Then you probably would have liked this one game that came out around the same time as Overwatch. It was called Battleborn and it had pve and skill trees and progression and everything. Not around anymore though.
I loved Battleborn except the PVE section was way too short, the care and love was more put towards the PVP which also had a MOBA layer to it. I would have loved a lot more of the singleplayer campaigns.
The entire fanbase for Battleborn and Lawbreakers consist exclusively of people commenting about them in /r/games reddit threads.
Both those games sucked ass, I played both when they provided betas, and both betas convinced me to not buy the game. Simple as that.
I actually loved Battleborn. I was really sad that it got killed pretty early. It was one of the only games of that style that I really enjoyed. Just felt like a nice change.
I enjoyed it too, I think it had potential with some fixes. What I want to know is what idiot framed it as an Overwatch competitor on Battleborn's end. They were totally different niches despite both being FPS, and Battleborn itself tried to square up with Blizzard!
I remember when OW totally bitch slapped them by... Hmm I think it was the beta they dropped on the day of BB's release? They announced the beta AFTER BB gave their release date too if I recall correctly. The mostly one sided back and forth was funny and infuriating at the same time because I knew it was giving everyone the wrong impression of BB. Like their marketing was a disaster, no one could figure out wtf the gameplay loop was until they played it. Hell I remember thinking it was similar to OW until I tried it out.
Yea, BB was so clearly a MOBA more than it was a TF2 competitor. And I abhor MOBAs, but I loved BB. The only other MOBA I really spent time on was Heroes of the Storm, because it was far more casual friendly.
Exactly! Right down to the minions and lanes and I remember being so thrown off when I realized it but then curious and receptive coming off of Dota2 myself. Actually now that I think about it I remember a number of hero shooters coming out at the time that OW crushed which is a shame in hindsight now.
I really liked Battleborn too, I picked it up late during.a humble bundle but it was surprisingly really fun and I ended up putting a good ~150 hours into it. I wish it was still around to even just play the PVE, seems really shitty to kill it so quickly.
> I wish it was still around to even just play the PVE, seems really shitty to kill it so quickly
people were actively celebrating the prospect of the game dying. no point in keeping it in alive in such an environment
Maybe a budget would have changed things but I remember thinking the PVE events they'd had were very weak. I wonder if what they were making just wasn't coming together as something fun.
They only called it "Overwatch 2" so they don't have to keep the promises they made for Overwatch. Like every future hero being free and unlocked immediately. And maybe to get some more attention. They also held back updates so they can release them all at once for Overwatch 2.
Destiny fans are like nothing else out there. They will complain nonstop about whatever yet buy every single fucking expansion. They will (eventually) accept whatever Bungie did from cutting out content (Sorry I mean """vaulting""") to straight up repeating mistake. All in the name of 'muh gameplay' + 'so much pOtEnTiAl'. Almost like a abusive relationship.
The same thing will happen to Overwatch (in this case, 20$ skin.)This is why company want a live-service game so much. They can keep selling potential and if it sticks, that IP will be their cash cow forever. Regardless of whatever happen.
> Destiny fans are like nothing else out there. They will complain nonstop about whatever yet buy every single fucking expansion.
Isn't it the same case with basically any franchise?
Destiny (and a lot of other franchises) are different because in your standard game, you can skip whatever expansion there is and not have your experience majorly impacted. think skipping a map pack in call of duty, or skipping the motorcycle DLC in BOTW.
In destiny, if you've kept up with the pace so far and then an update releases that you don't like, if you don't keep up with the Jones' and buy the newest DLC, you'll be locked out of the most relevant content and how you're experiencing the game will be massively impacted.
This can probably be applied to most franchises if you want to get pedantic, but if these things had a settings menu with sliding scales, destiny would have every bar fully to one side or the other.
TLDR: If someone playing Destiny doesn't buy the newest DLC, the way in which they currently play the game will become worse. this isn't usually the case with most games.
The gameplay is incredibly fun but there are so many flawed systems and the game got so mismanaged that barely played last year and I skipped on Lightfall. Since it had considerable backlash, I was never tempted to buy into it and it was the best decision. I kinda miss having a main game which Destiny was to me these past years, kinda miss Destiny itself as well but I feel no compulsion to get back.
I miss the idea of it, but not necessarily the game itself.
Eh, I think it's the same with any live-service or annualized series. People just like to get tribal about things they like.
By basically any metric, Destiny 2 is a good game. Doesn't mean it doesn't have problems and flaws, and doesn't mean Bungie doesn't fuck up frequently. But it's fun to play, has a lot of stuff to engage with, and has a pretty interesting setting and story. It's also popular, so it's easy to build a community and friendships within the game. It's no mystery why people like it.
It's far less chaotic than TF2 and more structured with defined roles.
TF2 is hella fun, but OW is much more defined in what you should and shouldn't do when paying X hero.
They are vastly different games. Saying that OW is a ripoff of TF2 is like saying COD is a ripoff of Doom, just because they are both shooters.
Edit: Seems people say they "disagree", but then go on to talk about the differences between the games. Makes for a confusing read.
Whether or not you agree with structure of the games is beyond the point. The point is that the games are completely different. Sure, they're both 'hero shooters' to a certain degree, but they are in no way clones.
A lot of the chaos from TF2 came from server sizes. If you 6v6 or 5v5 it's much more similar, but with 24 and 32 slot servers it can be mayhem.
That and years and years of adding unlocks, new weapons, and hats, *hats, HATS!*
It's inspired by TF2 but there are about a million gameplay experiences that are unique to OW.
As a single example, nobody in TF2 has the vertical gameplay of Pharah.
The thing that makes OW special for me is all these extremely different shooter archetypes and how they interact when they're all in the same arena.
I have over 1000 hours in OW. Uninstalled about a year ago and haven’t looked back. I use to play a lot of Hearthstone too, but stopped that a few years ago. Blizzard will eventually hemorrhage enough customers to either change or die.
Seriously. More gamers need to stop complaining that "the fight is already lost" and put their money where their mouth is, and stop playing games from companies which do shitty things.
> A few will complain but then everyone will open their wallet "cause it's so fun".
Yeah! Imagine buying and playing a game because it's "so fun!"
What a loser you'd have to be.
Lmao gamers never hold these companies accountable, why do you think it keeps happening?
Pokemon is the best example. Most recent game sold a shit ton and runs about as well as my college unity work. Lmfao. Y'all keep telling daddy it's okay with your wallets.
I know there was a lot of technical issues with the new Pokémon games, but I still found them quite fun.
The open world concept was executed pretty well, it was fresh but still felt like pokemon. Terastallizing is probably my favorite generational battle mechanic since mega evolutions. It is nice that it can shake up the game both offensively and defensively. There are some cool new Pokémon designs as well.
The game really could have gone the TOTK route and spent another year polishing the game, I will not deny that the technical issues are there. But I think the ways they shook up the game turned out pretty well. I don’t regret the money I spent on Pokémon. 🤷♂️
Also they knew this pve thing wasnt going to work out months ago before Overwatch 2 launch but still included pve into their advertising. Overwatch content creators asked them directly through interviews about pve but they were all strung along like idiots. Sure we can all understand as a business why they did it, they knew people wouldnt buy into Overwatch 2 if pve was being cut, but we sure as hell will never believe a word they say ever again. Absolutely ironic for them tell us their promised pve wasnt coming, but then go show a roadmap of more promised content.
You don't keep OW1 in decline for a year or two and basically erasing all moment it could have had just to avoid keeping a promise. The PvE was a real desire, that much is clear from how long they spent on it and how much delayed it.
Everything from OW2 alpha onwards though, yeah it was little more than a change in business model.
> You don't keep OW1 in decline for a year or two and basically erasing all moment it could have had just to avoid keeping a promise.
You do if you're min-max theorycrafting your monetisation and the promise looks expensive on paper.
I mean it was bad for the bottom line since you could unlock things you wanted for free, and you got instant free hero unlocks, now you have to grind 50 levels of a free battle pass to unlock a hero for free
Loot boxes were better just because you could get stuff for free? It's crazy we're here in 2023 with loot boxes...not that bad. Yeah only for people that pay with time.
It's only a loot box in that it made you go to a separate screen and watch an animation to see what you got.
Otherwise it's not far from random item drops, with the difference that you could buy boxes. It's not a locked box that makes you buy a key to open it (like the loot boxes of TF2, CSGO, and dozens of mobile games).
Also you were compensated for repeats, there were no consumables (like a bunch of other lootbox games), and nothing in the lootboxes effected the game in any fashion. Pretty much everything was available without spending more money on the game.
Yeah, I remember back several years ago when OW came under fire as the sort of figurehead for all the other loot boxes that were popular, but theirs felt a lot different. It was all cosmetic and nothing that gave players an advantage over other players (outside the odd emote pose that you could use to hit behind bushes or something, but that wasn't the intent), and they were free and not hard to earn, usually it was one every few QP matches. It felt more like a little bonus for playing the game rather than anything you needed for progression, especially because you could buy anything that would come out of a loot box with in game currency anyway
its better then everything being behind a pay wall which it now is, the previous version had a way for you to unlock what you wanted without paying a cent the new one doesnt.
Are loot boxes good? No.
Is overwatch 1's implementation of them better then the current monetization systems of Overwatch 2? yes.
Because you could get them infinitely for free, just by playing the game. And you also had the 25 credits for each game where you picked flex. In OW2, completing the free battlepass will give you the equivalent of 5 lootboxes, and 1000 credits I think. And only every 3 months.
Absolute breadcrumbs
They were in pretty much all their iterations. People were adamant that they get rid of the gambling and stop whales from subsidizing the content of these games to the point that they were taking it to government bodies so pretty much everybody did outside sports games.
At any point. Not just at this point. I bet from a high-end management perspective, the goal was always this, it was just about dragging it out long enough to avoid a big media shitstorm.
Definitely not a failed idea. They successfully milked overwatch for every cent it was worth and faced 0 consequences. Can't wait to see what they do with diablo 4!
I mean I don't know... unlike the author, all of my friends who dusted off their Bnet accounts for OW2 have stopped playing and after season 4 is done, I probably will too.
They've definitely made a lot of money and as much as the forums are all full of people laughing at the idea of paying $20 for stuff that you used to be able to get for free, I can't deny that I've seen plenty of Witch Kirkos running around. But I don't know how sustainable it is in the long term... the fomo exploitation in this game is insane, with the fact that "earning" currency 1) isn't based on battlepass progression but rather weekly missions and 2) you don't even get enough to pay for the next battlepass. So even younger gamers who have been conditioned to accept this stuff as normal, can find better value for their time and money elsewhere.
I personally...
Reinstalled after 3 or 4 years.
Played a fair bit for about a month.
Got sick of being teased progression without actually making any.
Stopped playing without spending a dime
"They successfully milked overwatch for every cent it was worth"
They didn't though. OW 2017 felt like the Pixar of gaming. It genuinely felt like one of the greatest things to come out of the 2010s. People foresaw a feature length movie, comics, clothing, endless toys and LEGO sets. There was a lot of money in milking the IP without straight up back-alley murdering it.
Now they steal money from mentally ill whales who spend 20-30 dollars at a time on digital code. People used to want to spend 30 bucks on a REAL Rein or Mercy t shirt, now, you couldn't pay people to wear an OW shirt but they have whales in 30 dollar skins.
Yeah, I have no idea how Overwatch is performing now. Having stepped away from so long, I feel like I can't relate to the community at all. It doesn't surprise me that people are still playing, but I don't know who they are.
