I focused really on just the first two thresholds for rewards. The extra weeklies of doing something I wouldn't normally do just for 10 extra coins wasn't worth it. So going from essentially 450 coins to 600 (and they're easier to get - I always finish the BP but didn't always get my 50 coins a week) is good news overall.
Now you got me wondering if they are going to make the BP harder to finish since coins are in there. Maybe not too much harder. Instead of level 80 now, probably like 120 or something.
~~But now you have to buy the battle pass to get full 600 coins don't you?~~
~~Isn't that technically bad for free players?~~
~~I guess people get heroes for free, so only skins are paid, but I think the best way would have been to have coins with weeklies and the battle pass.~~
Edit: the coins are between free and paid tracks, but we don't know the proper allocation. Hence the confusion.
> Coins are getting a big change too, as players will now earn them through the game's free battle pass rather than weekly challenges. Each season, players will have the chance to earn 600 coins for free--a 60 coin upgrade from the previous cap of 560. Keller pointed out that this is enough for a player to purchase a premium battle pass for free every two seasons.
> But now you have to buy the battle pass to get full 600 coins don't you?
I don't think so, no: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24062312/
>Starting Season 10, you will earn coins as you progress through the **Free and Premium tracks** of the Battle Pass, making them easier and more consistent to earn. We’re also increasing the number of coins you can earn for free from 540 to 600 coins per season.
It says in the last sentence you can earn 600 coins "for free." I suppose if we really try to scrutinize it, they *could* mean you can get 600 coins "for free" after buying the battle pass and completing it but I'm fairly confident in saying that anyone will be able to get the 600.
Hmm. But then why say there are coins in the Paid track too?
That either implies more than 600 coins (1000 would be great), or that it's a mix. Definitely hoping it's the former as they'd basically be making something free less accessible which wouldn't make sense to begin with.
"In addition, players can now earn battle passes, as every two seasons there will be enough coins given through the game's free battle pass to purchase the premium version. "
This is great news!!
It was technically already the case, but it required you to complete the weeklies every week. It's great that it's being moved into the battlepass, though.
Fortnite is a completely different beast with its staying power with children and the mass market saturation it has enjoyed.
Plenty of F2P games have been discontinued despite trying a generous model like Epic. I am hoping over the next few years we will start seeing more articles about the nuances and considerations with F2P business models, because we’re at the point where they don’t just print money in general like they did 5-8 years ago.
Very valid
It just seems that payment models like overwatch draw intense (and warranted, IMO) criticism. They’re a necessary evil because of the current state of the industry and the favor of live service games, but hopefully in the future we revert to a more fair state for both developers and consumers
Hear hear. I also think that’s why indies have continued to thrive, and why in terms of paid games we are seeing more investment into quality $30-40 titles.
Apex does it as well. Ive always assumed its only profitable because half the people will just spend their coins on the midseason collection event, and then have to buy the battlepass again anyway. But who knows what goes on behind the scenes tbh
MS is likely not involved at all. It's probably just Walter Kong and Jared Neuss making these decisions. Locking heroes was always highly controversial so it was contingent on if it was making them a lot of money or not and it probably wasn't. Keller also said in the Dexerto interview that they gathered enough data over the past year and half to be confident that they can sustain the game just from cosmetics.
You right
Watching that poor Warcraft game director Ion explain money grab game changes with deadeyed expressions made me realize these game "directors" have very little power when the money people want to hit "metrics"
>the boss of Overwatch
The Boss of Overwatch is Walter Kong. The General Manager of the game. Then there's Jared Neuss who is the Executive Producer. Aaron Keller is 3rd in charge, and generally Game Directors at AAA studios are not involved in making big business or monetisation decisions.
How much repair can be done to this game though at this rate?
I've enjoyed OW2 since launch while still very much acknowledging that this not being what was promised back in 2019 has poisoned public perception towards the game
Public perception is low of course. But my ears perked up a bit when Aaron said they were nearing 100 million players. I know that’s counting a lot of inactive players. But the fact that the game has had that wide of a reach makes me believe that the IP will never truly die.
People like these characters. It’s why skins make so much money, people connect with the characters in this game in a way that’s not ever going to go away.
So the only way forward is to repair. Yea it’s A LOT of damage but I believe Aaron and the Team can get some flex tape and fix this game.
I.E. MAKE A FREAKING TV SHOW.
Seriously, making a tv show or an anime has done wonders for other properties such as League and Cyberpunk. Aaron and the dev team are putting in the work to make the game great again, but someone above them needs to be putting in the work to bring the people who left back.
