I’d say it was less of OWL killing Overwatch and more Blizzard announcing Overwatch 2 in 2019 (which is crazy considering OW1 was only 3 years old) and then telling people that the majority of the Overwatch team was working on Overwatch 2. That turned Overwatch 1 into a waiting room for Overwatch 2 and killed all momentum the game had IMO.
Yeah, to add to that, GOATS meta lasting 2 years was terrible to the game. Then the OW2 announcement came out along with role queue and the balancing of OW1 again stagnated.
Yeah Atrioc's resentment that Kotick fleeced Twitch with OWL is just affecting his opinion on OW as a whole. During that 3 year period between OW2 announce and release date they didn't release ANY new content. No new maps, heroes, MAYBE like one balance patch every year.
Yeah, imo the real overwatch killer was Blizzard's reluctance to nerf characters "too hard" due to community backlash. The most egregious example of course being Brigitte, who was released to counter the meta strategy at the time: dive. Makes sense on paper, but the issue was she was so blatantly overpowered that it took a total of 19 CONSECUTIVE nerfs over 2 WHOLE YEARS before she stopped seeing "meta" play. This, along with Blizzard essentially cutting all support for the game, killed all momentum it had built up in its first 2 years and created what we have today.
They made a really short animated series which was an in-universe documentary about the development of God AIs and Omnics and it was very good but that just made it more upsetting how underutilised the actual story is in this game. I remember Super (for those who don't know, one of the biggest Overwatch streamers and an absolute certified OWL veteran being a Main Tank for the only team to get back-to-back season wins) saying that everyone on the Overwatch team genuinely cares about the game, people constantly complain about devs but they are just trying their best. The only exception he made was Michael Chu, the narrative design lead, who Super described as surely being a salary thief because nobody knows what he did between the games launch in 2016 and his departure in 2020.
Well we know what happened. The guy who was over seeing the game was purposely ruining it so CoD could continue to be the bigger IP. He's gone now so there's hope for the future.
I thought it was canceled several months ago. I guess they were going to do a half-assed version but just canceled that too. Not surprised after they canceled the original pve concept.
Yeah you had to buy a pack of individual missions for like $15-20. And all the missions could be beaten in a couple of hours from what I've heard. I can't imagine why that didn't sell
so they did cancel pve several months ago and decided to just randomly give out 3 or so missions for 10 dollars or so every couple months which they did do once a released 3 pve missions. But they even canceled that recently to absolutely zero pve
@@gujonteitur4853 Wait so they never even released more than one batch? I read their posts back then and from my understanding, you would've had to buy a new pass for missions coming out afterwards. But I guess they never even got that far so it doesn't matter. My bad either way, edited my comment
As a DEEP addicted ow player at the time it was no secret that they released ow2 just to overhaul the monetization structure so that they could charge you for all the features that were free at the time, all the PVE shit was a hobbled together excuse to get away with it, kinda wish I had archived my Twitter in some way before I deleted it a few years back just to show that a bunch of us were calling bs even on the day of the announcement tldr ow2 was NEVER about PvE it was so they could change to a “charge money for everything” game structure
Ah Reynad, I forget the days where all the top eSports streamers whole personality was "I will be an asshole if you ever disagree with me on the most minor thing"
I only played OW1 for 60 hours or so but I got around 10 legendary skins and loads of other rarities just through the free loot boxes you got on level up. As a free player in OW2, you get maybe three or four skins total per season through the battlepass, and none of them are legendary. You'd have to pay hundreds of dollars for that many legendary skins in OW2.
They've recently made monetisation much better, all heroes are free, all previous battle pass mythic skins are available. Much better than any other game offers today exept like... Drg and other mostly pve or single player games
@@BagelBoi4000 It's a step in the right direction but I wouldn't say it's "much" better than it was. It wasn't difficult to get the new heroes for free before anyway, it just took like 5-10 hours of playtime. The price of skins is still insane though, if £20+ for one skin is truly is 'much better' than 99% of other multiplayer games, then microtransactions in gaming are much worse state than I thought.
to the bathroom to smell your keys in order to cure your homesickness. really helps me out, a good old with of the house key and i can party for a bit longer.