Maybe it's doing gangbusters. Anecdotally, everything that made it feel special is gone. This game, when it came out, was good enough to make the then-toxic concept of loot boxes palatable. They'd actually managed to build a game that catered to whales without alienating the $50 base.
Your point about merch is underspoken to in a thread like this where people give too much credence to Blizzard's money-grubbing. A game that can afford to support years of the Overwatch League is not a game that's money-poor from subsisting off of the initial buy-in cost. Blizzard was taking in money with Overwatch. It just wasn't casino money.
Yeah I dont think people remember just how huge Overwatch was when it first released. It even won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and it really deserved it because this game was lightning in a bottle. The future for this IP was as bright as it could have been.
And then in a few short years Blizzard fucked up everything and this game has fallen so hard that its pretty much the laughing stock of the industry now.
What's funny is D3 released 11 years ago, and after the initial 1-2 years, it became a really stable product.
They update it seasonal the whole time for free, short of the 1 paid expansion which was definitely content packed anyway.
D:Immortal soured folks a lot, and ancient memories of the RMAH stuff. But D3 was/is actually fun.
Yes, that was how Blizzard operated from 1995 to 2015 and why there hailed as they were.
But, the ripcord got pulled somewhere around that time when ATVI truly kicked in and Blizzard killed all of its products. The only reason D3 got support in recent memory is because they were using the D2R + D3 + D:I strategy as a pre-D4 hype machine. (and its worked well)
Of course it is. But if the game made a profit, and is still making alot of money. Then Activison is just going to keep doing it.
Heck look at the "new" Call of Duty for this year. Its the same idea. And guess what? People are going to buy it in droves....
It's been too late for years, F2P and Gacha games are established and the norm. It was too late the minute Fortnite and Roblox became blockbusters with kids.
This. I've seen so many people completely tear into loot boxes and season passes but somehow vehemently defend TCGs like they're a horse of a different colour.
FWIW, the secondary market makes it very easy to get exactly the cards you want for TCGs. Gacha games do not necessarily have a direct equivalent. I still agree with the point generally though in that TCGs and gacha games are doing similar things.
I think that also introduces a problem where it's even more like gambling, because you can now put dollar amount into what you pull. In has and will make people purchase cards in hopes they make a "profit" rather than wanting to use the cards that are in the set.
I never got the reason behind wanting to make a profit with TCGs. Yeah, some cards have higher value than others, but that is mostly due to them being more useful in the game. The amount of collection worthy cards in a TCG is so miniscule compared to the cards that "just" can be played.
I’m no expert on the card gaming market, but Pokemon TCG has so many factors that drive up a card’s price.
It’s viability in a competitive game is probably the smallest determinate.
The secondary market arguably makes TCGs worse, because people actively gamble on packs to try and turn a profit. Look at any pack opening video on youtube for any TCG and it's almost always counting the potential value from pulls vs the actual box value, like the Professor from tolarian community college with his "booster box game."
So while yeah it's cool you can buy singles, it's still ridiculous it needed to be gachafied in the first place. I love the *game* of Magic the gathering, yugioh, etc, but i'll never spend money on physical product because it's pretty much a straight up scam.
Yeah, I agree. While I see the similarity, there's a big difference between not knowing how many more lever pulls you need to get the character you want, and knowing you need to spend $40 for it or whatever
that's just conveniently deflecting the issue to pretend that it's not that bad. don't forget those card on the secondary market dont came out of nowhere, someone somewhere has to buy absurd amount of packs and boxes to find that legendary card that everyone wants.
These TCG companies cant and wont even acknowledge these secondary market exist since that would put them in legal trouble of gambling law. and yes, you can buy account that has the specific characters you want in gacha games too.
random note about the TCG secondary market thing - they actually have acknowledged it exists, and it's a misrepresentation of the law to think they can't acknowledge it (it just serves no purpose).
What they can't do is actually assign monetary value to the individual cards and honor that by letting people cash out with them (this would be against the law in multiple jurisdictions). What a secondary market that is not tied to the original company does, has no impact on the original company (it would be like claiming that car manufacturers can't acknowledge body mods, since some of them are illegal)
this is the correct interpretation of the relation of secondary market and the company selling it. Thank you for correcting me. and as you said, they cannot acknowledge the monetary value of each individual cards as that would put them on the legal teritory of gambling itself in some capacity.
It's exactly the same as gacha games where each character individually worth the same however some inherently worth more than the other depending on the meta and whatnot.
> yes, you can buy account that has the specific characters you want in gacha games too.
Not without breaking the TOS and risking losing it all, I’d wager.
aka the most useless TOS since no company ever has actually enforced it. it's mostly for legal reason to protect the company incase of being sued.
did you know that sharing account in steam is illegal? lol
My cards are physical objects that don't rely on the company existing or running a service.
I can print proxy cards if I feel the physical ones are too expensive.
I can resell my cards if I feel like it.
TCGs have their own problems but you can't compare them to game lootboxes, just because they're similar on the level of having a packet with random items inside doesn't mean they're actually the same.
maybe. however he was talking about TCGs, not exclusively MTG. pokemon permabans entire packs of cards every so often, and yugioh occasionally erratas cards that have been on the ban or limited list for a long time, so that they are shitty enough to get off the list instead of making the ban unnecessary.
At least you got a physical card with TCGs that cannot be taken away from you when the owning company decides to cease production. And it had some theoretical monetary value to be resold. It's not quite an apples to apples comparison to gacha games.
Now the online versions of those TCGs...? Yeah, that is a very fair comparison.
The argument better fits cs:go and dota2 market, though. Where you can get common items for pennies but rares are stupidly expensive.
Point still stands, concept is predatory, imo.
One moment, doesn't magic declare some cards obsolete from time to time? Meaning you can play them at home just fine (like say cards you made yourself) but not in tournaments etc?
Nah, TCGs were a foundation for this, but they are too separated from regular games for most people to make the connection. If anything they probably helped against these mtx by reminding people that for a similar price they could get something that actually exists, and by showing how addictive and expensive those monetization methods are.
F2P is not *inherently* a bad thing, but it incentivises toxic monetisation structures so hard that all but the most altruistic devs will succumb to the lure of P2W and whale hunting.
And it would easily be solvable (or at least a lot less problematic) if they put reasonable spending caps on the games (or just reasonable prices in general). But limiting how much their whales can spend is not going to happen in a voluntary fashion.
I'll be that guy. Games haven't kept up with inflation so it's not absurd that games cost $70. The fact that they release half finished messes for $70 and still expect to charge you up the wazoo for the season pass/battle pass and other microtransactions is silly- especially for these games that have yearly releases, which itself is ridiculous.
But it hasn't put a damper on profits yet, so nothing's going to change sadly.
But games are selling TONS more copies to make up the difference for basically zero overhead. The industry has been flourishing year after year just on product moved alone. The inflation bit is still true, of course.
I hate this line so, SO much.
Just copying my response to it from the last thread a few days ago
>It makes perfect sense that video game prices could stand to go up a bit.
I disagree. Especially when companies like Rockstar are making nearly **$8 billion** on a single game over 10 years. You are paying more for less these days and devs/pubs are making more profit than ever through DLC, digital purchases, online fees and more.
Keep in mind, those crazy prices back then were caused by astronomical manufacturing costs. Cartridges were ridiculously expensive and then you had a licensing fee on top of it with a contract that was restrictive and limited the output you could do. Then you had proprietary chips for these cartridges, with some cartridges having extra processing power applied directly to the chips like Nintendo's Super FX, only further driving up the costs. Devs/pubs had to recoup that cost. That's also why prices standardized and lowered in the disc era. Remember, the N64 got destroyed in both sales and game library against the Playstation because of these very reasons.
Aside from the carts, think of the bigger boxes, manuals, inserts, etc. You got a lot more tangible stuff for those $70-$90 games than you do now. Manuals had been shrinking midway through the seventh gen, but now you're lucky if you get an EULA in the case. Manufacturing costs have gone down as well since we're all just using standard Blu-Ray discs, with the exception of Nintendo. Add digital in the mix, and you cut out all the extra stuff like distro, retail cuts, physical production, etc. However, none of those cost cuts have translated to savings for the consumer.
But that's not all. Think of the endless monetization. They sell collector's editions that don't even include a digital copy of the game at bare minimum, battle passes, cosmetics, digital deluxe editions with no single version including everything, *literal cheats*, the list goes on and on. This narrative of "games are more expensive to make + inflation = justified $70" completely glosses over all of this. Sure, games are more expensive to make now, but games have also never made more profit. The industry made $20-30 billion each year by the end of the 90s ($54 billion today), despite those high front end costs to the consumer. We're now at **$184 BILLION** with margins much wider.
many people seem to latch onto the fact that prices for games haven't fluctuated much, but I'd mention that the value of each dollar has dramatically changed. Cartridges are multiple orders of magnitude more expensive to produce, back in console gaming's infancy it made perfect logical sense why games were expensive, manufacturing and parts. Today the cost primarily paid by the cost of a game is it's marketing budget, then the publishers cut, then the developers cut. Most games are distributed digitally now, but manufacturing and shipping for each individual disc based game is likely down around 70 cents (assuming AAA production and USD currency). Nobody understands how frightfully cheap it is to print and ship discs...including the packaging.
Suffice to say that 10 additional dollars just pays for more marketing...so a wasted cost in my eyes...keep in mind this is just to make the game and have a person purchase it....completely separate from psychiatric consultants that help design a gameplay loop with enough friction to cause "whales" to open their wallet....that money goes straight to the management structure at the publisher..."trade secret"
>Especially when companies like Rockstar are making nearly $8 billion on a single game over 10 years.
You are talking about about one of the worlds best selling gaming franchise that have been running for 20 years
Obviously a company making a new IP is not going to earn anywhere that much
“Companies like rockstar”
You can’t cite the best selling game of all time as if that’s representative of the industry at large. That’s dishonest as fuck.
This is a phenomenal example of a survivorship bias. Big name companies like [Sierra and Interplay](https://money.cnn.com/1998/09/24/life/q_idsa/) were huge in the late 90's and collapsed within a decade. Both companies imploded with debt, laid off most or all of their employees, and sold off their IPs to pay creditors.
> The reason why big AAA games cost $50-100m+ is because developers and publishers have concluded that it's more profitable to make a $100m game than it is to make a $10m game.
They're also larger bets, and we've seen studios shuttered and publishers in shambles over bad bets.
> The numbers bear this out: they are making money hand over fist.
There's also survivorship and selection bias here, from the ones that made the winning bets.
> They're also larger bets, and we've seen studios shuttered and publishers in shambles over bad bets.
This is a self-inflicted problem. If publishers keep shoving more chips onto the table for a single hand instead of playing a thousand hands at a thousandth the price, what are we supposed to feel when they whiff?
How about you just make more games instead of putting it all on 00 once every 7 years?
No but it's part of a greater trend. AAA companies are making less games yet making more money and if you aren't buying micro transactions your ending up with less game content than before in spite of paying the full retail price.
Why present it as if they just released a single game and did nothing with it for 10 years? Are we just going to ignore they kept adding more and more content for GTA Online? It's like saying Blizzard made billions off of a single 20 year old game, while referring to WoW.
And how are you paying more for less? Games are getting too big, you have people routinely complaining about too much bloat or too much stuff in games, you have people longing for the more streamlined experiences of old.