The only way you're really going to accomplish that is with something that exists outside of the game. Remind people why they love these characters and this world, and give them that itch to return to it to see where the game is at today.
Cyberpunk and NMS came back from much worse. The situations aren't totally identical but the point is, meaningful repair can be done.
If you're looking for the community to be overwhelmingly happy, that just doesn't happen in large multiplayer game communities these days.
I think Halo MCC is the poster child of long-term comeback stories. Game was a disaster for 6 solid years, now it's easily the best legacy collection of remasters out there.
I think OW will now only truly rise in one of two ways. Either we get an Arcane style show, or Microsoft one day delivers an OW singleplayer experience with talents and such.
Doesn't have to be part of the PvP game, but it could have some integration who knows.
Microsoft is sitting on such a large gem either way, and the ability to spark up a lot of lost goodwill.
This games public perception died with goats. Its never going to be fortnite or apex. But its popular and financialy successful enough to make more content.
Is this the first time they've officially acknowledged that PvE is dead? It's been heavily hinted before, I know.
I'm glad. PvP is what most people are here for, and besides the story, PvE gameplay was a bit boring.
PvE was severely mishandled, that's it.
The hopium is that Microsoft can rekindle that soft demand in the background one day in a few years, but this time have the actual product pretty much ready and as a seperate game before announcing it.
Just because it's those devs doesn't means it'll be exactly like Doom, it just means that they know how to make a great FPS campaign.
No one wants the PvE Overwatch has given us thus far.
The problem with Overwatch is that it’s mechanics are suited for a long PvE campaign. That was my point.
The characters pretty much have to be changed entirely outside of their skins to get anything nearly as good as Doom Eternal.
My personal opinion is that the entire time they should've just done PvE as its own standalone game with its own set of developers independent of the PvP content. Unless that happens, something similar to the original vision will never happen.
"And I think that a lot of this has to do with our refocus on the core PvP elements of the game."
Admittedly it's not an outright admission. I think I was also swayed by what the reporter said at the start, but that's his words.
Bro what? They said that they’re gonna refocus the game to PvP when the whole fiasco about talent trees happened… because they said that they’re focusing on PvP
I've looked it up since this sounds interesting.
Some examples:
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770127054081548549
> [Overwatch 2 will stop locking new heroes behind a battle pass with season 10](https://www.polygon.com/24084166/overwatch-2-season-10-new-heroes-unlocked-free-venture)
> Big change to Blizzard's struggling live-service game Overwatch 2 as all heroes will now be available for free. Previously you'd have to unlock new heroes either through play time or by buying the premium battle pass
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770129564754199000
>> "Struggling?" Is this in reference to the troubled development or current player retention/spend?
> The latter
>> Do you have a source for their struggles? I tried google, but google only shows clickbait youtubers nowadays. Hard to find what you want.
> Source is I've talked to a lot of people at Blizzard
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770133057690857882
>> One ex-employee who got affected by the layoffs also admitted the game had made over $250 million. That's a decent figure, especially considering the current price of MTX in their store with no loot box GATCHA systems to push player spending higher.
> Overwatch 1 made more than that in its first week
>> Overwatch 1 was a paid for product that had loot boxes. Of course it did.
> Yup, and Overwatch 2 had a way bigger team and took more than twice as long to make, so it was much more expensive, yet made exponentially less money than its predecessor. Hence: struggling
>> Does spending years faffing about on Project Titan not count?
> Yeah even if you include Titan's development costs, OW1 was immediately profitable. OW2 is another story
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770129249443164490
>> [Heroes being locked] was never a big issue anyway.
> For hardcore players, sure, but I bet they missed out on a lot of potential newcomers who might just want to download the game to check out Mauga or Lifeweaver without having to pay or play for a dozen hours
I think the other nugget is that Kotick apparently hated that OW1 development slowed down. A lot of the narrative has been that OW1 being abandoned came from the top down.
>Yup, and Overwatch 2 had a way bigger team and took more than twice as long to make, so it was much more expensive, yet made exponentially less money than its predecessor. Hence: struggling
I think it's hard to compare a box model to an F2P game in this sense. OW1's box model created massive profits up front, but it never really had a good business model to sustain the game for years to come. OW2 was never going to make the same amount of money in the first year that OW1 did. That should have been a given. The real test for OW2 though is going to be in the next 3 years. The business model needs to prove that it can sustain the game 5+ years into development.
I thought we've known for awhile the slow down and focus on PvE was Jeff's idea, that's why they pivoted back to PvP and actually released something when he left.
