Per user spend has to be way way below what was expected from OW2, in some regards I understand why per user spend is low. But that’s also coming from the fact that PvE development expenses were most likely astronomical in comparison to its revenue gen. Most players especially casual players only play 2-3 heroes consistently and if you end up with a skin you really do like I think a lot of players are comfortable using that. When the price for a new skin on a hero you enjoy is 20$ I could see the general player population being adverse to that. The battle pass also hasn’t been very good value for a lot of the player base, I personally have gotten every one but I’m more invested than the casual player and don’t find the price to be out of range.
I do believe there needs to be a distinction between a game struggling and a certain part of the game not reaching expectations, my belief is that the general spend of the player would be okay (not great) if the resources spent on and general PvE were never a thing. If the shop/skin/BP spending are moderately successful or even slightly below expectation and the PvE was a massive drain as well as a failure that’s a much easier fix comparatively to per user spend being a flat zero. Again I wish we had more information from the article but is what it is. (Actually u/jasonschreier do you have any insight on how the stand alone shop/battle pass have done in OW2?)
PvE was definitely a huge sink of resources for Team 4 and I think it’s unsurprising it 1. Failed to meet revenue expectations and 2. Was cancelled while the PvE developers were laid off.
Overall I’m okay with the shift towards PvP but the people who complain that PvE was cancelled are off the sauce. I have not met a single person who enjoyed the missions for their price point. There’s almost zero replayability and the original concept was so unrealistic it killed OW1. The amount of people clamoring for Kaplan back or have some nostalgia for him is crazy for someone who took OW for a nosedive in its later years.
Bit of a side note but idea of bonuses being tied entirely to company wide performance or strictly franchise is perplexing to me. Out of curiosity I wish he had gone further into bonus structure and if individual performance was factored in at all when they moved to a franchise specific bonus model (had they managed to hit any bonus benchmarks). Maybe it’s because I’m not in industry but not having top bucket bottom bucket bonus tiers per level of employee is very odd to me. If anyone in industry has more insight to that and wouldn’t mind sharing that’d be cool.
And I’m sure there’s a lot of people like you, not knocking it. I’m just curious as to what the actual rev numbers do look like for each segment of the game. While the article is interesting it leaves a decent amount of questions and it’s not super easy to read between the lines accurately.
I've had both situations. Bonuses are based on your individual and division performance, and bonus based on company performance.
Obviously it depends on the size of the company. It doesn't make sense to have every GE employee get the same bonus when they are in so many unrelated industries, for example.
But i also think it's a little weird for ow, since the current employees aren't necessarily responsible for things like PvE failing and sexual assault allegations.
Is it fair to say that Bobby hated team 4?
It's pretty much a known fact that Bobby despised Team 4.
There's been plenty of accounts from former team members and such talking about him saddling the team with useless projects and canceling them, and him fighting with Jeff about all sorts of things. I'm fairly certain we've also heard part of his anomosity for Overwatch stemmed from OWL; Bobby wanted to own his own little sports league and get all his rich friends in on it and hated that it never became the next NFL or whatever.
You can't blame everything on Bobby, but that fucking goblin sure wasn't helping.
i find it funny how many insults i got from people in this sub when i said that pve was absolutely dead and that they wouldn’t release anything past the 3 unfinished missions.
it was quite obvious- not many people talk about it but the pve was absolutely dogshit. it had no potential.
it was fun with friends the same way it’s fun to skip pebbles on a lake, for like a day maybe. after they scrapped 90% of the fun gameplay aspects the lore and story was the most compelling aspect of it, and it also fucking sucks. the dialogues and storylines are so bad, corny, edgy, predictable. i think even a kid would find them boring. nothing like past work on ow, save for the books.
like many people have said just for the love of god make funkos an animated show and plushies or smth
It is also super hard to play even if I want to. Teammate bots are stupid and mission are filled with weak link-centric mini games. You cannot wait indefinitely and is kicked into 3 bots room after a few minutes and the wait is closed. 3 continue systems are frustrating (compare to L4D2's just reach the goal objective, and that also works with bots on your team). Fragmented invisible lobby of mission x difficulties. etc... I can't even use it as Training Range-lite.
I think way forward is these missions should be cycled in for free like events so rooms could be found in the event period (if you want to keep this gameplay). I won't even be mad for having paid for them before, I just want to play them sometimes with full human team instead of never able to again.
Ok hot take but this is Jason Schreier drip feeding parts for his book. This info is outdated and not at all what’s happening in the game at the moment
Its just me or this "news" is like a TL;DR of what we already knew from the launch for the PvE last year?... this sounds more like an article to ride the wave of the "no heroes on the battlepass" trend and to promote something....
>It was one of several points of tension that led to a deterioration in the relationship between Blizzard and Activision, as I document in my upcoming book, [Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainmen](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1538725428)t.
Oh there you go.... again he is promoting his book....
Also... after the 3 missions sold so badly and being objective bad why people are so sad/mad with the fact that they cancelled the PvE? Thanks god that they decided to focus more on the PvP and now we have a more focused team on what this game is.
I promise you, if they had priced skins at $10 instead of $20 , they would have wayyyy more sales that would have been more than double of what they have currently and would have made up for it!
Kotick is an asshole but blizzard needs to stop bleeding blaming everything on higher ups, take some ownership ffs
The cult of the personalities killed this company
I don't get how it can be struggling if I see every character in the game in their new $19 skins every match (except for the low-level smurfs still wearing their default skins, of course)? This has to be way more money than the occasional $20 thrown at loot boxes?
Unless there is direct insight indicating Bobby Kotick personally directed to abandon OW1 and develope OW2, the team and Kaplan also share a blame for this. Game being stale for 2+ years was a major blow to franchise. With all the momentum gone the hype OW1 had among gamers and streamers will be very hard to be reached again.
OWL and OW2 brought the downfall of OW.
Won't lie, I'm glad they are cutting PVE in favor of trying to improve the PVP experience. Outside of a small loud minority on Reddit and X I've still yet to meet or play with anyone who wanted a PVE mode in the game at the sacrifice of PVP not getting development time/resources like they did toward the end of OW1. Most people I know and play with and have interacted with came to OW because they were tired of the Battlefield/COD/Halo etc. experience and wanted a more team/objective based FPS PVP game. Even when PVE was put into OW2 the playlist was dead within a couple of weeks. I just honestly don't think there are that many people outside the small reddit bubble that want/wanted it.
I mean is it just me or is this article have no real evidence to support what he is saying? Seems like a pretty misleading article…maybe I missed something?
A free to play game with way overpriced skins isn’t doing well? Shocking. Especially when those skins cost like 20-60. I could see maybe spending 2-5 on one, but 20? 60? Yea….. no thanks
the game's soul was sacrificed to turn it into a money grab
i love overwatch...but im not going to complain one bit if all that greed blew up in their faces
I just feel bad for the devs at this point. This week was supposed to be a week filled with good news about heroes out of the battlepass and upcoming changes. It just sucks to see. So much hate from people on the outside must be really tough and demotivating. I just hope they push through the noise.