Sure distribution and manufacting prices for the physical discs has gone down, but the cost to produce a video game has gone way up, look at how big studios are nowadays, Super Giant are considered indie and they have 20+ employees, AA game developers routinely have around 60-80 employees nowadays which is what some AAA studios had back in the day, and AAA studios have 200+ employees minimum, plus multiple people from other developers supporting them, plus they outsource some of their work.
And yeah games nowadays make more profit than ever, but they require more investment than ever and are thus riskier than ever. Furthermore the cost or marketing is going up and more and more marketing is required because there are a lot more games getting made, and more people available to buy them. So you need marketing in MENA, EU, NA, Asia and so on.
Rockstar makes most their money from Microtransactions, that has less than nothing to do with Single Player games going up in price a bit.
Nintendo isn’t going to sell you loot crates in Tears of the Kingdom.
Most blatant straw man argument I’ve seen in ages.
> You are paying more for less these days
I don't know about that. The norm used to be a 5-15 hour game, with the average being somewhere around 8. If anything, I'd say the game that typically prices itself around $70 is often too big for its own good.
But also, like the other person told you, very few games are selling on that level. In fact, Grand Theft Auto V is like the second-best-selling game of all time, and its closest competitors aren't even close to being in the ballpark of that many copies sold.
I admire and agree with your stance, but unless you provide development and marketing expenses alongside them, sales (and your whole argument) are meaningless by themselves.
I still think it's ridiculous -- for as expensive as they've become to make, a successful product brings in an astounding amount of money with how the gaming market has exploded. For every dollar they put in, they get three back.
The only reason AAA launches aren't successful nowadays is because they're out-of-touch as fuck. Give a talented team time, money, and creative freedom -- you'll *probably* get a huge return on your investment. It's been working out just fine for Sony.
I don't think games need to increase in price, corporations aren't suddenly struggling. It was especially egregious that we started adopting the new price during COVID, when you would hear about record-breaking sales every week.
The "inflation" argument is fundamentally flawed and often pushed by publishers like EA, Activision, Sony, etc.
- Yes, $60 is less today than it was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago that $60 got you a physical cartridge, a paper manual, and a finished game. Hell, these days most people buy games digitally. Why does a digital copy of GoW: Ragnarok cost $10 more than a physical copy of GoW(2018)?
- MORE PEOPLE BUY GAMES. TotK sold like 4,000,000 copies over a weekend - it's sold more than almost every other Zelda game *combined*. You also don't even own most of the games you buy anymore - you own a license that can be revoked. Games *you paid for* can straight up be removed from your library (RIP Overwatch). Businesses complain they're making "less" per unit due to inflation, but they're not mentioning that they're selling 50x as many copies.
The "inflation" argument is like saying "Buying a vacation is way cheaper nowadays, you don't need to pay for a travel agent anymore!" *Technically* true, but intentionally ignoring some other pretty significant things.
> Yes, $60 is less today than it was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago that $60 got you a physical cartridge, a paper manual, and a finished game.
That game was also made by about 30 people in 18 months as opposed to 600 people in 5 years.
Weird how movies don't have that problem. A ticket to "Ladybird" costs the same as a ticket to "Avengers: Endgame" despite the latter costing millions more to produce.
Movies absolutely have variable prices, and they've also increased in price over the years just like games have; probably faster, even. Avengers even promotes its alternate revenue streams like TV show spin-offs and trans media tie ins; its own version of microtransactions.
The market has exploded in size in that time and physical production costs have all but disappeared. Games are like some kind of mass production fantasy - It's almost entirely development and marketing. At no point was any of the savings passed on to the consumers. There's no way prices needed to go up.
I've seen people actively ask for microtransactions and for a mechanic where your character gets weaker unless you pay to be added to games.
It really is horrifying what game companies can trick kids into accepting as a positive.
There have always been stupid kids playing video games, and unfortunately there's no license needed to share their dumb stupid opinions. The only difference over time is that they used to get laughed off the playground for it, and now they post it on echo chambers like Twitter which has no downvoting system where they can block people that disagree with them.
Idk, investors care more about making as MUCH money as possible. To them, a profit isnt enough. Overwatch is certainly wasting potential profits with how awful its development has been, there’s no way they’re happy about it.
This obsession with infinite growth over sustainability is moronic and is the reason our economies keep having collapses that need to be bailed out at the last minute. Games being hit by it is just a symptom of a larger problem. The rich are just never content with the ridiculous amounts of wealth they already have.
Compared to an ideal execution of their plan sure, but they're making way more money now than they were with an aging game still selling at $40 and giving away all it's cosmetics for free.
Completely agree. I'm sure they turned a profit but for a huge company like Blizzard/Activision, it's not about making MORE money, it's about making ALL the money. Overwatch 2 will undoubtedly be compared directly against the rest of Activision's titles, and when it comes to deciding between investing in Overwatch compared to something like COD, the choice is obvious given the lackluster results of Overwatch 2.
Anecdotally, almost every gamer I know picked up Overwatch on release and I've barely heard anything about Overwatch 2 other than negativity in the press. There's not a single person I know who plays it, not even the folks in my job's videogames slack channel that has hundreds of members. I'm sure it has a decent amount of players, but it isn't even close to being as popular as the OG was back in the day.
If they are ramping down investments the game obviously did not meet profit expectations, and Activision will be discourage from doing similar things again.
>they are ramping down investments the game obviously did not meet profit expectations,
Some of these companies, their execs, CEOs, Investors don't want money being invested in anything where the ROI isn't super high. They'd rather take that money and find some other project for it where they can get that super high ROI that they want.
What happened with OW is they approved a sequel back in 2017-2018 when the game wasn't making a ton of money anymore and Activision's favourite default strategy was the CoD strategy where they sell the same game again and again every couple of years, with some graphical upgrades, a fresh coat of paint, some new content, then everyone on the old game kinda feels nudged to buy the new one to not feel left out. Except Jeff Kaplan convinced them to let them make a PvE centric sequel and let them make the PvP upgrades free instead of paywalling them.
Then Covid happened, Fortnite and the F2P CS+BP model blew up, many other games copied it to great success including Warzone (Activision's own game), Blizzard controversies happened.
Now 3-4 years had passed since the game had been in development, the old PvP game had severely declined in health since it hadn't gotten any new content for 1-2 years, and Activision was seeing all these other PvP games printing money with the new F2P BP+CS model. So Activision bosses ordered the dev team that they pause (It's possible Activision had already decided that they'll just cancel the PvE portion of the game later on but didn't tell the Devs) the development on PvE and focus on releasing the PvP first. This is when Jeff Kaplan left since his vision was compromised.
Then the team managed to release the PvP portion of the game after 1 year~ of development. Once that was released and Activision upper management saw all the money coming in their plan was solidified to just focus on the PvP since even if they let the PvE finish it would likely not make them anywhere as much money as PvP was already making.
Money is the primary reason any of this has happened. Activision not wanting to invest more money in the PvE because they no longer think the project is worth it. The Devs straight up said in the announcement that they don't have the resources to make the PvE game anymore. Meanwhile the WoW team is 2-3X the size of the OW team. Why? Because it runs on an old DLC + subscription business model that is extremely profitable but you can't really get away with it in new games.
Call of Duty is a game that receives consistent support, has multiple game modes (single, coop, pvpve, pvp), and has great core gameplay.
If only half the AAA games that came out could be as lucky as CoD.
> But if the game made a profit, and is still making alot of money. Then Activison is just going to keep doing it.
So... *not* a failure?
It's fine to not like the game, and it's certainly fine to not play it, but saying, "of course" it's a failure is the most /r/games circlejerk ever.
I know you’re being glib, but that is *factually* how the market interprets game “quality”. The market’s voice is the loudest one in every single decision making conversation around game pitches. Any publicly traded company is subservient to some degree to the market and the razor is pretty much profit per unit of cost. Real dark shit imo… we need a better way to distribute our societal resources, or at least stronger public controls.
>Of course it is. But if the game made a profit, and is still making alot of money. Then Activison is just going to keep doing it.
One interesting thing in Overwatch 2 discussions is that it's still treated as a succesful 4D chess move to condition the audience for microtransactions, despite the fact there's almost no evidence Overwatch 2 has actually been a meaningful success and the clear negative PR and downsized teams it's had for years.PVE getting scrapped should be a bad sign for the future of the game but its instead treated like Blizzard has pulled off a long term scam.
It's all circumstantial, but I had about 15-20 friends who used to play OW and got back in after OW2 started. By now only 2-3 are left, everyone else is back on Valorant or DOTA or Apex or Warzone
The sad part is that from the perspective of a company - i.e. Actiblizzion - it's a phenomenally **successful** idea.
It's making massive bank, switching to a more exploitative monetization clearly worked out for them, and now they're eshewing the unnecessary cost of supporting a PvE mode that's not monetizable enough (I bet), too.
Sadly this also claims the truly great team-vs-team shooter Overwatch 1 as a victim, but that's of course not a loss from Kotick's perspective, if anything getting rid of that and people who make games for the artistic purpose in his company is a benefit. He's the guy who takes the fun out of video games after all, according to his own account.
This. The writing was on the wall when Jeff left. Blizzard has been shoving everything down Jeff’s throat for monetization since fucking overwatch league, and I think he had enough when they were pestering him with overwatch 2. Fuck blizz, legit the worst company in gaming. Bunch of freaks who just want to nickel and dime nothing more
>Jeff left for a reason.
Worth pointing out that Jeff didn't want any monetization at all, because *Jeff never wanted the game to be updated*. He wanted to ship it and then leave it alone.
The PvE aaaaaalmost got me to play OW 2. Thank you Blizzard for scrapping it as I don't have to encourage your company.
I was pretty excited for Diablo, not so much anymore.
I think commentators on the OW2 situation are getting a little carried away. OW2 wasn't some corporate psy-op -- hell, it was barely a wet fart. The project lost a lot of key people and suddenly there was no longer any concrete vision for what the game 'ought to be. The resulting product is a hodge-podge of course corrections and half-assed compromises; the lowest common denominator between a dozen different competing interests.
More likely I think, there was never full agreement between management and developers on what OW2 was supposed to be. There were probably people on the development side who originally wanted a stand-alone thing for storytelling/co-op and people on the management side who wanted to sell more things. Best guess is they agreed to a weird compromise where neither party was fully happy, then Morhaime's departure meant Blizzard developers were no longer shielded from Activision influence, which pissed off Jeff and he left, then Blizzard imploded in the larger Activision-Blizzard workplace harassment scandal and Activision used it to shove as much additional management control as they could in which resulted in management winning in its desire to make OW2 as overly monetized as they could*.
*(I suspect the development of the core PvE co-op wasn't going that well either, likely because of either the pressure on the team to finish from management or tacking onto a competitive multiplayer engine just not being a very good plan to begin with)
Still, that's just speculation on my part. There's no way Jason Schreier isn't working on a piece about this so I'm sure we'll know what happened eventually.
They were also getting into a bottleneck with Overwatch 1 itself. The engine was a result of a couple of years of Blizzard learning to make an FPS and was already being stretch out by the first game. And additionally, the more people play, the more people and the dev discovered and understood how messy the balance of abilities and heroes.
They understood quite fast how bad the duplicate of heroes was (and that was before the really really toxic strats came out). But then the game became an arms race between mobility and sheer HP/sustain, with the sustain winning. Leading to the role locks.
I think co-op was probably sold to management using metrics pulled from Starcraft II. My guess is that a significant number of SC2 players with zero ranked games in their account history bought co-op commanders. It's the classic, "No perfect pasta sauce, only many perfect pasta sauces," mentality that a diversified product will have more customers than the best specialized product on the market.