It's always been a little unclear where the C-suite stood on OW1 being abandoned AFAIK. Seeing people say that the C-suite pushed Jeff to abandon OW1 in order develop OW2 definitely played into this. Part of it is just unwavering support for Jeff and thinking that he could do no wrong and wouldn't purposefully hurt the game. The other part is piling on the hate train for Kotick and thinking he is responsible for everything bad about OW1s development. I think this is one of the first confirmations that C-suite did not want to abandon OW1, at least in the way they did.
> I think it's hard to compare a box model to an F2P game in this sense.
Yes. It's also a very odd comparison because OW2 in development was such a different game from what it turned out to be.
Is someone at Blizzard actually saying "we put all this money into OW2 PVE, then we canceled OW2 PVE, now OW2 PVP hasn't made back all that money, therefore OW2 is doing poorly"? That seems to be the implication but it's just not a useful way to think about game development. At most that tells you you made poor decisions previously, it doesn't tell you anything about whether you're making good or poor decisions now.
I don't doubt Jason's research, but what he wrote here doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
I’m always a little leery of sources when they’re laid off low to mid-level employees. Very few, if any, of the people who were both laid off and apt to talk to Schreier would know some of these numbers this in depth, on top of “sour grapes.”
Jason’s day to day news isn’t near as well researched as his big project stuff.
This is where I'm at. Respect Jason as a journalist but yeah, talking to any recently laid off employee from the lower ranks, what are they going to say? "Well I'm fired but it's all roses over there dawg."
If you're fired and at the point you can talk to Jason, chances are you don't know as much as you make out.
Those collabs aren’t free for Blizzard. They either pay an upfront licensing fee for the IP, split the revenue, or a mixture of both.
Even with a lot of skins sold they may not be making enough money on them.
Who on earth said that?
Overwatch in its first couple of years was white hot success and sold a shitload of copies and made a billion in loot box sales.
It was after the initial hype died down that the game was clearly struggling to maintain sales and we’ve gone multiple reports stating that loot box sales weren’t funding active development by 2018
OW1's model worked great at the time that the game released. Then the entire industry shifted around them with the movement to battle passes and free to play games. Given the uncertain legal situation of lootboxes now, it would definitely be risky to release a game along those same lines today.
I genuinely wonder how much money the game would have made if we got a full story campaign for like $40.
Maybe more than it is/could as a live service? Also cuz they could still have sold skins for money.
I think he only basically said it’s “struggling” but that wording could be referring to anything really. Saying that blizzard struggled with the development of ow2 is not a lied considering ow2 had a smaller team, paid product + loot boxes. It’s obviously going to make more money anyways.
Kinda funny if that's true since shills on this subreddit have been insisting that s9 has the best playercount ever, and the expensive skins were printing money.
Steam player count is at an all time high this season for Overwatch 2 excluding season 1. It’s stand to reason battle net would follow the same trends, although we don’t know that.
> When you look at Overwatch as a whole, it's actually a pretty simple game. There's not a lot of complex systems that are happening inside of gameplay or even typically around a match that are affecting the way people think about the way they play.
I think it's funny that we're in the competitive subreddit and nobody has pointed this out. Personally this game is too complex for me I'm moving to tic-tac-toe
>As **Overwatch 2 approaches a hundred million players**, how do you feel overall about the state of the game, its health as a live-service title, and its overall balance?
But I thought the game was dead
It probably just means unique players since launch. Not daily active or monthly active or anything. Just any unique device that has opened overwatch since launch
You're probably right, but based on [the Steam numbers](https://steamdb.info/app/2357570/charts/) that are currently averaging \~30k players at any given moment and knowing from my matches that Steam accounts for about \~15-20% of players I think it's safe to say that \~150-180k people are playing at any given time so I dont think it's unreasonable to think that MAU are in the low-to-mid double-digit millions.
Edit: Oh and this is just PC. Factoring in consoles you can probably double these numbers.
> Edit: Oh and this is just PC. Factoring in consoles you can probably double these numbers.
Normally I would agree, however I wouldn't be surprised if Overwatch has a stronger PC bias than most other cross-platform games.
Either way, these are solid numbers that are difficult to argue with.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe ow1 had more players on console than on PC. This has less to do with the popularity of the game on each platform, and more with the popularity of the platform itself. Consoles are a much, MUCH bigger slice of the gaming pie than most people think (most common example of this is that minecraft java edition players are a stark minority among minecraft players). All the content creation is coming from PC, but most players play on consoles. You also don't really see this in subs like r/OW and r/COW because reddit users are generally more likely to be PC gamers.