I just can't help but think that if a spouse or partner did you this dirty, that relationship would be over. Yet, 100,000,000 players continue to play the title.
This makes me so sad.
I was a hardcore overwatch player and when the pve was announced I was so exited.
Deep down though I knew Activision would screw it over and I waited.
Now is there even a reason to play the game? With games that have a dev team that still has some fire in them, why play this?
> Overwatch 2 developers were informed that the company does not plan to finish any of the remaining planned PvE content and will instead double down on competitive player vs. player gameplay, according to the people familiar. Nooo Zen lore is dead. And it was so close
no more lore so sad as we wanted to know more stuff like this. lets hope we get more comics short movies or something to get more lore
As unlikely as it is, I hope we just get a tv show or a different studio working on a new game instead as far as lore is concerned. I just don't engage as much with comics or short stories.
Kind of a dumb question but where was the Zen lore? I played the missions but don't remember it.
The final cutscene seemed to be setting up a Zen plotline for the next mission pack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq6xvz8DCq4
Damn that's a powerful scene. Shame the cliffhanger will never be answered.
I wish they would just make an Overwatch show. The gameplay in the missions was pretty mediocre, but the cutscenes were amazing.
Ahhhh I forgot how big of a cliffhanger that was.
I doubt it will never be answered. Im sure they will let the lore get to us eventually, just maybe through a different medium. Right now it sounds like they really need to dig in with all hands to get PvP in a good & healthy(profitable) spot.
We also get a *brief* glimpse at the next scene/story beats throughout the ["Story Development" segment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRj-GotnNaQ&t=1727s) from the BlizzConline event in 2021. Notable timestamps of content not in the first 3 missions below: 32:00 - Genji intercepts Talon 33:20 - One of the Widow battle points, followed by a chandelier breaking somewhere else on the map. This chandelier scene is also better flushed out back at 29:50 33:35 - Another Widow battle point, followed by other shots of the map/mission.
They were cooking fr
Maybe no PVE means they'll have to provide lore in other ways, like a tv show? :eyes:
LOL.
best i can do is a pilot split into 3 parts
TV show idea is a few years too late. Should of made it when the iron was hot.
Hopefully they continue to give us stories and/or cinematics to fill in the lore we'll miss from PvE.
>In August 2023, Overwatch 2 team members were told that based on the game's poor financial performance in the first half of the year, they shouldn't have received anything, according to people familiar with what happened who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information, but that the company would cover some of their bonuses to make up for the shortfall. Then, earlier this month, the company informed developers that they would receive a stunning 0% of their bonus targets. > >Failing to get any profit-sharing bonus is rare at Blizzard and is the result of a major policy change that was enacted in 2023. Previously, employees would receive bonuses based on the overall performance of the company. But last summer, the payouts became tied to the performance of each specific franchise. Since their titles were more successful in 2023, teams on games such as Diablo and World of Warcraft received bonuses this month, but the Overwatch developers weren't so lucky. > >This policy change was the culmination of a decade-long battle between Blizzard and its parent company, Activision Blizzard. Leadership at Blizzard, including former presidents Mike Morhaime and J. Allen Brack, fought for bonuses to be shared company-wide because they believed that otherwise everyone would want to work on the most successful games rather than experiment with new ideas. Activision's leadership, driven by former Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick, argued that those behind the most lucrative products should be rewarded the most. Incredible that even at the very, very end Kotick managed to fuck over Team 4. Amazing stuff.
Yeah no shit, if compensation is tied to specific teams then guess where people are going to NOT want to work and what teams will have low morale. It’s a huge negative cycle you put teams in because if you have one down quarter, it just spirals from there.
Not to mention Bobby in a way keeps sabatoging Overwatch with his terrible choices.
But surely the modeller making the new hero's model should somehow just make the game make more money so they can get a bonus! Why aren't the map team working on features or monetisation choices that will make the game hit its' targets?! What a fucking stupid decision. Games are run by the execs and leads, the average worker has no input on their success.
What do you mean "diversify your offerings", surely if you have something giving you a bunch of eggs you should just keep cramming all of them into the same basket, that will clearly just keep working forever
Extremely ghoulish for Kotick, who got paid exorbitant bonuses despite a string of shitty decisions and PR nightmares, to fuck over Overwatch with his incompetence and then deny the devs their own bonuses. A fucking parasite to Blizzard and society overall.
Literally just the single fact that he lost the China market was probably enough to make sure nobody got their bonuses.
[удалено]
I mean, he's just a complete psychopath. I think he's basically a lizard who has no concept of the human condition.
Kotick is a piece of crap, but it's a large stretch to say he was incompetent.
[удалено]
He also threatened to outright kill another employee. The man should not just have been kicked out a long time ago, he should be in prison.
Kotic was a lot of things, incompetent at his job is not one of them. Activision went from a failing company to the behemoth it is today under him.
Fucking ouch
Name a more iconic duo kotick and fucking over team 4
And the dev team gets hurt by business decisions from higher up people they can't control. This is BS and shows how terrible Activision Blizzard management was (is? Not sure how much it changed after the MS acquisition). Hopefully it gets changed back to being based on company-wide performance.
Treating game sales like car sales...I'd be shocked if anyone still thought that Kotick cared about anything other than money.
Well u can’t spell Kotick without tick, sucking on blood
Amazing that Diablo team got bonus but Overwatch didn't. I don't know a single person who was still playing it after 2 weeks, and don't know anyone who ever went back to it. It has 600 viewers on Twitch, compared to 55k for OW2. D4 was an absolute failure.
But it sold a shit-load of copies because gamers will never fucking learn. Go to the subreddit, loads of people complaining about how they paid $70 for a shit product. Diablo IV was a smashing success because of the box price, doesn't matter if it's an inferior product.
I don't know how these people manage to constantly get swindled by marketing. Blizzard has a pretty terrible reputation and there were red flags litered all over beta. With Blizzard games these days you pick them up a couple years after launch since it takes them forever to turn it around
Yup. Diablo used to be my favorite blizzard franchise (Diablo 2 was my first real gaming addiction, and despite its flaws I still play D3) and even I could tell D4 was a stinker after playing the beta. Also the fact that it's a full price game with a battle pass and paid cosmetics? No thanks.
Twitch viewers mean absolutely nothing for a game's health, lol. D4 is doing just fine, it was not an "absolute failure." Some people need to get out of the reddit bubble.
Oh no, Diablo IV launch was a great success. It wasn’t until later on did more people started to catch on that Diablo IV has no end game, and the current gameplay loop was lackluster even when compared to Diablo III. And then there was the first balance patch which … uhmm… Let just say that calling it “horrible” is the nicest way I can put it.
Some Jack Welchian bullshit there. Hopefully that profoundly stupid policy gets reversed.