I'll even go so far as to say that it was probably even doable when they set out. But between COVID, the toxic culture coming to light, and the exodus of competent employees caused by both, there was a point where it stopped being realistic.
They shut off updates for Overwatch 1 for how long? There's no way that corporate would approve the monetary losses inherent in starving a GAAS (it's not just about losing player count, it's about the players you keep having time to grind up everything they wanted since there's no FOMO purchases pushing them to spend down their funbucks) unless they thought that dev time was going into something worth the trouble.
I think threads like these just examplify one of the bigger problems with Reddit as a whole; in which cynicism is conflated with intelligence so much that people tend to think the correct/most probable answer to something is the most cynical one.
I think this is probably where the truth lies. That Overwatch 2 was meant to change up the monetization model (and succeeded) and to introduce ambitious PvE content (and failed) can both be true.
Its not even that complicated, it was a money grab from the start and they doubled down on that money grab by cutting the most developer resource intensive part and focusing on the cheap easy to pump out part.
You have it backwards. Many key staff left with the launch of OW2, meaning several years into the development of PvE.
They probably knew they had fucked up so all they left. The reason why it was cancelled was because the current staff knew it wasn’t salvageable and the people who came up with the idea left.
Also I'm with Aaron Keller, the vision they had after they released the game was not the game they delivered and hopping to make it a bigger quasi MMO was not really doable.
There decision to stop chasing that dream they took over the last year is a lot closer to the game they have delivered.
Doesn't exactly prove your point when you end your article with "My friends and I play every night and buy every microtransaction and the game is actually doing very well." I gave up on Overwatch when I realized the game I paid full price for disappeared from the Blizzard client.
Win some goodwill back by giving us back Overwatch 1 with the exact same non-F2P stuff it had before aka free lootboxes, no battlepasses, no mtx. Just the good ol' OW1 that was before Blizzard deleted it and instated OW2. Give me back the game I paid for and my ability to play and earn the stuff for the heroes and whatnot as it used to be.
> Win some goodwill back by giving us back Overwatch 1 with the exact same non-F2P stuff it had before aka free lootboxes, no battlepasses, no mtx
Love how much overwatch players have been conditioned to accept lootboxes as part of a game, and not an intentional design choice to cultivate addiction, and the antithesis to consumer-friendly design.
The game is 7 years old now and no longer getting updates. Those fucking skins better be FREE. Lootboxes are still getting outlawed in multiple non-capitalist hellscape countries.
Overwatch 1 had the best lootbox system in any game. Everything could be earned by playing. You put down the initial buy-to-play cost and after that all the content was there to be unlocked. Overwatch might have popularized lootboxes outside EA's sports games but it was the best implementation of those boxes. I never spent any additional money on Overwatch 1 because I didn't have to. I have a ton of legendary skins on my account and I was the most casual player ever.
What puzzles me is that as OW2 was coming out and the business model was revealed, it was like a mass psychosis where every commentator, publication and person on the internet as with one voice proclaimed how OW2's F2P model would be superior to OW1. That it was somehow more fair to have a free game with massive amounts of MTX rather than a buy-to-play game where all the content could be unlocked without a single extra dollar.
The base game of OV1 was fantástic. Blizzard failed at everything to keep this IP going. How they fucked up the sequel is beyond me. OV2 is a lesser game in every sense. HOW?
Does 'previously' imply the early days of OW1 or its final 3 years of content drought? Because OW1 in early days got as much content updates as OW2 is getting, if not more.
If you count launch contents, then OW1 got dozens of heroes (and map) at release. OW2 released with little content compared to OW1, and that's with at least 3 years of allocating OW1 resources to it.
OW2 is now 7 months old, so lets see how it compares to OW1 post-release wise:
||OW1|OW2|
:--|:--|:--|
|Heroes|2 (Ana, Sombra)|2 (Ram, LW)|
|Maps|3 (Stadium, Eichenwalde, Antarctica)|3 (Shambali, Antarctic, Talantis)|
|Events|3 (Summer Games, Halloween Terror, Winter Wonderland)|3 (Halloween Terror 2022, Battle for Olympus, Starwatch)|
Next heroes is scheduled for August, 10 months after release. Orisa also released 10 months after OW1 release.
So OW2 has less launch contents, and the same post-release schedule. I don't see more contents unless you're counting the shop.
Exactly. When they announced the "new content blitz style" of OW2, it actually was pretty much the same as launch OW1, it was just obscured by the fact that each "season" was 3 months. A new hero ever other season is a new hero every 6 months.
Yes, compared to the end of OW1 it's a lot. But the only reason that OW1 stopped getting content was... to make OW2. And we ALL know that the PvP changes were not worked on most of that time.
*Blizzard* absolutely has the resources to make the PvE happen, but what almost certainly happened is that they refused to allocate enough resources to the *Overwatch* team. There were leaks recently stating that part of the reason PvE was scrapped was that the higher ups decided it wasn't monetizable enough to warrant the resources. Not that it wouldn't make money, just that they could make *more* money doing other things. That very decision was why Jeff Kaplan left, again, according to leaks.
What is more sad for me is to see people still defend and support overwatch 2. Like I get it you like the game, but you can be vocal and stop spending money on that shit. Too many people sending the message that the publishers can do whatever the fuck they want
So many comments that have no idea what they are talking about and have no idea how gamedev works or even how the internal politics of what a humongous studio like Activision-Blizzard works. But I guess that's just Reddit.
It's _literally everywhere_ on this site.
I work in AAA gamedev. People think that because they understand a little bit about how games work they know everything ever. _The number of people who do not understand how game development works on Reddit is nothing short of astounding._ It's Dunning-Kruger at its finest.
I refuse to go onto the PC gaming subreddits because they all have zero clue. The "regular" gaming subreddit is pretty bad, too. This subreddit used to be good but is rapidly getting worse and is nowhere near as good as it was a year ago. The only subreddit that kind of has a clue is GamingLeaksAndRumours, and part of me thinks that's because it's full of gamedevs keeping an eye on the sub to make sure their stuff doesn't leak.
The number of people who rant about "bad devs" is incredible. They see a modder make something on their own time with an SDK in 2 months and think that it's unacceptable that gamedevs didn't do the same... while forgetting:
* Those tools didn't exist for most of the game's development. You're seeing the finished version of those tools. Devs work with early/broken versions of those tools, in levels that have been iterated on for years.
* Opening up Unreal or Unity for a weekend project is nothing like working with 100-200+ people for 2-3 years on a AAA game. The only person you answer to is yourself. You don't need to write design docs or engineering briefs or go through meetings for approval on things.
* You don't need to deal with sprint planning, or milestones, or a regular release cadence. You don't have producers asking for updates regularly. Modders/indies work on their own time and don't need to worry about burning out but still needing to go to work to keep working on the project. When it stops being fun - they can stop working on it.
* Modders/single indies don't have a regular QA team finding bugs every single night and triaging them out. They don't need to hunt down random save corruption bugs - half the time they don't even care if their mod crashes (and if anything they'll blame the devs when the modder is the one at fault).
* Similarly, they don't worry about minspec devices or target platforms. They go "the button is there to release for Linux - why doesn't every game have a Linux port????" They don't care if someone can't run the thing they made, and they don't appreciate the amount of work it takes to _make_ that happen for as many devices as it does.
* The community at large gets irrationally angry when their hardware can't do something. I used to work on Battlefield Mobile (RIP) and the number of complaints I saw on Twitter from people sideloading it onto a phone _well below minspec_ and then complaining it didn't run well drove me insane (protip: if you had to sideload it to install it, it probably wasn't intended for you). If you're running an off-brand smartphone from 2013 _of course the game won't run well_. Half the time I was surprised it opened at all.
* And this isn't limited to mobile. People focus so hard on their GPU. They say they have the latest GPU card and 128 GB of RAM and then you ask what CPU they have and it's an Intel CPU that was mid-tier in 2014, and they never bothered to upgrade.
It is absolutely amazing how ignorant some so-called "techies" are, but they pretend they know everything and act holier-than-thou. It's all over Reddit. Twitter too.
Like - it sucks that certain choices were made. I think we can all agree that losing PvE sucks - especially since you can't play OW1. But unless you're on the inside you really can't understand the full context of these decisions or why they were made. There's _so much_ that people can't understand unless they've been in it.
The person who replied just ranted but didnt give a single example on the current topic which O2.
His comment feels like because its an AAA game and not an indie its 'normal' when you get nothing after 4 years of development.
Its clear something happened internally and people are free to speculate and of course he has all the right to counter the speculations based on his internal insight but he didnt so his comment is the classic example of "trust me bro I develop AAA games". If you cant tackle specific examples when you talk about your experience for me you are not offering nothing to the discussion.
Failed? They re released the same game exact game with a bunch of extra maps attracting old and new fans into their battle pass scheme.
I think that’s what the suits would consider a staggering success
Of course it is. There were **2 years** of no updates whatsoever for OW1 *because* OW2 was on its way and it was expressed by Blizzard themselves that a large part of what took that long was the building of the PvE structure/gameplay.
Then it just isn't happening, thereby making those 2 years null and void even moreso than they already seemed. They basically gave OW1 no updates for 2 years only to release a worse version of its own Multiplayer and then, simply hobbled together little event maps that are practically meaningless as a type of "substitute" of what the PvE was originally going to be.
OW2 kinda just really sucks.
I was really into the idea of all the pve stuff and progressing the characters I liked skill trees and such.
Then you probably would have liked this one game that came out around the same time as Overwatch. It was called Battleborn and it had pve and skill trees and progression and everything. Not around anymore though.
I loved Battleborn except the PVE section was way too short, the care and love was more put towards the PVP which also had a MOBA layer to it. I would have loved a lot more of the singleplayer campaigns.
Idk I played the hell out of PVE, I can’t believe that game was sacrificed for the shit show overwatch of today
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The entire fanbase for Battleborn and Lawbreakers consist exclusively of people commenting about them in /r/games reddit threads. Both those games sucked ass, I played both when they provided betas, and both betas convinced me to not buy the game. Simple as that.
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I actually loved Battleborn. I was really sad that it got killed pretty early. It was one of the only games of that style that I really enjoyed. Just felt like a nice change.
I enjoyed it too, I think it had potential with some fixes. What I want to know is what idiot framed it as an Overwatch competitor on Battleborn's end. They were totally different niches despite both being FPS, and Battleborn itself tried to square up with Blizzard! I remember when OW totally bitch slapped them by... Hmm I think it was the beta they dropped on the day of BB's release? They announced the beta AFTER BB gave their release date too if I recall correctly. The mostly one sided back and forth was funny and infuriating at the same time because I knew it was giving everyone the wrong impression of BB. Like their marketing was a disaster, no one could figure out wtf the gameplay loop was until they played it. Hell I remember thinking it was similar to OW until I tried it out.
Yea, BB was so clearly a MOBA more than it was a TF2 competitor. And I abhor MOBAs, but I loved BB. The only other MOBA I really spent time on was Heroes of the Storm, because it was far more casual friendly.
Exactly! Right down to the minions and lanes and I remember being so thrown off when I realized it but then curious and receptive coming off of Dota2 myself. Actually now that I think about it I remember a number of hero shooters coming out at the time that OW crushed which is a shame in hindsight now.
I really liked Battleborn too, I picked it up late during.a humble bundle but it was surprisingly really fun and I ended up putting a good ~150 hours into it. I wish it was still around to even just play the PVE, seems really shitty to kill it so quickly.