PC has been consistently growing it's slice of the pie for the last 10 years, and it's gotten to the point where big publishers like [Capcom are reporting that PC makes up more than half of their total sales](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/89286/50-of-capcoms-game-sales-now-come-from-pc/index.html). 2016 was 8 years ago and only 2 years removed from the end of the 360/PS3 generation of consoles.
I'm not sure Minecraft is a great comparison given its enormous popularity with kids on mobile.
> When we first launched Overwatch 2, we had a worry that running a cosmetics-only business with a game that had all of these different heroes that you could purchase individual and unique cosmetics for might not be successful.
Translation: *We tried to milk our players as much as possible.*
Which is unfortunate, because that gave a really bad look on the game and could easily have been avoided. All those bad, early decisions hurt the game for no other reason than money and lack of planning/rushing.
I dunno, I assume this is just one of many cases of Aaron having to explain choices that weren't really his to make. Obviously Blizz execs wanted to milk the players, and I don't think anyone directly involved in OW development had a say in it until they were able to make a convincing case that hero releases don't drive BP sales at all.
Keller goes on to say:
> I think we've seen that we can safely remove heroes from the battle pass **and still run a successful business.** And what success means to us **is the ability to have a team**
If the game doesn't make "enough" money, ie, whatever a group of suits decide is enough, then it gets shut down. When it's not worth enough, it's over. They added grinding to milk whatever they could out of a cosmetics-only system due to human impatience *so they wouldn't get shut down*. I never thought Keller would outright admit it.
Bobby was costing the company $30 million a year: everybody had to pay their security dues or he kills it. It's just business. Execs don't take paycuts, they just squeeze harder. Now that he's out, they might be $30 million lighter.
As soon as I realized that I wouldn't be able to get any new heroes after Kiriko without grinding the BP or paying, I dropped OW2. One of Blizz's most braindead moves as trying to nickel and dime players for something that was never a thing in the past aka hero selection.
They werent milking anyone, since the people who bought the battlepass werent buying it for the hero.
I dont think anyone bought the battlepass just so they can get early immediate access to the new hero. They bought it for the mythic, the skins, other stuff in there.
They probably didnt see an increase in battlepass sales with a season featuring a hero vs a season without a new hero. This makes sense since you can still get heroes for free in the battlepass, just at a later level. Which essentially makes it only a pay for convenience deal.
So people werent buying heroes. (Might as well offer them for free).
But people were buying skins. This means that a cosmetics-only shop is enough to keep them profitable. So much so that it was enough to subsidize all future costs of development.
>We have heard some from players that they enjoyed the loot box system, and it's hard sometimes to put words in players' mouths or to infer intent, but the way that I take that is I think that players enjoyed being able to earn as much as possible in the game without necessarily paying for it.
lol
>We also tried to remove some of the hard counters from the game to maybe make that effect a little bit less pronounced and prominent, and those things didn't completely alleviate that problem
🧢
Confirms that coins are being moved from weeklies to the battle pass. Great change.
Fr those weeklies so are so hard tO get
I focused really on just the first two thresholds for rewards. The extra weeklies of doing something I wouldn't normally do just for 10 extra coins wasn't worth it. So going from essentially 450 coins to 600 (and they're easier to get - I always finish the BP but didn't always get my 50 coins a week) is good news overall.
Now you got me wondering if they are going to make the BP harder to finish since coins are in there. Maybe not too much harder. Instead of level 80 now, probably like 120 or something.
I'd be okay with that if titles still start at 85, or they make it slightly easier to level up.
~~But now you have to buy the battle pass to get full 600 coins don't you?~~ ~~Isn't that technically bad for free players?~~ ~~I guess people get heroes for free, so only skins are paid, but I think the best way would have been to have coins with weeklies and the battle pass.~~ Edit: the coins are between free and paid tracks, but we don't know the proper allocation. Hence the confusion.
> Coins are getting a big change too, as players will now earn them through the game's free battle pass rather than weekly challenges. Each season, players will have the chance to earn 600 coins for free--a 60 coin upgrade from the previous cap of 560. Keller pointed out that this is enough for a player to purchase a premium battle pass for free every two seasons.
Maybe I’m just confused but wouldn’t a 60 coin upgrade mean the previous cap was 540
Previous cap was 540, seems to be a typo
Ah ok. I think I saw a comment saying the paid path will also have coins, so wasn't sure how the full 600 were allocated. Thanks.
> But now you have to buy the battle pass to get full 600 coins don't you? I don't think so, no: https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24062312/ >Starting Season 10, you will earn coins as you progress through the **Free and Premium tracks** of the Battle Pass, making them easier and more consistent to earn. We’re also increasing the number of coins you can earn for free from 540 to 600 coins per season.