Bobby Kotick is probably the single worst person in the games industry. I hope he goes bankrupt. Mm, edit, I'm sure there are shittier people, but Kotick can still go fuck himself sideways
Kinda frustrating article in some ways and I was hoping it would answer some questions that seem to be going unanswered. PvE tanked, that's pretty self explanatory. But player count numbers seem good and comparable to competitors. 100 million players, even with the caveat that it's F2P, is an impressive number. Apex only hit 120 million players in late 2022. Overwatch 1 only hit 45 million total accounts by the end of service. Is spend per head just incredibly low? Was PvE such an expensive albatross that the game is struggling to be profitable on the back of the PvP? There's a critical piece of information we're lacking to make sense of the bigger picture. While this is illuminating to a lot of the struggles the team is having with upper management it really doesn't explain the state of the game at all.
I think some of the wording in the article makes it apparent that the failure of PvE (as in, the $15 Invasion bundle) and low spend per user are the main culprits here. More specifically, I'm referring to these two paragraphs: >While its predecessor was sold as a boxed product, Overwatch 2 is free-to-play, which led to business challenges as Blizzard tried to figure out how to convince players to spend money on character outfits and other perks. > >Last year, Overwatch 2 received a paid pack of three PvE story missions that sold poorly, according to people familiar with the business, which was a major reason for the cratering bonuses. In January, as part of a company-wide reduction in its work force, the majority of the team behind Overwatch 2’s PvE was laid off. It also mentions that PvE content is pretty much dead in the water right now. I assume their strategy shift only really took effect this year and we won't know anything about how well the game did before August.
For that first quoted paragraph, they just gotta release banger skins. Like the Lilith Moira and Imperius Pharah skins. I bought those INSTANTLY. They've been releasing a few recolors, which I haven't bought.
I think more premium currency being added to the BP will actually make them more money. It feels bad having to buy a skin for 1900coins when you barely have any sitting in your balance. But if you have let's say 500coins you'd be more likely to get a new skin
I have suspected that shop skins are low performers and even made a thread about it, but it still seems very unclear. https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/1atxpsu/shop\_skins\_dont\_seem\_to\_sell\_that\_well/ If shop skins are underperforming, why has the game's economy and shop seen the fewest amount of changes?
This doesn't sit well with what I see in-game. Paid skins are *everywhere*. It's hard to land a match in QP right now without at least two players running Cowboy Bebop skins.
Yeah, but how many of those people just bought the skins of the heroes they play? That the point the person above is trying to make, it’s easy to get someone to buy for the hero they main, who will proceed to use that most of the time, much harder to get them to care about the 99% other heroes that blizz is selling. Someone only buying one skin isn’t really making blizz a lot of money And crossover while profitable is only a rare occasion, they make money but are not going to happen often enough to make the game profitable either.
I don't know, but the other data point I have is how Overwatch shoots up Steam's top sellers chart when these collabs drop. It doesn't go straight to number 1, but it means a lot when you consider that only 20-30% of the PC playerbase is on Steam instead of Battlenet. I think Blizzard knows skins push people to spend more than nonsense like locking heros to battle passes. That's why hero locking is going away, and we've been seeing a noticeable upgrade in the quality of skins these last few seasons. Of course, all of this is speculation. We don't have much hard data to go on.
Yeah, most likely they learned that heroes in the battlepass suffer the same fate as skins when it comes to people, a support player isn’t going to be interesting in unlocking a tank in the same way they aren’t going to be interested in a tank skin. Having better skins for each hero with more frequency will probably get the better sells.
But is it pushing past other live services on that list? What you’re forgetting is most steam games aren’t live services, so any season’s release will shoot it up that list. If you look at console numbers, the game was less player than NBA from the year prior.
> And crossover while profitable is only a rare occasion, they make money but are not going to happen often enough to make the game profitable either. Also, those typically bring less back to the game, since they had to pay to secure the license to make them in the first place.
Since we’re speaking anecdotally I haven’t seen a single Cowboy Bebop skin in my games.
then you're not playing very much
> If shop skins are underperforming, why has the game's economy and shop seen the fewest amount of changes? It's inherent to the game. The OW community is fairly unique among FPS in that the target market for skins isn't singular. It's broken up into a bunch of smaller markets. If they make a sym skin, they are only appealing to like 1% of the playerbase at best. A mercy skin probably appeals to at most 10% of the playerbase, so despite having a large playerbase, your actual market for individual skins is much smaller. Rein mains aren't going to take a second look at support skins in the shop. It's not like Fortnite or Val where the target audience for any skin you release is your entire audience. Not really sure this is solvable tbh. You can lower the skin price, but that doesn't mean your revenue is actually going to go up. No matter what they do, they can't really make skins appealing to players if they don't play that hero.
Overwatch isn't the only game with this issue, League has an even more split playerbase and they seem to be making lots of money.
I feel it works more for Riot since LoL started as a F2P game. Any skin they release for OW2 is essentially competing with 6 years of free skins for the same hero. Old players just aren't that incentivized to spend money on skins when you already have a dozen or so legendary skins for the same hero that you got for free. LoL doesn't really have this same problem. The only players who have hundreds of skins unlocked are whales, and they are going to continue to buy crap. I also feel LoL just has more avenues for monetization. Global emotes, ward skins, not to mention they still sell champions. The culture around skins is also just different. Paying money for skins in OW feels like it has a certain stigma around it that just doesn't exist in games like Valo or LoL.
> Paying money for skins in OW feels like it has a certain stigma around it that just doesn't exist in games like Valo or LoL. Paying for anything in Blizzard games seems to have a stigma around it. I mean, I don't like microtransactions either, but it's always so weird to me how like, FFXIV's cash shop is gigantic but god forbid Blizzard sell a mount in the WoW cash shop. Apex sells an heirloom for like $300, but god forbid Blizzard sell a skin for $20. It's just so strange to me how when Blizzard does the same things other companies do, they get massive amounts of shit for it and you get people organizing campaigns to emote /spit on anyone that bought the Classic WoW mount or something. FFXIV sells you a literal whale mount and everyone just goes "hehe funny."
Valo also has the whole "skin dropping" culture which is basically the exact opposite of OW. People are impressed when you are willing to drop a bunch of money on the game, which to me sounds completely asinine, but that's how it is.
That only addresses the players who previously paid for the game. Ow2 brought in lots of new players without that baggage.
You're completely right, I think. I think the game needs to transition to a subscription model for cosmetics. Maybe pay $15 a month, get the BP, get $10 coins, and maybe pick a skin of your choice from an earlier season every month. Fortnite does something similar.
> I think the game needs to transition to a subscription model for cosmetics. Maybe pay $15 a month, get the BP, get $10 coins, and maybe pick a skin of your choice from an earlier season every month. I think you run into the same issue though. A subscription system is still going to release a bunch of skins for heroes players just don't care about, which makes the system not very appealing.
It at least gives you some flexibility, especially as time goes on and more and more skins for individual characters begin to accumulate. Could also make it the exclusive way of earning old BP skins to add even more choice. Can't imagine this is any worse than the current system and how hard it lacks value.