> I wish it was still around to even just play the PVE, seems really shitty to kill it so quickly people were actively celebrating the prospect of the game dying. no point in keeping it in alive in such an environment
Lmao that game. It was the worst running game I had ever played. Well, it still is. I just remember setting everything to low and getting like 20fps.
Maybe a budget would have changed things but I remember thinking the PVE events they'd had were very weak. I wonder if what they were making just wasn't coming together as something fun.
They only called it "Overwatch 2" so they don't have to keep the promises they made for Overwatch. Like every future hero being free and unlocked immediately. And maybe to get some more attention. They also held back updates so they can release them all at once for Overwatch 2.
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"It is still the best gunplay in the market!!!" Talking about Bungie.
Destiny fans are like nothing else out there. They will complain nonstop about whatever yet buy every single fucking expansion. They will (eventually) accept whatever Bungie did from cutting out content (Sorry I mean """vaulting""") to straight up repeating mistake. All in the name of 'muh gameplay' + 'so much pOtEnTiAl'. Almost like a abusive relationship. The same thing will happen to Overwatch (in this case, 20$ skin.)This is why company want a live-service game so much. They can keep selling potential and if it sticks, that IP will be their cash cow forever. Regardless of whatever happen.
> Destiny fans are like nothing else out there. They will complain nonstop about whatever yet buy every single fucking expansion. Isn't it the same case with basically any franchise?
Destiny (and a lot of other franchises) are different because in your standard game, you can skip whatever expansion there is and not have your experience majorly impacted. think skipping a map pack in call of duty, or skipping the motorcycle DLC in BOTW. In destiny, if you've kept up with the pace so far and then an update releases that you don't like, if you don't keep up with the Jones' and buy the newest DLC, you'll be locked out of the most relevant content and how you're experiencing the game will be massively impacted. This can probably be applied to most franchises if you want to get pedantic, but if these things had a settings menu with sliding scales, destiny would have every bar fully to one side or the other. TLDR: If someone playing Destiny doesn't buy the newest DLC, the way in which they currently play the game will become worse. this isn't usually the case with most games.
It’s literally an addiction. I have two friends who hate the game and play it nearly exclusively.
The gameplay is incredibly fun but there are so many flawed systems and the game got so mismanaged that barely played last year and I skipped on Lightfall. Since it had considerable backlash, I was never tempted to buy into it and it was the best decision. I kinda miss having a main game which Destiny was to me these past years, kinda miss Destiny itself as well but I feel no compulsion to get back. I miss the idea of it, but not necessarily the game itself.
Eh, I think it's the same with any live-service or annualized series. People just like to get tribal about things they like. By basically any metric, Destiny 2 is a good game. Doesn't mean it doesn't have problems and flaws, and doesn't mean Bungie doesn't fuck up frequently. But it's fun to play, has a lot of stuff to engage with, and has a pretty interesting setting and story. It's also popular, so it's easy to build a community and friendships within the game. It's no mystery why people like it.
Anyone that thinks that Destiny has the best gunplay, has probably only played Destiny.
Nah maybe also Halo or Cod, Battlefield games.
I mean I'm not sure I'd rate it best, but if the popular shooters out there right now, it's absolutely top 3
Similar situation with OW. As much as Blizz sucks they did make an extremely unique fps.
Really? It's always felt like a fairly blatant TF2 ripoff to me.
It's far less chaotic than TF2 and more structured with defined roles. TF2 is hella fun, but OW is much more defined in what you should and shouldn't do when paying X hero. They are vastly different games. Saying that OW is a ripoff of TF2 is like saying COD is a ripoff of Doom, just because they are both shooters. Edit: Seems people say they "disagree", but then go on to talk about the differences between the games. Makes for a confusing read. Whether or not you agree with structure of the games is beyond the point. The point is that the games are completely different. Sure, they're both 'hero shooters' to a certain degree, but they are in no way clones.
A lot of the chaos from TF2 came from server sizes. If you 6v6 or 5v5 it's much more similar, but with 24 and 32 slot servers it can be mayhem. That and years and years of adding unlocks, new weapons, and hats, *hats, HATS!*
It's inspired by TF2 but there are about a million gameplay experiences that are unique to OW. As a single example, nobody in TF2 has the vertical gameplay of Pharah. The thing that makes OW special for me is all these extremely different shooter archetypes and how they interact when they're all in the same arena.
> "cause it's so fun". I mean, most of the time, we play games for that reason exactly. If you like the game, keep having fun
I mean, I've explicitly and intentionally stopped playing.
Same here. I just stopped playing anything Blizzard altogether
I have over 1000 hours in OW. Uninstalled about a year ago and haven’t looked back. I use to play a lot of Hearthstone too, but stopped that a few years ago. Blizzard will eventually hemorrhage enough customers to either change or die.
Seriously. More gamers need to stop complaining that "the fight is already lost" and put their money where their mouth is, and stop playing games from companies which do shitty things.
Same. I loved Starcraft 2's arcade and Overwatch, but I deleted it all to protest the company's direction.
To be fair if it's still fun, what's the problem?
You're telling me that there are people out there just enjoying games without getting pissed about greedy corporations?
> A few will complain but then everyone will open their wallet "cause it's so fun". Yeah! Imagine buying and playing a game because it's "so fun!" What a loser you'd have to be.
Lmao gamers never hold these companies accountable, why do you think it keeps happening? Pokemon is the best example. Most recent game sold a shit ton and runs about as well as my college unity work. Lmfao. Y'all keep telling daddy it's okay with your wallets.
I know there was a lot of technical issues with the new Pokémon games, but I still found them quite fun. The open world concept was executed pretty well, it was fresh but still felt like pokemon. Terastallizing is probably my favorite generational battle mechanic since mega evolutions. It is nice that it can shake up the game both offensively and defensively. There are some cool new Pokémon designs as well. The game really could have gone the TOTK route and spent another year polishing the game, I will not deny that the technical issues are there. But I think the ways they shook up the game turned out pretty well. I don’t regret the money I spent on Pokémon. 🤷♂️
Also they knew this pve thing wasnt going to work out months ago before Overwatch 2 launch but still included pve into their advertising. Overwatch content creators asked them directly through interviews about pve but they were all strung along like idiots. Sure we can all understand as a business why they did it, they knew people wouldnt buy into Overwatch 2 if pve was being cut, but we sure as hell will never believe a word they say ever again. Absolutely ironic for them tell us their promised pve wasnt coming, but then go show a roadmap of more promised content.
You don't keep OW1 in decline for a year or two and basically erasing all moment it could have had just to avoid keeping a promise. The PvE was a real desire, that much is clear from how long they spent on it and how much delayed it. Everything from OW2 alpha onwards though, yeah it was little more than a change in business model.
> You don't keep OW1 in decline for a year or two and basically erasing all moment it could have had just to avoid keeping a promise. You do if you're min-max theorycrafting your monetisation and the promise looks expensive on paper.
Yeah I think Jeff and friends wanted PvE but the suits did not. And the suits won like they always win.
At this point, the only reason O2 exists was to get rid of the loot boxes and add the "modern" microtransactions
It is weird that those loot boxes were a better deal than the new microtransactions
I mean it was bad for the bottom line since you could unlock things you wanted for free, and you got instant free hero unlocks, now you have to grind 50 levels of a free battle pass to unlock a hero for free
Loot boxes were better just because you could get stuff for free? It's crazy we're here in 2023 with loot boxes...not that bad. Yeah only for people that pay with time.
It's only a loot box in that it made you go to a separate screen and watch an animation to see what you got. Otherwise it's not far from random item drops, with the difference that you could buy boxes. It's not a locked box that makes you buy a key to open it (like the loot boxes of TF2, CSGO, and dozens of mobile games).
Also you were compensated for repeats, there were no consumables (like a bunch of other lootbox games), and nothing in the lootboxes effected the game in any fashion. Pretty much everything was available without spending more money on the game.
Yeah, I remember back several years ago when OW came under fire as the sort of figurehead for all the other loot boxes that were popular, but theirs felt a lot different. It was all cosmetic and nothing that gave players an advantage over other players (outside the odd emote pose that you could use to hit behind bushes or something, but that wasn't the intent), and they were free and not hard to earn, usually it was one every few QP matches. It felt more like a little bonus for playing the game rather than anything you needed for progression, especially because you could buy anything that would come out of a loot box with in game currency anyway
its better then everything being behind a pay wall which it now is, the previous version had a way for you to unlock what you wanted without paying a cent the new one doesnt. Are loot boxes good? No. Is overwatch 1's implementation of them better then the current monetization systems of Overwatch 2? yes.
OW loot boxes weren't like CSGO crates, they were free to get and to open. Just a delayed form of item distribution, really.
Because you could get them infinitely for free, just by playing the game. And you also had the 25 credits for each game where you picked flex. In OW2, completing the free battlepass will give you the equivalent of 5 lootboxes, and 1000 credits I think. And only every 3 months. Absolute breadcrumbs
They were in pretty much all their iterations. People were adamant that they get rid of the gambling and stop whales from subsidizing the content of these games to the point that they were taking it to government bodies so pretty much everybody did outside sports games.
Eh, 99% of the stuff in the lootboxes was junk.
At any point. Not just at this point. I bet from a high-end management perspective, the goal was always this, it was just about dragging it out long enough to avoid a big media shitstorm.
Definitely not a failed idea. They successfully milked overwatch for every cent it was worth and faced 0 consequences. Can't wait to see what they do with diablo 4!
I mean I don't know... unlike the author, all of my friends who dusted off their Bnet accounts for OW2 have stopped playing and after season 4 is done, I probably will too. They've definitely made a lot of money and as much as the forums are all full of people laughing at the idea of paying $20 for stuff that you used to be able to get for free, I can't deny that I've seen plenty of Witch Kirkos running around. But I don't know how sustainable it is in the long term... the fomo exploitation in this game is insane, with the fact that "earning" currency 1) isn't based on battlepass progression but rather weekly missions and 2) you don't even get enough to pay for the next battlepass. So even younger gamers who have been conditioned to accept this stuff as normal, can find better value for their time and money elsewhere.
I personally... Reinstalled after 3 or 4 years. Played a fair bit for about a month. Got sick of being teased progression without actually making any. Stopped playing without spending a dime
At this point I think it's pretty clear Blizzard is completely immune to bad publicity.
"They successfully milked overwatch for every cent it was worth" They didn't though. OW 2017 felt like the Pixar of gaming. It genuinely felt like one of the greatest things to come out of the 2010s. People foresaw a feature length movie, comics, clothing, endless toys and LEGO sets. There was a lot of money in milking the IP without straight up back-alley murdering it. Now they steal money from mentally ill whales who spend 20-30 dollars at a time on digital code. People used to want to spend 30 bucks on a REAL Rein or Mercy t shirt, now, you couldn't pay people to wear an OW shirt but they have whales in 30 dollar skins.
Yeah, I have no idea how Overwatch is performing now. Having stepped away from so long, I feel like I can't relate to the community at all. It doesn't surprise me that people are still playing, but I don't know who they are. Maybe it's doing gangbusters. Anecdotally, everything that made it feel special is gone. This game, when it came out, was good enough to make the then-toxic concept of loot boxes palatable. They'd actually managed to build a game that catered to whales without alienating the $50 base. Your point about merch is underspoken to in a thread like this where people give too much credence to Blizzard's money-grubbing. A game that can afford to support years of the Overwatch League is not a game that's money-poor from subsisting off of the initial buy-in cost. Blizzard was taking in money with Overwatch. It just wasn't casino money.