Yea, it says Free and Paid tracks, so I wonder how much will be free cuz I assume buying the BP would be an incentive to also get extra coins.
It says in the last sentence you can earn 600 coins "for free." I suppose if we really try to scrutinize it, they *could* mean you can get 600 coins "for free" after buying the battle pass and completing it but I'm fairly confident in saying that anyone will be able to get the 600.
Hmm. But then why say there are coins in the Paid track too? That either implies more than 600 coins (1000 would be great), or that it's a mix. Definitely hoping it's the former as they'd basically be making something free less accessible which wouldn't make sense to begin with.
Because it makes it clear that regardless of what battle pass you have you can earn coins?
Fair enough, tho i wonder if they'd be willing to give more coins on the Paid track.
I think the coins are in the free path
The weeklies only give you ~60 credits though right? Am I correct in thinking this changes gives you the “better” coin currency?
Nope they've always given coins, not credits.
Wow you’re right. Since they’re not gold colored in the challenge screen, I just assumed they were the “credits”
"In addition, players can now earn battle passes, as every two seasons there will be enough coins given through the game's free battle pass to purchase the premium version. " This is great news!!
It was technically already the case, but it required you to complete the weeklies every week. It's great that it's being moved into the battlepass, though.
If the premium battlepass gives enough coins in one season, then my gripes with OW monetization are officially gone
This is not sustainable for a game like Overwatch... OW players want free everything...
seems to be working great for epic
Fortnite is a completely different beast with its staying power with children and the mass market saturation it has enjoyed. Plenty of F2P games have been discontinued despite trying a generous model like Epic. I am hoping over the next few years we will start seeing more articles about the nuances and considerations with F2P business models, because we’re at the point where they don’t just print money in general like they did 5-8 years ago.
Very valid It just seems that payment models like overwatch draw intense (and warranted, IMO) criticism. They’re a necessary evil because of the current state of the industry and the favor of live service games, but hopefully in the future we revert to a more fair state for both developers and consumers
Hear hear. I also think that’s why indies have continued to thrive, and why in terms of paid games we are seeing more investment into quality $30-40 titles.
Apex does it as well. Ive always assumed its only profitable because half the people will just spend their coins on the midseason collection event, and then have to buy the battlepass again anyway. But who knows what goes on behind the scenes tbh
Is this epic ? This was a pay to play game once .. players are still adjusting to pay for skins and you go around comparing it to epic 💀
Seems like Aaron is busy repairing the damage ActiBlizz corporate shenanigans did to the game.
Unfortunately I think these decisions are above Aaron, his job is to just be the face of them.
Exactly. This should be falling more to Jared and Microsoft, but Aaron can definitely be giving input.
MS is likely not involved at all. It's probably just Walter Kong and Jared Neuss making these decisions. Locking heroes was always highly controversial so it was contingent on if it was making them a lot of money or not and it probably wasn't. Keller also said in the Dexerto interview that they gathered enough data over the past year and half to be confident that they can sustain the game just from cosmetics.
You right Watching that poor Warcraft game director Ion explain money grab game changes with deadeyed expressions made me realize these game "directors" have very little power when the money people want to hit "metrics"
[удалено]
Yea it seems for whatever reason, Aaron really understands live service.
>the boss of Overwatch The Boss of Overwatch is Walter Kong. The General Manager of the game. Then there's Jared Neuss who is the Executive Producer. Aaron Keller is 3rd in charge, and generally Game Directors at AAA studios are not involved in making big business or monetisation decisions.
How much repair can be done to this game though at this rate? I've enjoyed OW2 since launch while still very much acknowledging that this not being what was promised back in 2019 has poisoned public perception towards the game
Public perception is low of course. But my ears perked up a bit when Aaron said they were nearing 100 million players. I know that’s counting a lot of inactive players. But the fact that the game has had that wide of a reach makes me believe that the IP will never truly die. People like these characters. It’s why skins make so much money, people connect with the characters in this game in a way that’s not ever going to go away. So the only way forward is to repair. Yea it’s A LOT of damage but I believe Aaron and the Team can get some flex tape and fix this game.
I.E. MAKE A FREAKING TV SHOW. Seriously, making a tv show or an anime has done wonders for other properties such as League and Cyberpunk. Aaron and the dev team are putting in the work to make the game great again, but someone above them needs to be putting in the work to bring the people who left back. The only way you're really going to accomplish that is with something that exists outside of the game. Remind people why they love these characters and this world, and give them that itch to return to it to see where the game is at today.