Hey Big A idk if you read comments on the clips channel but OW got so much more screwed then you think with ow2. The crazy thing is when they announced ow2 we still had to play ow1 for almost 2 years without any balance update but luckily the patch we were left with ended up allowing for a decent diverse meta. I played for college during this time and it’s some of my favorite gaming memories. This is important because when OW2 came out (in my opinion) 5v5 killed what I found most fun in OW which was the tank synergy and how diverse you could be with tanks. Switching to 5v5 was to reduce the tank queue time as it was the least played role but Dropping it to 1 tank has the opposite effect they wanted and NOBODY plays it now. And that’s not even talking about the fact that all the passion & enthusiasm you felt from the devs in ow1 is gone in ow2 which replaced it with obviously soulless cash grabbing. It’s such a sad story for my favorite game b/c I honestly think that if blizzard was hands off the esports side the game would have had a crazy thriving esports scene if it was allowed to grow naturally. I know you’re an overwatch hatter but I thought you’d enjoy some further insight
I swear to god your story about getting your foot in the door at twitch is literally the quintessential gamer to professional experience. That shit is so fuckin funny having also gone through it for esports. 😂
I'm an Overwatch fiend and this was majorly disappointing. They had canceled most of PVE before this but said that they would still release PVE missions once in a while, but it seems they are even scraping the bare minimum. Such a shame.
Think a youtuber by the name of "Sir Swag" (crazy name) interviewed ex blizzard employees, the story is that execs saw the money diablo immortal was raking in and wanted to do it with overwatch. Extreme resource cuts and eventually layoffs to pve division bottlenecked it till they just decided to scrap it. Pretty big OW fan, pvp has been improving by quite a lot, so I think a resurgence might come in a year or two.
Another interesting detail which may or may not have forewarned or maybe contributed to Overwatch cancelling its story-driven PvE is that their lead narrative designer got laid off in January and that position is yet to have been filled. They have nobody in charge of story content, despite being a game that got a lot of popularity from having fun characters and world building.
I would've been alot more open to Overwatch 2 if they just didn't make it so you couldn't play the first game anymore. I just recently got back into gaming a bit more, I mostly stopped after getting MW3 for the Wii and not really playing it, and then Overwatch was the next game I bought. Didn't buy another game until Elden Ring, so Overwatch was basically the only game I was playing for awhile. Wasn't everyday, but I'd casually play a few rounds from time to time and it was always fun. When Overwatch 2 came out and was having problems I figured I'd just play the original before I fully jump into the new game. That's when I learned if I wanted any Overwatch it had to be Overwatch 2. I just disagreed so much with the monetization and it did just rub me the wrong way that basically the only game I paid for and played in years just got taken away, so that's why I stopped playing. Man do I miss going crazy on Junkrat, blasting myself into the air and shooting bombs from the sky, running up to a Bastion and getting him to kill me so my death bombs could take out the Bastion. Mannn do I miss that Overwatch
The news is from a few days ago. The announcement from a few months ago was that they were scrapping the standalone campaign, the recent announcement is that they're scrapping all PvE content.
Blizzard definitely didn't balance around overwatch league. Pretty much the entire reason OWL died is because of the lack of balance. One meta (goats) dominated high level play for almost two years and it got stale. It was blizzard's LACK of balance that made OWL tumble. Also the overwatch league died at the end of 2022 and was immediately replaced with a more home grown system.
As an ow2 player (never played ow1) I never knew about PVE until they cancelled the full PVE and I just figured it was over then and was glad the PVP was being focused on
I used to love Overwatch back in its first year. Played a load of it and even came back when new things came in. Didn’t play it all that much after the first year and when Overwatch 2 was announced I was hyped until I saw it basically Overwatch 1 with a huge update and they just stuck 2 on it. Haven’t played it and probably never will as I don’t wanna play a reskin like the CoDs.
yeah, at this point the reason for overwatch 2, was that the ceo at the time (bobby kotick) wanted to milk all the remaining money he could from the game, project increased revenue to boost the microsoft aquisition numbers, and then didnt care about it. This led to development time being spent on pve and then scrapped at the will of the shareholders because the pvp was making money RIGHT NOW at ow2 launch. At this point the upper heads have all been replaced, and the devs who actually care are allowed more control in the games direction. I would recommend speaking to some overwatch content creators to get the fuller picture. At this point microsoft has realized that bobby was just pumping the numbers and are firing a lot of people, and allowing the devs to choose the future direction of the game.
What you said at the end is basically true, you cant just turn up to a convention amd network but with right groundwork you roll the dice in your favour. I don't work in gaming but due to winning cash in some Pokemon tournaments it did open the door to meet Poketubers (but random lol)
Dude I was a die hard OW fan for years, I actually enjoyed OW2 but I stopped playing 6 months ago and tried to get back into it and it’s atrocious now. Cannot stand it
OWL didn't really play that big of a part in OWs downfall. it was mostly the fact that they didn't balance the game for years because "we are working on OW2". if they just kept updating OW1 I think the game would have been fine.