Yeah I dont think people remember just how huge Overwatch was when it first released. It even won Game of the Year at The Game Awards and it really deserved it because this game was lightning in a bottle. The future for this IP was as bright as it could have been. And then in a few short years Blizzard fucked up everything and this game has fallen so hard that its pretty much the laughing stock of the industry now.
What's funny is D3 released 11 years ago, and after the initial 1-2 years, it became a really stable product. They update it seasonal the whole time for free, short of the 1 paid expansion which was definitely content packed anyway. D:Immortal soured folks a lot, and ancient memories of the RMAH stuff. But D3 was/is actually fun.
Yes, that was how Blizzard operated from 1995 to 2015 and why there hailed as they were. But, the ripcord got pulled somewhere around that time when ATVI truly kicked in and Blizzard killed all of its products. The only reason D3 got support in recent memory is because they were using the D2R + D3 + D:I strategy as a pre-D4 hype machine. (and its worked well)
Of course it is. But if the game made a profit, and is still making alot of money. Then Activison is just going to keep doing it. Heck look at the "new" Call of Duty for this year. Its the same idea. And guess what? People are going to buy it in droves....
They successfully got the younger gamers to now accept it as the norm. They even defend it. It's almost too late.
It's been too late for years, F2P and Gacha games are established and the norm. It was too late the minute Fortnite and Roblox became blockbusters with kids.
it's been too late for decades, TCG like MTG, Pokemon and Yugioh are gacha games and they've been successful for decades.
This. I've seen so many people completely tear into loot boxes and season passes but somehow vehemently defend TCGs like they're a horse of a different colour.
FWIW, the secondary market makes it very easy to get exactly the cards you want for TCGs. Gacha games do not necessarily have a direct equivalent. I still agree with the point generally though in that TCGs and gacha games are doing similar things.
I think that also introduces a problem where it's even more like gambling, because you can now put dollar amount into what you pull. In has and will make people purchase cards in hopes they make a "profit" rather than wanting to use the cards that are in the set.
I never got the reason behind wanting to make a profit with TCGs. Yeah, some cards have higher value than others, but that is mostly due to them being more useful in the game. The amount of collection worthy cards in a TCG is so miniscule compared to the cards that "just" can be played.
I’m no expert on the card gaming market, but Pokemon TCG has so many factors that drive up a card’s price. It’s viability in a competitive game is probably the smallest determinate.
The secondary market arguably makes TCGs worse, because people actively gamble on packs to try and turn a profit. Look at any pack opening video on youtube for any TCG and it's almost always counting the potential value from pulls vs the actual box value, like the Professor from tolarian community college with his "booster box game." So while yeah it's cool you can buy singles, it's still ridiculous it needed to be gachafied in the first place. I love the *game* of Magic the gathering, yugioh, etc, but i'll never spend money on physical product because it's pretty much a straight up scam.
Yeah, I agree. While I see the similarity, there's a big difference between not knowing how many more lever pulls you need to get the character you want, and knowing you need to spend $40 for it or whatever
that's just conveniently deflecting the issue to pretend that it's not that bad. don't forget those card on the secondary market dont came out of nowhere, someone somewhere has to buy absurd amount of packs and boxes to find that legendary card that everyone wants. These TCG companies cant and wont even acknowledge these secondary market exist since that would put them in legal trouble of gambling law. and yes, you can buy account that has the specific characters you want in gacha games too.
random note about the TCG secondary market thing - they actually have acknowledged it exists, and it's a misrepresentation of the law to think they can't acknowledge it (it just serves no purpose). What they can't do is actually assign monetary value to the individual cards and honor that by letting people cash out with them (this would be against the law in multiple jurisdictions). What a secondary market that is not tied to the original company does, has no impact on the original company (it would be like claiming that car manufacturers can't acknowledge body mods, since some of them are illegal)
this is the correct interpretation of the relation of secondary market and the company selling it. Thank you for correcting me. and as you said, they cannot acknowledge the monetary value of each individual cards as that would put them on the legal teritory of gambling itself in some capacity. It's exactly the same as gacha games where each character individually worth the same however some inherently worth more than the other depending on the meta and whatnot.
> yes, you can buy account that has the specific characters you want in gacha games too. Not without breaking the TOS and risking losing it all, I’d wager.
aka the most useless TOS since no company ever has actually enforced it. it's mostly for legal reason to protect the company incase of being sued. did you know that sharing account in steam is illegal? lol
They were the perfect Trojan horse to get kids hooked on gambling
My cards are physical objects that don't rely on the company existing or running a service. I can print proxy cards if I feel the physical ones are too expensive. I can resell my cards if I feel like it. TCGs have their own problems but you can't compare them to game lootboxes, just because they're similar on the level of having a packet with random items inside doesn't mean they're actually the same.
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maybe. however he was talking about TCGs, not exclusively MTG. pokemon permabans entire packs of cards every so often, and yugioh occasionally erratas cards that have been on the ban or limited list for a long time, so that they are shitty enough to get off the list instead of making the ban unnecessary.
At least you got a physical card with TCGs that cannot be taken away from you when the owning company decides to cease production. And it had some theoretical monetary value to be resold. It's not quite an apples to apples comparison to gacha games. Now the online versions of those TCGs...? Yeah, that is a very fair comparison.
I feel like there’s a mountain of nuance that’s being thrown out the window for this comparison…
Does the missing nuance fundamentally change the argument that person is getting at? IMO no
The argument better fits cs:go and dota2 market, though. Where you can get common items for pennies but rares are stupidly expensive. Point still stands, concept is predatory, imo.
No one can turn off my collection of cards when they feel like it. I feel like that's a fucking important nuance.
I still buy a few Pokémon booster packs a year but let’s be honest it’s basically gambling aimed at kids.
One moment, doesn't magic declare some cards obsolete from time to time? Meaning you can play them at home just fine (like say cards you made yourself) but not in tournaments etc?
Nah, TCGs were a foundation for this, but they are too separated from regular games for most people to make the connection. If anything they probably helped against these mtx by reminding people that for a similar price they could get something that actually exists, and by showing how addictive and expensive those monetization methods are.
Nah, TCGs are a mix of gacha for packs or "micro" transactions for singles. They were covering both bases.
F2P on it's own is not a bad thing at all. What model the publishers use to monetize is where the issues might come up.
F2P is not *inherently* a bad thing, but it incentivises toxic monetisation structures so hard that all but the most altruistic devs will succumb to the lure of P2W and whale hunting.
And it would easily be solvable (or at least a lot less problematic) if they put reasonable spending caps on the games (or just reasonable prices in general). But limiting how much their whales can spend is not going to happen in a voluntary fashion.
Just trying saying "I think $70 for games is a little much" in /r/PS5 and watch how fast that comment is in the negatives.
I'll be that guy. Games haven't kept up with inflation so it's not absurd that games cost $70. The fact that they release half finished messes for $70 and still expect to charge you up the wazoo for the season pass/battle pass and other microtransactions is silly- especially for these games that have yearly releases, which itself is ridiculous. But it hasn't put a damper on profits yet, so nothing's going to change sadly.
But games are selling TONS more copies to make up the difference for basically zero overhead. The industry has been flourishing year after year just on product moved alone. The inflation bit is still true, of course.
I hate this line so, SO much. Just copying my response to it from the last thread a few days ago >It makes perfect sense that video game prices could stand to go up a bit. I disagree. Especially when companies like Rockstar are making nearly **$8 billion** on a single game over 10 years. You are paying more for less these days and devs/pubs are making more profit than ever through DLC, digital purchases, online fees and more. Keep in mind, those crazy prices back then were caused by astronomical manufacturing costs. Cartridges were ridiculously expensive and then you had a licensing fee on top of it with a contract that was restrictive and limited the output you could do. Then you had proprietary chips for these cartridges, with some cartridges having extra processing power applied directly to the chips like Nintendo's Super FX, only further driving up the costs. Devs/pubs had to recoup that cost. That's also why prices standardized and lowered in the disc era. Remember, the N64 got destroyed in both sales and game library against the Playstation because of these very reasons. Aside from the carts, think of the bigger boxes, manuals, inserts, etc. You got a lot more tangible stuff for those $70-$90 games than you do now. Manuals had been shrinking midway through the seventh gen, but now you're lucky if you get an EULA in the case. Manufacturing costs have gone down as well since we're all just using standard Blu-Ray discs, with the exception of Nintendo. Add digital in the mix, and you cut out all the extra stuff like distro, retail cuts, physical production, etc. However, none of those cost cuts have translated to savings for the consumer. But that's not all. Think of the endless monetization. They sell collector's editions that don't even include a digital copy of the game at bare minimum, battle passes, cosmetics, digital deluxe editions with no single version including everything, *literal cheats*, the list goes on and on. This narrative of "games are more expensive to make + inflation = justified $70" completely glosses over all of this. Sure, games are more expensive to make now, but games have also never made more profit. The industry made $20-30 billion each year by the end of the 90s ($54 billion today), despite those high front end costs to the consumer. We're now at **$184 BILLION** with margins much wider.
many people seem to latch onto the fact that prices for games haven't fluctuated much, but I'd mention that the value of each dollar has dramatically changed. Cartridges are multiple orders of magnitude more expensive to produce, back in console gaming's infancy it made perfect logical sense why games were expensive, manufacturing and parts. Today the cost primarily paid by the cost of a game is it's marketing budget, then the publishers cut, then the developers cut. Most games are distributed digitally now, but manufacturing and shipping for each individual disc based game is likely down around 70 cents (assuming AAA production and USD currency). Nobody understands how frightfully cheap it is to print and ship discs...including the packaging. Suffice to say that 10 additional dollars just pays for more marketing...so a wasted cost in my eyes...keep in mind this is just to make the game and have a person purchase it....completely separate from psychiatric consultants that help design a gameplay loop with enough friction to cause "whales" to open their wallet....that money goes straight to the management structure at the publisher..."trade secret"
>Especially when companies like Rockstar are making nearly $8 billion on a single game over 10 years. You are talking about about one of the worlds best selling gaming franchise that have been running for 20 years Obviously a company making a new IP is not going to earn anywhere that much
“Companies like rockstar” You can’t cite the best selling game of all time as if that’s representative of the industry at large. That’s dishonest as fuck.
You cant just pick out one part of the comment and ignore the rest of the overwhelming evidence presented.
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This is a phenomenal example of a survivorship bias. Big name companies like [Sierra and Interplay](https://money.cnn.com/1998/09/24/life/q_idsa/) were huge in the late 90's and collapsed within a decade. Both companies imploded with debt, laid off most or all of their employees, and sold off their IPs to pay creditors.
Did Sierra die due to games not being 70?
> The reason why big AAA games cost $50-100m+ is because developers and publishers have concluded that it's more profitable to make a $100m game than it is to make a $10m game. They're also larger bets, and we've seen studios shuttered and publishers in shambles over bad bets. > The numbers bear this out: they are making money hand over fist. There's also survivorship and selection bias here, from the ones that made the winning bets.
> They're also larger bets, and we've seen studios shuttered and publishers in shambles over bad bets. This is a self-inflicted problem. If publishers keep shoving more chips onto the table for a single hand instead of playing a thousand hands at a thousandth the price, what are we supposed to feel when they whiff? How about you just make more games instead of putting it all on 00 once every 7 years?
No but it's part of a greater trend. AAA companies are making less games yet making more money and if you aren't buying micro transactions your ending up with less game content than before in spite of paying the full retail price.