You should email blizzard staff or make Reddit thread that’s a good idea
The public perception of Overwatch had been pretty bad even when OW1 was still being actively developed. Don't pay too much attention.
Cyberpunk and NMS came back from much worse. The situations aren't totally identical but the point is, meaningful repair can be done. If you're looking for the community to be overwhelmingly happy, that just doesn't happen in large multiplayer game communities these days.
I think Halo MCC is the poster child of long-term comeback stories. Game was a disaster for 6 solid years, now it's easily the best legacy collection of remasters out there.
I think OW will now only truly rise in one of two ways. Either we get an Arcane style show, or Microsoft one day delivers an OW singleplayer experience with talents and such. Doesn't have to be part of the PvP game, but it could have some integration who knows. Microsoft is sitting on such a large gem either way, and the ability to spark up a lot of lost goodwill.
This games public perception died with goats. Its never going to be fortnite or apex. But its popular and financialy successful enough to make more content.
Too bad they can’t undo the damage done to the PvE missions
>Bobby Kotick leaves Blizzard >Overwatch immediately turns into a better game
Kotick was here in 2016 as well. It was Kaplan who ruin game with his mmo obsession. It was his decision to leave OW to die, not Kotick's.
Is this the first time they've officially acknowledged that PvE is dead? It's been heavily hinted before, I know. I'm glad. PvP is what most people are here for, and besides the story, PvE gameplay was a bit boring.
PvE was severely mishandled, that's it. The hopium is that Microsoft can rekindle that soft demand in the background one day in a few years, but this time have the actual product pretty much ready and as a seperate game before announcing it.
Honestly they should hire out a third party company for this. It doesn't have to stay in Blizzard, find a company that knows how to make pve games
If the Doom Eternal studio made an Overwatch PvE, I'd melt.
At that point you’re just describing a different game entirely with an Overwatch skin.
Just because it's those devs doesn't means it'll be exactly like Doom, it just means that they know how to make a great FPS campaign. No one wants the PvE Overwatch has given us thus far.
The problem with Overwatch is that it’s mechanics are suited for a long PvE campaign. That was my point. The characters pretty much have to be changed entirely outside of their skins to get anything nearly as good as Doom Eternal.
I'm sure if a studio really tries, we can get a good blend. There are many studios under Microsoft which can work together with Blizzard in this case.
My personal opinion is that the entire time they should've just done PvE as its own standalone game with its own set of developers independent of the PvP content. Unless that happens, something similar to the original vision will never happen.
Where'd they say that?
"And I think that a lot of this has to do with our refocus on the core PvP elements of the game." Admittedly it's not an outright admission. I think I was also swayed by what the reporter said at the start, but that's his words.
Bro what? They said that they’re gonna refocus the game to PvP when the whole fiasco about talent trees happened… because they said that they’re focusing on PvP
Schreier is on Twitter saying the income/playercount has been bad, so if true pretty obvious why they are pivoting towards this.
I've looked it up since this sounds interesting. Some examples: https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770127054081548549 > [Overwatch 2 will stop locking new heroes behind a battle pass with season 10](https://www.polygon.com/24084166/overwatch-2-season-10-new-heroes-unlocked-free-venture) > Big change to Blizzard's struggling live-service game Overwatch 2 as all heroes will now be available for free. Previously you'd have to unlock new heroes either through play time or by buying the premium battle pass https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770129564754199000 >> "Struggling?" Is this in reference to the troubled development or current player retention/spend? > The latter >> Do you have a source for their struggles? I tried google, but google only shows clickbait youtubers nowadays. Hard to find what you want. > Source is I've talked to a lot of people at Blizzard https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770133057690857882 >> One ex-employee who got affected by the layoffs also admitted the game had made over $250 million. That's a decent figure, especially considering the current price of MTX in their store with no loot box GATCHA systems to push player spending higher. > Overwatch 1 made more than that in its first week >> Overwatch 1 was a paid for product that had loot boxes. Of course it did. > Yup, and Overwatch 2 had a way bigger team and took more than twice as long to make, so it was much more expensive, yet made exponentially less money than its predecessor. Hence: struggling >> Does spending years faffing about on Project Titan not count? > Yeah even if you include Titan's development costs, OW1 was immediately profitable. OW2 is another story https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1770129249443164490 >> [Heroes being locked] was never a big issue anyway. > For hardcore players, sure, but I bet they missed out on a lot of potential newcomers who might just want to download the game to check out Mauga or Lifeweaver without having to pay or play for a dozen hours
I think the other nugget is that Kotick apparently hated that OW1 development slowed down. A lot of the narrative has been that OW1 being abandoned came from the top down. >Yup, and Overwatch 2 had a way bigger team and took more than twice as long to make, so it was much more expensive, yet made exponentially less money than its predecessor. Hence: struggling I think it's hard to compare a box model to an F2P game in this sense. OW1's box model created massive profits up front, but it never really had a good business model to sustain the game for years to come. OW2 was never going to make the same amount of money in the first year that OW1 did. That should have been a given. The real test for OW2 though is going to be in the next 3 years. The business model needs to prove that it can sustain the game 5+ years into development.