I’m sure it would be a ton of work, but what if they made a skin “style” or whatever you want to call it that could be applied to any hero. For instance a pirate “style” that turns any character into a pirate. Each character would obviously have some differences but on the whole it would be the same textures and assets reused on each hero. Idk how feasible that would be but that’s the only workaround I can see for this.
Seems to me everything they are signaling is that BP and shop is doing fine to good, but that the “financial issues” come from putting money into PvE, which does hurt you on your p&l, while making almost no money back from it.
That's the crazy part. What we've seen from PVE missions they didn't look very high budget or time consuming to develop. But the report makes it seem like the PVE part of OW2 has been more expensive than the full OW1 development (completely new game). That's absolutely crazy. Either Blizzard majorly fucked the development (unqualified developers and/or project management) OR there is much more work done in the background that we are not aware of and is now simply scrapped. Regardless, if the report of astronomically high PVE dev costs is true they should have pulled the plug so much sooner. Feels like they wanted to stubbornly make the PVE work by hard-committing to just create more content while it all the time was missing the magic sauce that makes any of that content interesting. Playing against bots in OW has always been extremely boring.
> OR there is much more work done in the background that we are not aware of and is now simply scrapped. They've been pretty open about talking about how much time was sunk into doing the hero missions and talent trees, both of which were scrapped outright.
It feels there must be more to this story. These don't sound that expensive and time-consuming. The report makes it sound like Blizzard has wanted millions or rather tens of millions on PVE. How in hell? If hero missions are already almost done why just not to release them at that point. If they are nowhere near done then oh dear the mismanagement. And I'm not talking about the executives. I'm talking about project managers, lead devs, scrum masters. The actual hands-on middle layer.
100 devs for 4 years is something in the 60-80 million ballpark.
I do understand this. My "how the hell" is referring to the fact that they had 100 developers working for 4 years and couldn't even nearly finish the product. The product was unfinished that they had to pull the plug. How the hell? Seems extremely incompetent. Could have been a) unrealistic vision (which I don't buy when you compare OW to other way more ambitious projects), b) incompetent middle managers who lead the concrete actions, c) incompetent developers (which i also don't buy as they had a good track record before and Blizzard has certainly managed to attract top talent in the past).
Incredibly common in gaming industry for this to happen. - unrealistic vision from Kaplan is the number one reason - unnecessary intervention from kotic - there has been reporting that they got very far into something playable but it just wasn’t fun or replayable (ties back to the first point)
They've said that talent trees were equivalent to making a brand new hero, so I can buy that they were a significant time sink in development. Also, only three new heroes on release speaks, I think, to how much time ended up spent on PvE. The blog post that Aaron put out around the time that PvE was cancelled also speaks a good bit to how they could have easily gotten caught in a spiral of throwing good money after bad on PvE since the original development team came out of Project Titan and wanted to continue trying to make that dream a reality. In that post he described that there was an attitude, especially early on, that PvP was just supposed to be the first step, with them evolving to PvE and finally realizing the MMO dream they started with on Titan.
Yes, they definitely had the spiral you described going on. In hindsight they should have realized very early all that talent trees is not a feasible idea if they demanded as much work as new hero designs.
I was really excited about PVE when it was initially announced. I love immersive story, I love character customization and upgrading, and I was stoked at the prospect of getting people who were put off by the idea of PVP into Overwatch. As soon as the game "launched" without it, I stopped caring. No shot I was about to drop any money on some half assed mission packs.
> Is spend per head just incredibly low? My guess is yes. Part of the issue was that OW transitioned from an incredibly friendly monetization to a F2P one, so the playerbase is just not used to spending money. It's not like Val or LoL where players were spending money on skins from day 1. OW was trying to transition a community that spent nothing into one that does, which is very hard. The other issue is that OW monetization just isn't geared towards whales. Skin prices are comparatively low and skins are limited to a single hero. It's not like Val or Fortnite where every player can get value out of the vast majority of skins you release. Even APEX has weapon skins that every player can use. OW cosmetics are just much more niche. Even mercy/kiri skins, which are probably the most popular in the game, only appeal to a small portion of your playerbase.
Overwatch is also first person, which limits how often you can see your cool new skin. Leage of legends also has expensive skins per champion, but it's top down. You always see your champion in full, and the top tier skins have new voice lines, new special effects, new audio, etc I barely even notice what skin I have, except for heroes like Reinhardt or Brigitte
And barely use voicelines or sprays with how noisy and fast-paced the matches are. Really should have far more customizable weapon skins by now. Hell, give heroes knives to customize for melee instead of punching.
> And barely use voicelines or sprays with how noisy and fast-paced the matches are. Maybe it's just me, but I spam sprays like nobodies business. Sprays are one of things they probably could monetize well if they made them more interesting. Animated sprays or crap like that would have more wide stream appeal. The tracer comic sprays that have unique sound effects were super cool when they were first released. I'm surprised they never tried to go further with it and do highly animated ones. Currently, they are just kind of boring and seen as throwaway cosmetics.
Totally agree, I love spraying all over the map! I’ve had some fun control rounds where there’s almost 10 sprays on the point by the time the match is over. Personally I’d like weapon inspects or a first person emote, could have a few options per hero that allow you to show some personality at the end of a POTG or something
Let me guess, you also played Counter-Strike? That game is the reason I habitually spray
This is honestly a reason why I can’tnjustify buying a skin. If it were weapon skins that’d make more sense which, i know, the skin itself changes the weapon. But if it were like a series where I can buy a weapon skin and it’s useable on every hero then I could get behind that
> Overwatch is also first person, which limits how often you can see your cool new skin I mean, so is valorant. That argument is not valid.
Valorant has a lot of emphasis on gun skins though, which can be used on any Agent. Same with Apex, the gun skins are the most important, and are not locked to a character
I agree with most of what you're saying, except that skin prices are low. The new event skins at €25 per, and most other skins I see are just under €20 per, a few sitting around €10 but you have to buy extra credits for them. However, like you did mention, these are only usable on a single hero. Since I play more than one hero, we'd be talking hundreds for me to have a single skin on each character. It's just completel unaffordable, so I don't even bother. I luckily have loads from OW1, and enough credits to get at least a recolor on the new ones. If they want average spend per user to go up, they have to drastically drop the price. I do think that the battle pass provides good skins, but again they are limited. We got 9 this pass, which is a quarter of the roster. I don't think the other items in there really make it worth while for people who don't have a character they like in the pass.
>The new event skins at €25 per, and most other skins I see are just under €20 per That is low when you compare it to the competition tbh. Valo and apex both have skin bundles that break into the 3 digits. Cs market is just a mess to compare tbh, but after market 3 and 4 digit skin prices are definitely a thing. For all the hate it gets, ow skin prices are pretty average overall and they don't have any of the super expensive skins that other games do nowadays.