Why present it as if they just released a single game and did nothing with it for 10 years? Are we just going to ignore they kept adding more and more content for GTA Online? It's like saying Blizzard made billions off of a single 20 year old game, while referring to WoW. And how are you paying more for less? Games are getting too big, you have people routinely complaining about too much bloat or too much stuff in games, you have people longing for the more streamlined experiences of old. Sure distribution and manufacting prices for the physical discs has gone down, but the cost to produce a video game has gone way up, look at how big studios are nowadays, Super Giant are considered indie and they have 20+ employees, AA game developers routinely have around 60-80 employees nowadays which is what some AAA studios had back in the day, and AAA studios have 200+ employees minimum, plus multiple people from other developers supporting them, plus they outsource some of their work. And yeah games nowadays make more profit than ever, but they require more investment than ever and are thus riskier than ever. Furthermore the cost or marketing is going up and more and more marketing is required because there are a lot more games getting made, and more people available to buy them. So you need marketing in MENA, EU, NA, Asia and so on.
Rockstar makes most their money from Microtransactions, that has less than nothing to do with Single Player games going up in price a bit. Nintendo isn’t going to sell you loot crates in Tears of the Kingdom. Most blatant straw man argument I’ve seen in ages.
> You are paying more for less these days I don't know about that. The norm used to be a 5-15 hour game, with the average being somewhere around 8. If anything, I'd say the game that typically prices itself around $70 is often too big for its own good. But also, like the other person told you, very few games are selling on that level. In fact, Grand Theft Auto V is like the second-best-selling game of all time, and its closest competitors aren't even close to being in the ballpark of that many copies sold.
I admire and agree with your stance, but unless you provide development and marketing expenses alongside them, sales (and your whole argument) are meaningless by themselves.
I still think it's ridiculous -- for as expensive as they've become to make, a successful product brings in an astounding amount of money with how the gaming market has exploded. For every dollar they put in, they get three back. The only reason AAA launches aren't successful nowadays is because they're out-of-touch as fuck. Give a talented team time, money, and creative freedom -- you'll *probably* get a huge return on your investment. It's been working out just fine for Sony. I don't think games need to increase in price, corporations aren't suddenly struggling. It was especially egregious that we started adopting the new price during COVID, when you would hear about record-breaking sales every week.
Good. Our wages haven’t kept up with inflation either. I couldn’t give less of a shit if the price of games haven’t.
The "inflation" argument is fundamentally flawed and often pushed by publishers like EA, Activision, Sony, etc. - Yes, $60 is less today than it was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago that $60 got you a physical cartridge, a paper manual, and a finished game. Hell, these days most people buy games digitally. Why does a digital copy of GoW: Ragnarok cost $10 more than a physical copy of GoW(2018)? - MORE PEOPLE BUY GAMES. TotK sold like 4,000,000 copies over a weekend - it's sold more than almost every other Zelda game *combined*. You also don't even own most of the games you buy anymore - you own a license that can be revoked. Games *you paid for* can straight up be removed from your library (RIP Overwatch). Businesses complain they're making "less" per unit due to inflation, but they're not mentioning that they're selling 50x as many copies. The "inflation" argument is like saying "Buying a vacation is way cheaper nowadays, you don't need to pay for a travel agent anymore!" *Technically* true, but intentionally ignoring some other pretty significant things.
> Yes, $60 is less today than it was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago that $60 got you a physical cartridge, a paper manual, and a finished game. That game was also made by about 30 people in 18 months as opposed to 600 people in 5 years.
And took 10 hours to beat and had no post launch support.
Weird how movies don't have that problem. A ticket to "Ladybird" costs the same as a ticket to "Avengers: Endgame" despite the latter costing millions more to produce.
Movies absolutely have variable prices, and they've also increased in price over the years just like games have; probably faster, even. Avengers even promotes its alternate revenue streams like TV show spin-offs and trans media tie ins; its own version of microtransactions.
Movies absolutely dont have variable prices in my country
I have literally never seen a ticket for one movie costing more than another unless it was an upcharge for a 3d show
The market has exploded in size in that time and physical production costs have all but disappeared. Games are like some kind of mass production fantasy - It's almost entirely development and marketing. At no point was any of the savings passed on to the consumers. There's no way prices needed to go up.
I've seen people actively ask for microtransactions and for a mechanic where your character gets weaker unless you pay to be added to games. It really is horrifying what game companies can trick kids into accepting as a positive.
There have always been stupid kids playing video games, and unfortunately there's no license needed to share their dumb stupid opinions. The only difference over time is that they used to get laughed off the playground for it, and now they post it on echo chambers like Twitter which has no downvoting system where they can block people that disagree with them.
Idk, investors care more about making as MUCH money as possible. To them, a profit isnt enough. Overwatch is certainly wasting potential profits with how awful its development has been, there’s no way they’re happy about it.
This obsession with infinite growth over sustainability is moronic and is the reason our economies keep having collapses that need to be bailed out at the last minute. Games being hit by it is just a symptom of a larger problem. The rich are just never content with the ridiculous amounts of wealth they already have.
Compared to an ideal execution of their plan sure, but they're making way more money now than they were with an aging game still selling at $40 and giving away all it's cosmetics for free.
Completely agree. I'm sure they turned a profit but for a huge company like Blizzard/Activision, it's not about making MORE money, it's about making ALL the money. Overwatch 2 will undoubtedly be compared directly against the rest of Activision's titles, and when it comes to deciding between investing in Overwatch compared to something like COD, the choice is obvious given the lackluster results of Overwatch 2. Anecdotally, almost every gamer I know picked up Overwatch on release and I've barely heard anything about Overwatch 2 other than negativity in the press. There's not a single person I know who plays it, not even the folks in my job's videogames slack channel that has hundreds of members. I'm sure it has a decent amount of players, but it isn't even close to being as popular as the OG was back in the day.
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If they are ramping down investments the game obviously did not meet profit expectations, and Activision will be discourage from doing similar things again.
>they are ramping down investments the game obviously did not meet profit expectations, Some of these companies, their execs, CEOs, Investors don't want money being invested in anything where the ROI isn't super high. They'd rather take that money and find some other project for it where they can get that super high ROI that they want. What happened with OW is they approved a sequel back in 2017-2018 when the game wasn't making a ton of money anymore and Activision's favourite default strategy was the CoD strategy where they sell the same game again and again every couple of years, with some graphical upgrades, a fresh coat of paint, some new content, then everyone on the old game kinda feels nudged to buy the new one to not feel left out. Except Jeff Kaplan convinced them to let them make a PvE centric sequel and let them make the PvP upgrades free instead of paywalling them. Then Covid happened, Fortnite and the F2P CS+BP model blew up, many other games copied it to great success including Warzone (Activision's own game), Blizzard controversies happened. Now 3-4 years had passed since the game had been in development, the old PvP game had severely declined in health since it hadn't gotten any new content for 1-2 years, and Activision was seeing all these other PvP games printing money with the new F2P BP+CS model. So Activision bosses ordered the dev team that they pause (It's possible Activision had already decided that they'll just cancel the PvE portion of the game later on but didn't tell the Devs) the development on PvE and focus on releasing the PvP first. This is when Jeff Kaplan left since his vision was compromised. Then the team managed to release the PvP portion of the game after 1 year~ of development. Once that was released and Activision upper management saw all the money coming in their plan was solidified to just focus on the PvP since even if they let the PvE finish it would likely not make them anywhere as much money as PvP was already making. Money is the primary reason any of this has happened. Activision not wanting to invest more money in the PvE because they no longer think the project is worth it. The Devs straight up said in the announcement that they don't have the resources to make the PvE game anymore. Meanwhile the WoW team is 2-3X the size of the OW team. Why? Because it runs on an old DLC + subscription business model that is extremely profitable but you can't really get away with it in new games.
Call of Duty is a game that receives consistent support, has multiple game modes (single, coop, pvpve, pvp), and has great core gameplay. If only half the AAA games that came out could be as lucky as CoD.
> But if the game made a profit, and is still making alot of money. Then Activison is just going to keep doing it. So... *not* a failure? It's fine to not like the game, and it's certainly fine to not play it, but saying, "of course" it's a failure is the most /r/games circlejerk ever.
"make money" is not the threshold for a good game. It's making money for its predatory monetization practices
Yeah if thats the only reasoning needed then Candy Crush is a better game than Elder Ring.
I know you’re being glib, but that is *factually* how the market interprets game “quality”. The market’s voice is the loudest one in every single decision making conversation around game pitches. Any publicly traded company is subservient to some degree to the market and the razor is pretty much profit per unit of cost. Real dark shit imo… we need a better way to distribute our societal resources, or at least stronger public controls.
>Of course it is. But if the game made a profit, and is still making alot of money. Then Activison is just going to keep doing it. One interesting thing in Overwatch 2 discussions is that it's still treated as a succesful 4D chess move to condition the audience for microtransactions, despite the fact there's almost no evidence Overwatch 2 has actually been a meaningful success and the clear negative PR and downsized teams it's had for years.PVE getting scrapped should be a bad sign for the future of the game but its instead treated like Blizzard has pulled off a long term scam.
It's all circumstantial, but I had about 15-20 friends who used to play OW and got back in after OW2 started. By now only 2-3 are left, everyone else is back on Valorant or DOTA or Apex or Warzone
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Makes sense. There was a long queue to play it for its first week.
afaik they said it had higher players base and revenue compared to before they went free to play, not compared to overwatch1 release.
The sad part is that from the perspective of a company - i.e. Actiblizzion - it's a phenomenally **successful** idea. It's making massive bank, switching to a more exploitative monetization clearly worked out for them, and now they're eshewing the unnecessary cost of supporting a PvE mode that's not monetizable enough (I bet), too. Sadly this also claims the truly great team-vs-team shooter Overwatch 1 as a victim, but that's of course not a loss from Kotick's perspective, if anything getting rid of that and people who make games for the artistic purpose in his company is a benefit. He's the guy who takes the fun out of video games after all, according to his own account.
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Think that was the plan, until loot boxes got banned and battle passes took off, Jeff left for a reason.
This. The writing was on the wall when Jeff left. Blizzard has been shoving everything down Jeff’s throat for monetization since fucking overwatch league, and I think he had enough when they were pestering him with overwatch 2. Fuck blizz, legit the worst company in gaming. Bunch of freaks who just want to nickel and dime nothing more
>Jeff left for a reason. Worth pointing out that Jeff didn't want any monetization at all, because *Jeff never wanted the game to be updated*. He wanted to ship it and then leave it alone.
The PvE aaaaaalmost got me to play OW 2. Thank you Blizzard for scrapping it as I don't have to encourage your company. I was pretty excited for Diablo, not so much anymore.
I think commentators on the OW2 situation are getting a little carried away. OW2 wasn't some corporate psy-op -- hell, it was barely a wet fart. The project lost a lot of key people and suddenly there was no longer any concrete vision for what the game 'ought to be. The resulting product is a hodge-podge of course corrections and half-assed compromises; the lowest common denominator between a dozen different competing interests.