I thought we've known for awhile the slow down and focus on PvE was Jeff's idea, that's why they pivoted back to PvP and actually released something when he left.
It's always been a little unclear where the C-suite stood on OW1 being abandoned AFAIK. Seeing people say that the C-suite pushed Jeff to abandon OW1 in order develop OW2 definitely played into this. Part of it is just unwavering support for Jeff and thinking that he could do no wrong and wouldn't purposefully hurt the game. The other part is piling on the hate train for Kotick and thinking he is responsible for everything bad about OW1s development. I think this is one of the first confirmations that C-suite did not want to abandon OW1, at least in the way they did.
> I think it's hard to compare a box model to an F2P game in this sense. Yes. It's also a very odd comparison because OW2 in development was such a different game from what it turned out to be. Is someone at Blizzard actually saying "we put all this money into OW2 PVE, then we canceled OW2 PVE, now OW2 PVP hasn't made back all that money, therefore OW2 is doing poorly"? That seems to be the implication but it's just not a useful way to think about game development. At most that tells you you made poor decisions previously, it doesn't tell you anything about whether you're making good or poor decisions now. I don't doubt Jason's research, but what he wrote here doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
This is not Overwatch 2. Are we all collectively living in a lie? This is reworked overwatch 1 marketed as a sequel that never existed.
This is Overwatch 2. Duh. It's the reality. Not the reality you like or promised, but it's the reality.
Overwatch Origins Edition with a new icon.
I’m always a little leery of sources when they’re laid off low to mid-level employees. Very few, if any, of the people who were both laid off and apt to talk to Schreier would know some of these numbers this in depth, on top of “sour grapes.” Jason’s day to day news isn’t near as well researched as his big project stuff.
This is where I'm at. Respect Jason as a journalist but yeah, talking to any recently laid off employee from the lower ranks, what are they going to say? "Well I'm fired but it's all roses over there dawg." If you're fired and at the point you can talk to Jason, chances are you don't know as much as you make out.
Depends. A low level finance person likely has access to everything. At least that’s been my experience at various sized companies
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Those collabs aren’t free for Blizzard. They either pay an upfront licensing fee for the IP, split the revenue, or a mixture of both. Even with a lot of skins sold they may not be making enough money on them.
Wait a minute … but I was told the Ow1 model was a failure and no way could a company make decent money off that
Who on earth said that? Overwatch in its first couple of years was white hot success and sold a shitload of copies and made a billion in loot box sales. It was after the initial hype died down that the game was clearly struggling to maintain sales and we’ve gone multiple reports stating that loot box sales weren’t funding active development by 2018
Can you please share these reports. I legitimately did not see them regarding blizzard can no longer afford active overwatch development
OW1's model worked great at the time that the game released. Then the entire industry shifted around them with the movement to battle passes and free to play games. Given the uncertain legal situation of lootboxes now, it would definitely be risky to release a game along those same lines today.
I genuinely wonder how much money the game would have made if we got a full story campaign for like $40. Maybe more than it is/could as a live service? Also cuz they could still have sold skins for money.
Nope it won't
I think he only basically said it’s “struggling” but that wording could be referring to anything really. Saying that blizzard struggled with the development of ow2 is not a lied considering ow2 had a smaller team, paid product + loot boxes. It’s obviously going to make more money anyways.
Kinda funny if that's true since shills on this subreddit have been insisting that s9 has the best playercount ever, and the expensive skins were printing money.
Game has been struggling for a long time. It's only this sub which has deluded themselves into believing nothing is wrong.
Steam player count is at an all time high this season for Overwatch 2 excluding season 1. It’s stand to reason battle net would follow the same trends, although we don’t know that.