Overwatch was sadly dead before it started the plan was always 3 games OW1 PvP, OW2 PvE and OW3 an MMO (this is real) so the devs immediately started work on PvE before they knew the lightning in the bottle they had once they realised they did the bare minimum only adding new maps and heroes and the occasional QoL update, no new modes or systems because they were all still focusing on OW2, after a particularly painful meta in 2018 most players had stopped playing and in late 2019 they announced OW2 with a crazy story mode and replayable missions with talent trees, needless to say everyone was hyped but after that they stopped updating the game only adding 1 last hero in April 2020 and a couple of deathmatch maps no one played. for 2 and a half years the base game was left to die. Finally, in early to mid 2022 it was announced OW2 PvP and PvE would be 'decoupled' with OW2 PvP coming October that year and PvE would still be coming just later so they had something to ship and make some money back. However during December 2022 Blizzard realised they couldn't fulfil the plan for the talent trees (tbf it was gonna be like 1600 total abilities) which they announced to the public in May 2023 saying they still have an awesome story mode coming which they added the first 3 story missions in August last year which ended up being very barebones linear missions, limited hero selection and no variation in enemies or abilities. Due to this poor performance its been stated that Blizzard will no longer continue to release the rest of these story missions even though some more are finished which has lead to PvE being cancelled twice. Now the PvP is much better than it ever was in OW1 with regular new heroes and maps, several new modes and major gameplay changes twice a year (along with the standard minor ones twice a month) but that still doesn't excuse the 3 years of abandonment of OW1 to release a sequel which at the time was the same game slowly going back on promises until we're left with an updated version of the original game. However please don't blame this on 'lazy devs' or anything these poor people have been worked to the bone with upper management telling them constantly to go back and forth on projects and telling the team not to worry about the concerns they had and for the poor performance of the launch in august and the abysmal launch of the story missions these devs have not received a single $ for their work in bonuses whilst the entirety of the rest of Blizzard have.
this is just the lingering wake of Bobby Kotick. There is a completely new team behind the game and this decision has nothing to really do with the current Blizzard team.
@nekogami87 i did play at release, up until the first halloween event and then i quit. Tried ow2 and it felt less like a fun party game and more like a meta hell over-analysed shoehorned esports project that disowns creativity and interesting gameplay in favor of "((("balance")))".
wait… didn’t this happen like last year? Blizard has been on the downturn since Cataclysm… I gave them another chance with D3.. then it was over. Never touched the company again. I am suprised people even still talk about it. its been years
As an overwatch player, we all knew it was canceled for months, for the past 2 years we knew ocerwatch PvE is NOT EVER going to come out Overwatch is very fun to play and it’s in a good state rn but I have hope for ow now that bobby kotic is gonE
By cancelling the content before releasing it they theoretically turn it into a tax write off if they believe that will be worth more money than releasing it, the same way HBO or Netflix does when they cancel these big productions that are already made.
Loved OW played thousands of hours Loved watching OWL got crap ton of those points for the team skins OW2 announced with PVE ( super excited cause all i wanted was a game like MVM from TF2) 1 years goes by no news or OW update another year still nothing Finally the announcement and just happy for a release date wait for the reviews Reviews say no pve "still in development" Uninstall the literally unplayable ow1 Here i am now Helldivers 2 almost exactly the type of game i wanted (side note i know OW wasnt ever going to have a game like helldivers but i knew what i could get with MVM
2016-2018: great game late 2018- mid 2019: meta gets a little stale and updates aren't coming out frequently enough to fix it(meta became GOATS which is basically 3 tanks 3 supports and is really hard to kill people) late 2019: They add role queue which locks teams to 2dps, 2 tanks, and 2 supports. This got rid of the meta that everyone was getting tired of and we get double shield meta. Really boring, basically just tanks rotating who has shield up so no one dies, also TERRIBLE for visual clarity and spectating (google: "double shield ow" and look at the pictures). A side effect of role queue is that the players on a team are balanced between all roles 2-2-2, but there are basically double the amount of dps players as tank players so queue times for tanks are instant and dps players have to wait forever to find a game also late 2019: They announce OW2, free upgrade to multiplayer, paid expansion for new pve mode. early 2020: new character echo comes out in April but they say this will be the last hero in OW1 because there will be a new engine and they're focusing on OW2 going forward also early 2020: they try doing weekly "hero pools" where they just basically delete random agents for a week instead of trying to actually balance the game. Caused balancing issues in game and one tricks got angry because the only character they play is gone from the game. (they eventually stopped hero pools) Rest of 2020, 2021 and half of 2022: No new heroes, maps, game modes, etc. the only real big updates are recycled holiday events with no new content aside from skins. Jeff Kaplan also leaves blizzard in 2021. 2022: New leaders in charge say wtf is going on here, our players are leaving because the game isn't getting updated. PvE mode is taking forever just get OW2 out there so we can give the players content. OW2 comes out in late 2022 and players are like "wow its been 3 years since I last played Overwatch, theres probably a bunch of changes in Overwatch 2!!!" and then are greeted by a game that was basically unchanged except its now 5v5 and its night time instead of day time on some maps.