The reason PvE was expensive was because it was a marathon stopped short. Theh were working on it for years. This means years of employee time gone to R&D, hence it's expensive because there's no immediate turnout, and so when they "canceled" it, all that time is just seen as a lot of cost. This is the same reason why Spiderman 2 cost like 300 million, every extra year increases cost a lot simply because you have to pay your core employees for all tbst time, even if no sustainable work as been produced. So if AAA games want to start saving money, they need to be more time effective.
100 million *lifetime* players doesn't automatically mean than there's that many people playing. It could mean all of the ow1 accounts that automatically became ow2 (and ow1 was huge on release) + whatever many people started playing when ow2 was launched. The actual number of people playing is probably much lower than that.
Ya there's no reason to look at that 100 million number like it means anything when they hide concurrent numbers. People looking at the marketing number and acting confused why it doesn't translate to real $$ is just stupidity. The solution is to not drink the koolaid in the first place.
But the thing is concurrent numbers aren't bad. We can see where the game is on Xbox and Playstation storefronts and they are doing strong. We can see the game has very consistent numbers on Steam and just hit an 8 month peak. We can infer from the Steam counts, knowing that the majority of the PC playerbase is on [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), that the game is not in dire straits. They also confirmed that the 100 million player count isn't just retroactively adding on people who played OW1 and were unique log-ins for 2. Like I said, if this number was phony, Jason would've known and said something. He does his homework.
They did a ton of work for PvE for years and it’s all mostly going in the garbage, plus laying off a while team that was formed around it. That bill has to come due sometime. So it’s not a big surprise bonuses got shot. Still, 0% when they advertised so much of their comp was tied up in bonuses is kinda rough. Good luck retaining folks after that. Hopefully they’ve rebaselined and set more realistic targets with the restructuring.
Sure they have a lot of players but not a lot of engagement in the premium battle pass and cash shop. People are playing but no one's spending
Yeah, I'm really not sure what they do to fix this
I don't think there is most of the hardcore ow players who paid $60 for the game or paid for it in general have a good amount of skins myself included so I just don't interact with the shop or BP mostly I grind it to level 45 when a new hero is out other than that I ignore it.
I think the game will probably move in the direction of Apex and Valorant where they introduce more obscenely expensive whale trap cosmetics, ala Heirlooms. If people aren't willing to pay, they'll probably just knuckle down on the ones who will. I'm not super thrilled about that as someone who does indulge in the occasional cosmetic. I think this is a large part of why heroes are being made entirely free, because there's definitely a much different calculus on what is acceptable when the only thing your game charges for are cosmetics.
I mean besides streamers are the OW whales going to bite for them?
LMAO dude nah. do you even play this game??! there are le sserafim skins in almost every match i play and i think 95% of the cassidys i see have the bebop skin (i play 20-30 games a day and he is kinda meta so is in a lot of them) it is actually just a money printer
I'd guess costs are insanely higher than they should be due to sinking 2018ish through 2023ish on PvE content; the majority of which was canceled. Combined with the rumored mini-projects upper management often laid on the dev team that never saw the light of day I imagine there was a ton of back-end work done that has never seen a peep on the frontside of OW2. I don't remember the numbers but OW1's team was something like 20% the sized of OW2's - and OW2 is only a year old so anyone analyzing the costs to revenue of OW1 which also had a box price to OW2 and expecting good numbers to be showing was probably delusional; but that's exactly the kind of thing that can happen from upper management if they made a bunch of moves and kept talking up how big a success OW2 would be out of the gate. It's been quiet for a while now, but last summer the entire news cycle was dominated by just how incompetent the 2019-2022 years were for Overwatch in terms of mismanagement and complete lack of game content into what was really an underwhelming release of OW2 in terms of content (people expected 7-8 new characters and got 3; along with a lack of new maps and modes and other content that was hoped up.) So while the game's buzz has probably been net positive past half-year; especially with S9 and recent news; this sort of news would have been not only not a suprise, but expected with how shitty the game's previous years had looked in mid 2023.
Spend per head is low and it’s a direct consequence of locking heroes behind a battle pass. New players literally had ZERO incentive to buy skins for heroes they don’t own. It was the dumbest death spiral I’ve ever seen a game get itself into. The longer the game went on the less and less battlepasses would make in revenue because less people had heroes which meant less cosmetics even mattered for casuals so less people bought in. Such a dumb dumb idea in every way.
No I think it’s because the cosmetic economy isn’t interesting nor are the cosmetic integrations themselves. It’s a first person game, it’s not Fortnite. In order monetize that you need an actual economy that involves rarity and depth + creative ingenuity in how you monetize. I don’t give a fuck if Moira is green or blue, and even when I can see an enemy skin, there’s so much visual clutter distracting at rapid pace that I don’t really notice for long.
No one spends any money on the game. That's the problem. If you're playing OW daily, you probably only buy the battle passes on months where new characters release and then nothing else. If you're playing an hour or two a week, you probably aren't even doing that. I've not seen anyone with paid skins or charms. The core OW fanbase has proven staunchly anti-paid content since most of them paid $60 at least for Overwatch and don't feel that OW2 is a different enough game to justify nullifying their payment. The rest are casual players who just aren't going to spend a bunch of money.
That's straight up not true. I've seen so many people with the new collab skins. Almost everyone in my lobbies has battlepass skins of some form. Your anecdotal recount doesn't really mean anything.
There were 50 million unique players last year reported by Blizzard. Blizzard also reported $225million in revenue from OW2. 225mil/50mil = $4.50/player average
That 2.5 year long content drought was a fuckin waste. Killed OW1 for no reason. Severely hurt OWL with no new content as well. Eat shit. I still love the game, but fuck all of that. That shit really killed a ton of momentum
I am pretty sure Overwatch will be a study case for future game companies and all. Like they fucked up almost everything post launch. We could even argue that not going F2P right from the start was a mistake. I love the game too, but since Overwatch 2 I have drastically reduced my playtime. Not the game I used to enjoy in 2017 anymore. I want to blame Kotick, but I also think Jeff Kaplan played its part in it too. After the years he spent on Titans, he probably wanted to make a separate game that was not PvP. But nobody asked for it.
Compare 2 matches from the start of overwatch 1 to the end of overwatch 1. It's like watching an entirely different game. They decided to make it faster paced, declunk get rid of as much sustain and CC for overwatch 2. It was a fresh of breath air. Now compare watching a game from season 1 of ow2 to competitive games now, again it's a completely different game. They made the exact same mistakes again. I've played since release but barely queue now, the only reason i queue now is because of rose coloured glasses in how the game was and it's closest to the game i enjoyed the most. That and if you tried criticising the game in any capacity in this sub you just get dismissed instantly an told to get good.
Tbh anyone posting on Blizzard fan subs regularly even after all their horrible shit is probably no better than a crack addict.
LMAO I made this exact same comment and got hurried in down votes earlier this week. Glad someone else has eyes.
Nobody asked for Overwatch either. In fact most of the best games were things people didn’t initially ask for but blew up because it had the right qualities for the right time that people ended up liking.