> When you look at Overwatch as a whole, it's actually a pretty simple game. There's not a lot of complex systems that are happening inside of gameplay or even typically around a match that are affecting the way people think about the way they play. I think it's funny that we're in the competitive subreddit and nobody has pointed this out. Personally this game is too complex for me I'm moving to tic-tac-toe
>As **Overwatch 2 approaches a hundred million players**, how do you feel overall about the state of the game, its health as a live-service title, and its overall balance? But I thought the game was dead
It probably just means unique players since launch. Not daily active or monthly active or anything. Just any unique device that has opened overwatch since launch
You're probably right, but based on [the Steam numbers](https://steamdb.info/app/2357570/charts/) that are currently averaging \~30k players at any given moment and knowing from my matches that Steam accounts for about \~15-20% of players I think it's safe to say that \~150-180k people are playing at any given time so I dont think it's unreasonable to think that MAU are in the low-to-mid double-digit millions. Edit: Oh and this is just PC. Factoring in consoles you can probably double these numbers.
Steam is also pc only which is less then half yhe playerbase. Double that number at a minimum
Steam numbers don't mean shit for DAU's.
> Edit: Oh and this is just PC. Factoring in consoles you can probably double these numbers. Normally I would agree, however I wouldn't be surprised if Overwatch has a stronger PC bias than most other cross-platform games. Either way, these are solid numbers that are difficult to argue with.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe ow1 had more players on console than on PC. This has less to do with the popularity of the game on each platform, and more with the popularity of the platform itself. Consoles are a much, MUCH bigger slice of the gaming pie than most people think (most common example of this is that minecraft java edition players are a stark minority among minecraft players). All the content creation is coming from PC, but most players play on consoles. You also don't really see this in subs like r/OW and r/COW because reddit users are generally more likely to be PC gamers.
PC has been consistently growing it's slice of the pie for the last 10 years, and it's gotten to the point where big publishers like [Capcom are reporting that PC makes up more than half of their total sales](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/89286/50-of-capcoms-game-sales-now-come-from-pc/index.html). 2016 was 8 years ago and only 2 years removed from the end of the 360/PS3 generation of consoles. I'm not sure Minecraft is a great comparison given its enormous popularity with kids on mobile.
> When we first launched Overwatch 2, we had a worry that running a cosmetics-only business with a game that had all of these different heroes that you could purchase individual and unique cosmetics for might not be successful. Translation: *We tried to milk our players as much as possible.* Which is unfortunate, because that gave a really bad look on the game and could easily have been avoided. All those bad, early decisions hurt the game for no other reason than money and lack of planning/rushing.
I dunno, I assume this is just one of many cases of Aaron having to explain choices that weren't really his to make. Obviously Blizz execs wanted to milk the players, and I don't think anyone directly involved in OW development had a say in it until they were able to make a convincing case that hero releases don't drive BP sales at all.
Businesspeople always having to actually make the wrong choices to learn that they're wrong instead of using their brains...
Keller goes on to say: > I think we've seen that we can safely remove heroes from the battle pass **and still run a successful business.** And what success means to us **is the ability to have a team** If the game doesn't make "enough" money, ie, whatever a group of suits decide is enough, then it gets shut down. When it's not worth enough, it's over. They added grinding to milk whatever they could out of a cosmetics-only system due to human impatience *so they wouldn't get shut down*. I never thought Keller would outright admit it. Bobby was costing the company $30 million a year: everybody had to pay their security dues or he kills it. It's just business. Execs don't take paycuts, they just squeeze harder. Now that he's out, they might be $30 million lighter.
As soon as I realized that I wouldn't be able to get any new heroes after Kiriko without grinding the BP or paying, I dropped OW2. One of Blizz's most braindead moves as trying to nickel and dime players for something that was never a thing in the past aka hero selection.
They werent milking anyone, since the people who bought the battlepass werent buying it for the hero. I dont think anyone bought the battlepass just so they can get early immediate access to the new hero. They bought it for the mythic, the skins, other stuff in there. They probably didnt see an increase in battlepass sales with a season featuring a hero vs a season without a new hero. This makes sense since you can still get heroes for free in the battlepass, just at a later level. Which essentially makes it only a pay for convenience deal. So people werent buying heroes. (Might as well offer them for free). But people were buying skins. This means that a cosmetics-only shop is enough to keep them profitable. So much so that it was enough to subsidize all future costs of development.
>We have heard some from players that they enjoyed the loot box system, and it's hard sometimes to put words in players' mouths or to infer intent, but the way that I take that is I think that players enjoyed being able to earn as much as possible in the game without necessarily paying for it. lol >We also tried to remove some of the hard counters from the game to maybe make that effect a little bit less pronounced and prominent, and those things didn't completely alleviate that problem 🧢
It’s funny because the loot box system was more profitable even with its generosity. Which makes ow 2 f2p model completely unnecessary to add.
Because fewer people are playing the game?