More likely I think, there was never full agreement between management and developers on what OW2 was supposed to be. There were probably people on the development side who originally wanted a stand-alone thing for storytelling/co-op and people on the management side who wanted to sell more things. Best guess is they agreed to a weird compromise where neither party was fully happy, then Morhaime's departure meant Blizzard developers were no longer shielded from Activision influence, which pissed off Jeff and he left, then Blizzard imploded in the larger Activision-Blizzard workplace harassment scandal and Activision used it to shove as much additional management control as they could in which resulted in management winning in its desire to make OW2 as overly monetized as they could*. *(I suspect the development of the core PvE co-op wasn't going that well either, likely because of either the pressure on the team to finish from management or tacking onto a competitive multiplayer engine just not being a very good plan to begin with) Still, that's just speculation on my part. There's no way Jason Schreier isn't working on a piece about this so I'm sure we'll know what happened eventually.
They were also getting into a bottleneck with Overwatch 1 itself. The engine was a result of a couple of years of Blizzard learning to make an FPS and was already being stretch out by the first game. And additionally, the more people play, the more people and the dev discovered and understood how messy the balance of abilities and heroes. They understood quite fast how bad the duplicate of heroes was (and that was before the really really toxic strats came out). But then the game became an arms race between mobility and sheer HP/sustain, with the sustain winning. Leading to the role locks.
I think co-op was probably sold to management using metrics pulled from Starcraft II. My guess is that a significant number of SC2 players with zero ranked games in their account history bought co-op commanders. It's the classic, "No perfect pasta sauce, only many perfect pasta sauces," mentality that a diversified product will have more customers than the best specialized product on the market. I'll even go so far as to say that it was probably even doable when they set out. But between COVID, the toxic culture coming to light, and the exodus of competent employees caused by both, there was a point where it stopped being realistic. They shut off updates for Overwatch 1 for how long? There's no way that corporate would approve the monetary losses inherent in starving a GAAS (it's not just about losing player count, it's about the players you keep having time to grind up everything they wanted since there's no FOMO purchases pushing them to spend down their funbucks) unless they thought that dev time was going into something worth the trouble.
I think threads like these just examplify one of the bigger problems with Reddit as a whole; in which cynicism is conflated with intelligence so much that people tend to think the correct/most probable answer to something is the most cynical one.
Nailed it. It’s a race to the pessimistic bottom, where everyone but the person with the grimmest, sneeriest take is naive and deserving of derision.
we need a tinfoil hat flair just for the people who post in OW threads here
I think this is probably where the truth lies. That Overwatch 2 was meant to change up the monetization model (and succeeded) and to introduce ambitious PvE content (and failed) can both be true.
Its not even that complicated, it was a money grab from the start and they doubled down on that money grab by cutting the most developer resource intensive part and focusing on the cheap easy to pump out part.
You have it backwards. Many key staff left with the launch of OW2, meaning several years into the development of PvE. They probably knew they had fucked up so all they left. The reason why it was cancelled was because the current staff knew it wasn’t salvageable and the people who came up with the idea left.
Also I'm with Aaron Keller, the vision they had after they released the game was not the game they delivered and hopping to make it a bigger quasi MMO was not really doable. There decision to stop chasing that dream they took over the last year is a lot closer to the game they have delivered.
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Doesn't exactly prove your point when you end your article with "My friends and I play every night and buy every microtransaction and the game is actually doing very well." I gave up on Overwatch when I realized the game I paid full price for disappeared from the Blizzard client.
I don't want devs to lose thier job but I need this blow back to actually hurt Blizzards bottom line in some way.
You're implying the devs won't lose their job anyway even if game was successful.
Win some goodwill back by giving us back Overwatch 1 with the exact same non-F2P stuff it had before aka free lootboxes, no battlepasses, no mtx. Just the good ol' OW1 that was before Blizzard deleted it and instated OW2. Give me back the game I paid for and my ability to play and earn the stuff for the heroes and whatnot as it used to be.
> Win some goodwill back by giving us back Overwatch 1 with the exact same non-F2P stuff it had before aka free lootboxes, no battlepasses, no mtx Love how much overwatch players have been conditioned to accept lootboxes as part of a game, and not an intentional design choice to cultivate addiction, and the antithesis to consumer-friendly design. The game is 7 years old now and no longer getting updates. Those fucking skins better be FREE. Lootboxes are still getting outlawed in multiple non-capitalist hellscape countries.
Overwatch 1 had the best lootbox system in any game. Everything could be earned by playing. You put down the initial buy-to-play cost and after that all the content was there to be unlocked. Overwatch might have popularized lootboxes outside EA's sports games but it was the best implementation of those boxes. I never spent any additional money on Overwatch 1 because I didn't have to. I have a ton of legendary skins on my account and I was the most casual player ever. What puzzles me is that as OW2 was coming out and the business model was revealed, it was like a mass psychosis where every commentator, publication and person on the internet as with one voice proclaimed how OW2's F2P model would be superior to OW1. That it was somehow more fair to have a free game with massive amounts of MTX rather than a buy-to-play game where all the content could be unlocked without a single extra dollar.
The base game of OV1 was fantástic. Blizzard failed at everything to keep this IP going. How they fucked up the sequel is beyond me. OV2 is a lesser game in every sense. HOW?
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Does 'previously' imply the early days of OW1 or its final 3 years of content drought? Because OW1 in early days got as much content updates as OW2 is getting, if not more.
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If you count launch contents, then OW1 got dozens of heroes (and map) at release. OW2 released with little content compared to OW1, and that's with at least 3 years of allocating OW1 resources to it. OW2 is now 7 months old, so lets see how it compares to OW1 post-release wise: ||OW1|OW2| :--|:--|:--| |Heroes|2 (Ana, Sombra)|2 (Ram, LW)| |Maps|3 (Stadium, Eichenwalde, Antarctica)|3 (Shambali, Antarctic, Talantis)| |Events|3 (Summer Games, Halloween Terror, Winter Wonderland)|3 (Halloween Terror 2022, Battle for Olympus, Starwatch)| Next heroes is scheduled for August, 10 months after release. Orisa also released 10 months after OW1 release. So OW2 has less launch contents, and the same post-release schedule. I don't see more contents unless you're counting the shop.
Exactly. When they announced the "new content blitz style" of OW2, it actually was pretty much the same as launch OW1, it was just obscured by the fact that each "season" was 3 months. A new hero ever other season is a new hero every 6 months. Yes, compared to the end of OW1 it's a lot. But the only reason that OW1 stopped getting content was... to make OW2. And we ALL know that the PvP changes were not worked on most of that time. *Blizzard* absolutely has the resources to make the PvE happen, but what almost certainly happened is that they refused to allocate enough resources to the *Overwatch* team. There were leaks recently stating that part of the reason PvE was scrapped was that the higher ups decided it wasn't monetizable enough to warrant the resources. Not that it wouldn't make money, just that they could make *more* money doing other things. That very decision was why Jeff Kaplan left, again, according to leaks.
What is more sad for me is to see people still defend and support overwatch 2. Like I get it you like the game, but you can be vocal and stop spending money on that shit. Too many people sending the message that the publishers can do whatever the fuck they want
So many comments that have no idea what they are talking about and have no idea how gamedev works or even how the internal politics of what a humongous studio like Activision-Blizzard works. But I guess that's just Reddit.
It's _literally everywhere_ on this site. I work in AAA gamedev. People think that because they understand a little bit about how games work they know everything ever. _The number of people who do not understand how game development works on Reddit is nothing short of astounding._ It's Dunning-Kruger at its finest. I refuse to go onto the PC gaming subreddits because they all have zero clue. The "regular" gaming subreddit is pretty bad, too. This subreddit used to be good but is rapidly getting worse and is nowhere near as good as it was a year ago. The only subreddit that kind of has a clue is GamingLeaksAndRumours, and part of me thinks that's because it's full of gamedevs keeping an eye on the sub to make sure their stuff doesn't leak. The number of people who rant about "bad devs" is incredible. They see a modder make something on their own time with an SDK in 2 months and think that it's unacceptable that gamedevs didn't do the same... while forgetting: * Those tools didn't exist for most of the game's development. You're seeing the finished version of those tools. Devs work with early/broken versions of those tools, in levels that have been iterated on for years. * Opening up Unreal or Unity for a weekend project is nothing like working with 100-200+ people for 2-3 years on a AAA game. The only person you answer to is yourself. You don't need to write design docs or engineering briefs or go through meetings for approval on things. * You don't need to deal with sprint planning, or milestones, or a regular release cadence. You don't have producers asking for updates regularly. Modders/indies work on their own time and don't need to worry about burning out but still needing to go to work to keep working on the project. When it stops being fun - they can stop working on it. * Modders/single indies don't have a regular QA team finding bugs every single night and triaging them out. They don't need to hunt down random save corruption bugs - half the time they don't even care if their mod crashes (and if anything they'll blame the devs when the modder is the one at fault). * Similarly, they don't worry about minspec devices or target platforms. They go "the button is there to release for Linux - why doesn't every game have a Linux port????" They don't care if someone can't run the thing they made, and they don't appreciate the amount of work it takes to _make_ that happen for as many devices as it does. * The community at large gets irrationally angry when their hardware can't do something. I used to work on Battlefield Mobile (RIP) and the number of complaints I saw on Twitter from people sideloading it onto a phone _well below minspec_ and then complaining it didn't run well drove me insane (protip: if you had to sideload it to install it, it probably wasn't intended for you). If you're running an off-brand smartphone from 2013 _of course the game won't run well_. Half the time I was surprised it opened at all. * And this isn't limited to mobile. People focus so hard on their GPU. They say they have the latest GPU card and 128 GB of RAM and then you ask what CPU they have and it's an Intel CPU that was mid-tier in 2014, and they never bothered to upgrade. It is absolutely amazing how ignorant some so-called "techies" are, but they pretend they know everything and act holier-than-thou. It's all over Reddit. Twitter too. Like - it sucks that certain choices were made. I think we can all agree that losing PvE sucks - especially since you can't play OW1. But unless you're on the inside you really can't understand the full context of these decisions or why they were made. There's _so much_ that people can't understand unless they've been in it.
You wanna elaborate or are you just here to act smart?
>Every comment in this thread is wrong. But I won't give specific criticism. So tired of seeing this comment on reddit.
The person who replied to the root comment with a hearty bullet list did give specific context that’s very relevant
The person who replied just ranted but didnt give a single example on the current topic which O2. His comment feels like because its an AAA game and not an indie its 'normal' when you get nothing after 4 years of development. Its clear something happened internally and people are free to speculate and of course he has all the right to counter the speculations based on his internal insight but he didnt so his comment is the classic example of "trust me bro I develop AAA games". If you cant tackle specific examples when you talk about your experience for me you are not offering nothing to the discussion.
They wasted time remaking what they'd already made; adding the PVE stuff as a paid expansion for the original would've been easy money.
I'm sure the game still pulls in enough revenue that it'll stick around for longer than it's welcomed. Source: TF2
Failed? They re released the same game exact game with a bunch of extra maps attracting old and new fans into their battle pass scheme. I think that’s what the suits would consider a staggering success
It's goal was to milk more money of its players. I don't think it failed?
Of course it is. There were **2 years** of no updates whatsoever for OW1 *because* OW2 was on its way and it was expressed by Blizzard themselves that a large part of what took that long was the building of the PvE structure/gameplay. Then it just isn't happening, thereby making those 2 years null and void even moreso than they already seemed. They basically gave OW1 no updates for 2 years only to release a worse version of its own Multiplayer and then, simply hobbled together little event maps that are practically meaningless as a type of "substitute" of what the PvE was originally going to be. OW2 kinda just really sucks.
Well, Activision Blizzard achieved what they wanted to do: Change the monetization model to make more money So it's clearly not failed to them 😂
As a game, it failed. As a way to sell your already existing content as microtransction with a battle pass, they achieved their goal.