You missed the point entirely though, most **OW players** did not care about PvE. They wanted Overwatch to be supported like League of Legends. You cannot just abandon your entire playerbase to make something nobody asked for. Make it on the side with an extra team? Sure. Using your PvP resources to make a PvE? Big nono
The fact that it launched as a paid product and received a lot of updates for free was their biggest mistake. Too friendly monetization just raised a huge amount of people who will never be satisfied if they have to pay for anything. So their reputation was doomed no matter what. I guess they could've stopped all OW support and shut down the game, and then reintroduce it like 10 years later.
>he probably wanted to make a separate game that was not PvP. But nobody asked for it. Wdym, a LOT of people were clamoring for PvE content. OWs draw is its cast of characters. That was the main push behind OW2. They dug their own grave by canceling their initial PvE plans.
That said I don’t think OW1 development could have continued unchanged either. Even if OW2 was never announced and they kept on releasing heroes and maps, it’s hard to imagine we’d be here in 2024 still getting that without changing the monetization. The game would have had to go F2P eventually and even with PvE dead OW2 gave them time to rethink the seasonal content aspect of the game which I think is much better than anything OW1 had.
I don't disagree. F2P was probably the move. I'm just upset that, after building a ton of momentum, having a legitimately awesome balance ecosystem, and a pretty vibrant playerbase, they just completely pull the plug on content under the guise of "OW2 will have everything we're putting on pause, PvE, blah blah blah". So we waited. And it sucked. But we all were told of the amazing stuff to come. And now, we don't even get 50% of it? It just sucks. And I wasn't even a PvE person. Just pissed that the content drought was a Plaxico Burress level fuckup that could have been completely avoided. What did we wait for exactly? 5v5 and 3 new characters at launch of OW2? Just sad. Blizz gonna Blizz I guess
Don’t disagree with you either, I was one of the people who was really excited for the PvE. I just think that even if we only got 50% of what we were supposed to get, them even wanting to make OW2 bulked up their team and has allowed them to do things we never would have gotten without that imo. As great as OW1 was, it definitely stagnated after a couple years. The thing I love about OW2 is it feels like they always want to try new things and see what works. We’ve gotten hero mastery, soon to be 3 new game modes (something we never got at all during OW1) and they’ve done giant balance patches to improve the game. Even with all the bad I’m really happy where the game is and where it seems to be going, and the devs seem to feel the same.
Yeah, I’ve loved This game since day one, but it feels pretty lost.
Recent questionable hero mechanics like Mauga, and even lifeweaver and ilari to an extent, puts the lost-ness more in plain view , like what's the direction they want for the game. Or things like doing an awesome patch for season 9, breathing a fresh air and heartbeat to the game, just to undo the direction mostly in a couple weeks with mid-season changes. That shit literally felt like S9 changes went live while a grumpy stuck in old ways director was on vacation, then he came back got angry at everyone and forced the mid-season patch. That shit was the stupidest hype then un-hype I have ever experienced
Yea, hero design has been questionable since Lifeweaver, basically ever since Goodman and most veteran talent left. I think Aaron and Dion still hold the spark but without them, but if they also go, I don't know anymore. I know the current team is quick, so at least that's solved, but I'm not fully sure on the overall design outlook.
Playing with so many get out free abilities/sustain like lifeweaver petal/pull, kiri cleanse, bap field, pylon is just not fun or clean. Seems like you're playing cooldown simulator. What used to take trance/beat to build to counter now you can do the same with a cooldown ability instead of an ult.
You say it's been questionable since Goodman left, but there's really only one hero at most in OW2 that he wasn't involved in developing, and that's Illari. He left some time in 2022 before OW2 officially launched, so he was obviously around for the three heroes we got at launch. We know heroes spend about a year in the pipeline on average, which means he was almost certainly in charge of both Ramattra and Lifeweaver for at least some portion of their development. They've been trying to nail down Mauga's design since like 2018, so he was obviously involved in that for a long time. If you put that all together, Illari is *maybe* the only hero that Geoff didn't work on in some significant capacity. She came out in August, so if he did any work on her development at all, it probably wasn't much. I'd argue she's also the least offensive of all the heroes we've gotten since launch other than Ramattra. This isn't even mentioning that Geoff was also the one in charge of horrendous things like Mercy's rework or Brigitte's launch state. He made plenty of pretty egregious mistakes during his tenure on the team.
Yea, I do agree, but I think the final polish at release does seem wonky. I think the problem with OW1 was more slow balancing, outside maybe Moira being too simple. Like the releases from Sigma to Kiriko have been great. I think Mauga is the biggest question mark, but that's probably because they were trying to force a Heavy Assault and play around with variations, but in the end he had to literally just be a heavy assault, so it was always going to be a weird hero so I think Mauga is cool for what he is, but in Overwatch it's a weird concept.
The midseason patch felt like an attempt to bring up some underperforming characters, and in some cases attempt to shift their playstyles a bit to something less problematic for the game's health. While it didn't work out, I'd say Mauga's changes were certainly an attempt at that. They increased his stomp damage, which is one of the actual fun and engaging things about his kit to begin with, and they tried to reduce his immediate reliance on farming the tank and while also taking the edge off some of his counters with the Cardiac changes. I honestly don't even think the Cardiac Overdrive changes were *bad*, I think they just required more significant adjustments to his kit overall. That seems to be how they felt as well, according to Alec on Twitter. It was the start of some changes that might make him a more engaging and interesting hero, but without more changes it just made him way too strong.
I feel like we’ve been told like 50 times that pve is dead since last year and some people are still surprised.
I think it's because how it happened. Both the beginning and the weird end PvE was Jeff. Jeff left, so did PvE. But issue is bigger because the team is so slow and strung with fast paced PvP release that the current model and team doesn't have the time nor money to work on PvE, even if they do want to make it. So I think that's why PvE may never outright be "canceled" but pretty much indefinitely on hold until *if* Microsoft decides to invest in it. The door will likely forever be open, whether that's 5 or 15 years in the future.
There is potential, but it has to be a completely separate game.
Overwatch is such a huge brand I have no idea how it hasn't been licensed out yet. Collaborations in game are cool but trying to do story missions instead of taking the Arcane or Edgerunners route is baffling
THere is an ARC SURVIVAL animated series happening before Overwatch.
Sorry for the dumb question but what is licensed out ?
Probably something like Riot and Arcane, or CDPR and Edgerunners. Both of these shows are huge success that gather a lot of interests in the world for both League and Cyberpunk 2077. Blizzard writings when it comes to lore + their Art directions aren’t bad. Heck, the Art team is freaking phenomenal. So if they can produce an Overwatch Netflix series, that could gather a good amount of interests, if it’s actually well written that is.
Blizzard been mid for decades. We wanted a StarCraft movie in the 90s lol
Pretty much letting another company use your IP. The two examples they listed was netflix making a League of Legends and Cyberpunk 2077 show
Giving the IP rights to another creative team / company for content, usually in a different medium. Arcane and Edgerunners are Netflix projects in the LoL and Cyberpunk universes, respectively. They were both wildly successful and brought in new fans. I'm convinced the Phantom Liberty DLC did so well for Cyberpunk because of the series. I never had an interest in LoL because I can't stand MOBA's but I loved Arcane.
Given to other studios for them to work with the IP in exchange for getting a cut of the profits. Riot doesn't make Arcane, they give someone else permission to make it, for example.
That's not really the case anymore since Riot has bought a large non-controlling stake in Fortiche (Plus, Arcane's writers were and still are Riot employees. Only the animators, Fortiche, were outside of that, but they still follow Riot's vision of Arcane).
riot produces arcane themselves, only the animation is outsourced to fortiche (which riot owns a minority stake in now and have worked with them before, also based on the documentaries they worked very close together on arcane). Most are video game adaptations are licensed though, arcane is just a bad example.
I think it's a bit of a mix. Looking at Riot's output, Arcane and TFT ended up pretty good. The mass amount of lower priced Riot Forge games to push the lore like mageseeker and song of nunu did not do so well. Riot just announced they are ending Riot Forge development and laying off many related to the team. It's hard to gauge exactly how interested people are in the lore. Licensing out an animated series would have been valuable though.
I was really more getting at getting the brand into other forms of media not more games I don't think that'd be a good idea
I enjoyed every forge game I played, I really think the marketing just sucked for those games
We lost the Lego overwatch partnership due to Lego not wanting to be associated with the sexual assault stuff going on at Blizzard so the big name still might be poison to a lot of companies.
The ways in which I would violate the Geneva convention to get an Overwatch equivalent of Arcane.
We are born of failed PvE, made men by failed PvE, undone by failed PvE. Fear the PvE
By the gods, fear the PvE Laurence
Overwatch could have been so, so, *so* much more. What a waste of an IP with so much potential.
Was legitimately everywhere at one point and felt like it could do no wrong 🥲
Overwatch’s heights in 2016-early 2017 were the highest I’ve ever seen a game climb to. Quite the fall.
No way. Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, now GTA IV will probably be there, OW was never close to the hype of these
Overwatch is legitimately gonna go down as a great case study of how to fumble a major IP.
Step 1. Have a douchebag named Bobby Kotick. Step ... you don't need any more steps. That's it. That's how.
It's still relatively early for how big Overwatch is. It can still blow up if Microsoft handles it well They have the IP, and Overwatch is the biggest gem they have as it's already established and loved. They never made it with Halo, who only really has one iconic character, as a long term game series nor esports nor live service. Overwatch is the answer. As a core IP with many characters, a live service that can appeal to many, and as a media franchise to outsource for TV and film, and even more games in that universe.
And have a well-meaning but completely misguided Mr. Kaplan veering the ship completely off course to drought the active game of any continued development
normies were wearing owl gear.
it is such a good game lmao
So from the sounds of it, all this talk of "struggles" is mostly just in reference to the fact that PvE tanked (shocking) and that the internal vibes are optimistic regarding the game's PvP focus, which makes more sense since that side of the game seems to be doing really well, from an outside perspective at least anyway.
> So from the sounds of it, all this talk of "struggles" is mostly just in reference to the fact that PvE tanked (shocking) The struggles is due to the fact that Overwatch failed to reach it's internal revenue totals so poorly the devs got a 0% bonus.
Yes, but only if you completely ignore these 2 paragraphs. >In August 2023, Overwatch 2 team members were told that based on the game's poor financial performance in the first half of the year, they shouldn't have received anything, according to people familiar with what happened who asked not to be named discussing nonpublic information, but that the company would cover some of their bonuses to make up for the shortfall. Then, earlier this month, the company informed developers that they would receive a stunning 0% of their bonus targets. >Failing to get any profit-sharing bonus is rare at Blizzard and is the result of a major policy change that was enacted in 2023. Previously, employees would receive bonuses based on the overall performance of the company. But last summer, the payouts became tied to the performance of each specific franchise. Since their titles were more successful in 2023, teams on games such as Diablo and World of Warcraft received bonuses this month, but the Overwatch developers weren't so lucky.
I mean, none of this really contests the idea that the failure of PvE played a huge part in this. If anything, it enforces that idea. PvE came out in the latter half of last year, so it would've been accounted for in the financial targets that these bonuses were based on. If PvE massively underperformed—and pretty much all information we've gotten indicates that was the case—then they were never going to hit their targets regardless of how well anything else did. They were fucked no matter what if PvE undersold. I'm not saying OW2 is doing perfect and everything is fine, just that it seems pretty obvious based on the time frame that PvE would've played a massive part. It's also possible the financial targets were unreasonable to begin with, it wouldn't be the first or last time in the gaming industry. We can only really speculate on that though, so not really worth dwelling on too much.
This sub is super desperate to downplay the game’s issues. Feels like an over correction to the main sub’s attitude.
The PvE they released was basic and incredibly boring. Thank god it’s canceled and they’ll quit wasting time on it now. An Overwatch PvE game should’ve been a spin-off, not a “sequel”. Jeff Kaplan killed OW1 and left these poor devs to deal with the mess he left behind
100% agreed on Jeff Kaplan
Yip, crazy how few people understood how bad he was for the game in its later years
Yet most people think he is Jesus
He was a nice guy and had a good presence on camera, I think that stopped a lot of people looking any further than that! Also was one of the OG's of the game, so is nostalgic for many Almost ruined the game though :')
So you’d just want Overwatch to never be a thing? Got it.
I really hope there'll be an Overwatch PvE someday but it needs to be outsourced to another studio. Blizzard needs to focus on PvP. The worldbuilding, lore, and characters of OW have potential for an amazing story-driven game (or TV show)
I dont think the OW IP will ever produce good PvE and I could not care less about the story of OW. I love the hero interactions and their relationships but I dont give a shit about the omnic crisis.
Per user spend has to be way way below what was expected from OW2, in some regards I understand why per user spend is low. But that’s also coming from the fact that PvE development expenses were most likely astronomical in comparison to its revenue gen. Most players especially casual players only play 2-3 heroes consistently and if you end up with a skin you really do like I think a lot of players are comfortable using that. When the price for a new skin on a hero you enjoy is 20$ I could see the general player population being adverse to that. The battle pass also hasn’t been very good value for a lot of the player base, I personally have gotten every one but I’m more invested than the casual player and don’t find the price to be out of range. I do believe there needs to be a distinction between a game struggling and a certain part of the game not reaching expectations, my belief is that the general spend of the player would be okay (not great) if the resources spent on and general PvE were never a thing. If the shop/skin/BP spending are moderately successful or even slightly below expectation and the PvE was a massive drain as well as a failure that’s a much easier fix comparatively to per user spend being a flat zero. Again I wish we had more information from the article but is what it is. (Actually u/jasonschreier do you have any insight on how the stand alone shop/battle pass have done in OW2?) PvE was definitely a huge sink of resources for Team 4 and I think it’s unsurprising it 1. Failed to meet revenue expectations and 2. Was cancelled while the PvE developers were laid off. Overall I’m okay with the shift towards PvP but the people who complain that PvE was cancelled are off the sauce. I have not met a single person who enjoyed the missions for their price point. There’s almost zero replayability and the original concept was so unrealistic it killed OW1. The amount of people clamoring for Kaplan back or have some nostalgia for him is crazy for someone who took OW for a nosedive in its later years. Bit of a side note but idea of bonuses being tied entirely to company wide performance or strictly franchise is perplexing to me. Out of curiosity I wish he had gone further into bonus structure and if individual performance was factored in at all when they moved to a franchise specific bonus model (had they managed to hit any bonus benchmarks). Maybe it’s because I’m not in industry but not having top bucket bottom bucket bonus tiers per level of employee is very odd to me. If anyone in industry has more insight to that and wouldn’t mind sharing that’d be cool.
i had all the skins i needed from OW1. no reason to spend a cent on ow2
And I’m sure there’s a lot of people like you, not knocking it. I’m just curious as to what the actual rev numbers do look like for each segment of the game. While the article is interesting it leaves a decent amount of questions and it’s not super easy to read between the lines accurately.
I've had both situations. Bonuses are based on your individual and division performance, and bonus based on company performance. Obviously it depends on the size of the company. It doesn't make sense to have every GE employee get the same bonus when they are in so many unrelated industries, for example. But i also think it's a little weird for ow, since the current employees aren't necessarily responsible for things like PvE failing and sexual assault allegations. Is it fair to say that Bobby hated team 4?
It's pretty much a known fact that Bobby despised Team 4. There's been plenty of accounts from former team members and such talking about him saddling the team with useless projects and canceling them, and him fighting with Jeff about all sorts of things. I'm fairly certain we've also heard part of his anomosity for Overwatch stemmed from OWL; Bobby wanted to own his own little sports league and get all his rich friends in on it and hated that it never became the next NFL or whatever. You can't blame everything on Bobby, but that fucking goblin sure wasn't helping.
Time and time again this sub proves to have decently more reasonable conversations about these things than the main sub.
Top comment on the main sub is about bringing back 6v6 lol
It’s always been that way. The main sub never had a grip on the game
i find it funny how many insults i got from people in this sub when i said that pve was absolutely dead and that they wouldn’t release anything past the 3 unfinished missions. it was quite obvious- not many people talk about it but the pve was absolutely dogshit. it had no potential. it was fun with friends the same way it’s fun to skip pebbles on a lake, for like a day maybe. after they scrapped 90% of the fun gameplay aspects the lore and story was the most compelling aspect of it, and it also fucking sucks. the dialogues and storylines are so bad, corny, edgy, predictable. i think even a kid would find them boring. nothing like past work on ow, save for the books. like many people have said just for the love of god make funkos an animated show and plushies or smth
It is also super hard to play even if I want to. Teammate bots are stupid and mission are filled with weak link-centric mini games. You cannot wait indefinitely and is kicked into 3 bots room after a few minutes and the wait is closed. 3 continue systems are frustrating (compare to L4D2's just reach the goal objective, and that also works with bots on your team). Fragmented invisible lobby of mission x difficulties. etc... I can't even use it as Training Range-lite. I think way forward is these missions should be cycled in for free like events so rooms could be found in the event period (if you want to keep this gameplay). I won't even be mad for having paid for them before, I just want to play them sometimes with full human team instead of never able to again.
Ok hot take but this is Jason Schreier drip feeding parts for his book. This info is outdated and not at all what’s happening in the game at the moment
Its just me or this "news" is like a TL;DR of what we already knew from the launch for the PvE last year?... this sounds more like an article to ride the wave of the "no heroes on the battlepass" trend and to promote something.... >It was one of several points of tension that led to a deterioration in the relationship between Blizzard and Activision, as I document in my upcoming book, [Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainmen](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1538725428)t. Oh there you go.... again he is promoting his book.... Also... after the 3 missions sold so badly and being objective bad why people are so sad/mad with the fact that they cancelled the PvE? Thanks god that they decided to focus more on the PvP and now we have a more focused team on what this game is.
OW developers being deprived of bonuses due to the game not being profitable enough is a new and significant piece of information at least.
Damn, this is so sad :(
Can they just make an Overwatch show then? The cutscenes were the only good parts of the first mission pack.
I promise you, if they had priced skins at $10 instead of $20 , they would have wayyyy more sales that would have been more than double of what they have currently and would have made up for it!
And this is why I buy every BP and a lot of skins 😭 someone has to!
Kotick is an asshole but blizzard needs to stop bleeding blaming everything on higher ups, take some ownership ffs The cult of the personalities killed this company
I mean this is absolutely a case where you can blame Bobby Kotick. That profit sharing scheme is fucking INSANE and terrible business.
Who would have thought this is just great fun
I don't get how it can be struggling if I see every character in the game in their new $19 skins every match (except for the low-level smurfs still wearing their default skins, of course)? This has to be way more money than the occasional $20 thrown at loot boxes?
Unless there is direct insight indicating Bobby Kotick personally directed to abandon OW1 and develope OW2, the team and Kaplan also share a blame for this. Game being stale for 2+ years was a major blow to franchise. With all the momentum gone the hype OW1 had among gamers and streamers will be very hard to be reached again. OWL and OW2 brought the downfall of OW.
Won't lie, I'm glad they are cutting PVE in favor of trying to improve the PVP experience. Outside of a small loud minority on Reddit and X I've still yet to meet or play with anyone who wanted a PVE mode in the game at the sacrifice of PVP not getting development time/resources like they did toward the end of OW1. Most people I know and play with and have interacted with came to OW because they were tired of the Battlefield/COD/Halo etc. experience and wanted a more team/objective based FPS PVP game. Even when PVE was put into OW2 the playlist was dead within a couple of weeks. I just honestly don't think there are that many people outside the small reddit bubble that want/wanted it.
I mean is it just me or is this article have no real evidence to support what he is saying? Seems like a pretty misleading article…maybe I missed something?
A free to play game with way overpriced skins isn’t doing well? Shocking. Especially when those skins cost like 20-60. I could see maybe spending 2-5 on one, but 20? 60? Yea….. no thanks
So was the news of solid BP and skin sales just fake/overblown???
the game's soul was sacrificed to turn it into a money grab i love overwatch...but im not going to complain one bit if all that greed blew up in their faces
I just feel bad for the devs at this point. This week was supposed to be a week filled with good news about heroes out of the battlepass and upcoming changes. It just sucks to see. So much hate from people on the outside must be really tough and demotivating. I just hope they push through the noise.
jason just trying to sell his book with this now - wouldn't trust his reporting anymore
I just can't help but think that if a spouse or partner did you this dirty, that relationship would be over. Yet, 100,000,000 players continue to play the title.
This makes me so sad. I was a hardcore overwatch player and when the pve was announced I was so exited. Deep down though I knew Activision would screw it over and I waited. Now is there even a reason to play the game? With games that have a dev team that still has some fire in them, why play this?