Listening to you explain how OW and OWL died shows you have some fundamental misunderstandings about the game and the league. They did not shut the league down around covid, they took a break for like a month or two while figuring out how they were gonna run the league while everyone stayed at home. After that it came back, they finished the season, and orgs did not field teams of just 5-6 random players. OWL didn't die until just a few months ago. Season 6 finished with a playoffs hosted at LAN in Toronto and that was the last ever season. In fact the GM of Florida Mayhem stated that they were earning money rather than losing money for the first time ever in season 6, and that was BEFORE they went on to win the Championship and a million dollars. On the gameplay side of things, it's now about as good as it has ever been IMO. The balance is in a great state, and when they accidentally made a hero WAY too strong a couple of weeks ago they quickly fixed that after just a week which they never did in OW1. Previously that could have taken up to a month. As a big OW fan it's kind of disappointing that the PvE mode is now completely cancelled, but I'm also glad that they've cut their losses and decided to fully focus on PvP rather than continue working on a game mode they were never gonna be able to deliver. Reports are that Bobby Kotick is personally responsible for a lot of the delays/fiascos when it comes to PvE because he would frequently force the devs to redo or completely scrap features that they had been spending months or even years working on. Final points I'd like to make is that OW2 has always been free to play. At no point did anyone have to buy a new game like you said in the video. You also said OW2 launch brought a little bit of a spike in interest but didn't really do shit. In reality the player base has continued to grow after launch, and in a developer update just last week game director Aaron Keller said they were approaching 100 million players. I will say that number is extremely vague, so we don't really know what that means. He certainly didn't use the words "monthly active users", and if they were approaching 100 million MAU that would put them just ~30% behind LoL, and I definitely don't think that is the case. Maybe he means 100 million installs, idk. Anyways, I'm a big fan of Big A, but I thought it was appropriate to point out some of the big errors in the video. Can't expect people to know everything about everything, especially not when Atrioc is explaining something he wasn't really invested in off the cuff live on stream.
Blizzard had a literal money printing machine on their hands until they fumbled everything in 2019 with announcing OW2 to avoid backlash from the Hong Kong fiasco. Overwatch is literally one of the greatest IPs made in the last 10 years and they are just throwing it away.
It’s funny watching non-overwatch players react to this stuff because if they were actually in the scene they’d know people are mostly fine with where the game is currently.
As other people are already saying OWL is not what killed overwatch, in fact the pro scene is what keeps/kept a lot of players up to this point. The dev team has always simultaneously appeased to casuals with things like arcade modes, events, etc... the problem is literally just the development of ow2, (and blizzards bad balancing). They spent 2 YEARS working on ow2 while basically ignoring overwatch 1 besides some skins every now and then, and now most of the work they had going has gone to shit
blizzard handled ow so poorly but it had very little to do with the things you mentioned. esports is not the reason ow1 died. it was because blizzard abandoned the game for years to work on ow2 and you know how that turned out.
Seems lile all the resources that should have gone into content development went into trying to make esports work instead. Management at blizz lost focus on why people were playing their game.
@@kitolzdo you honestly think that game developers and coders were pouring their resources into owl? there being a competitive scene has nothing to do with why players dropped off and that is especially not the case now
@@Neon-tj4el I think it sucked up budgets and management attention. Devs and artists don't get assigned to projects unless management thinks it's a priority, and from what I can see that's what happened. They thought esports were going to be their main focus and put everything else in the back burner.
No, that was when they announced that they were removing the hero levelling and customisation in PvE but they still released PvE missions with cutscenes and an overarching story. Now they're announcing that the PvE missions are completely cancelled. They'll probably release some more seasonal PvE games because they've already developed a bunch of enemy AIs and interactions, but they'll just be like Halloween gamemodes, not an actual story.
nah that's not what happend. ow1 was really popular and used to cost money people bought the game and played a lot to grind loot boxes for rewards and some bought those loot boxes. it wasn't weird to have like 1000 boxes cause after a while people stopped caring ow2 is free and if you want some rewards you have to spend money for most things, buy the battle pas, exclusive skins, locked new heroes in the battle pass for some time. ow2 was a monetization overhaul.
To be completely honest big A is seriously misunderstanding the timeline of events that led to OW2. OWL had nothing to do with a sequel existing. Overwatch 2 as a concept existed before overwatch 1 even launched. It was a completely audacious, groundbreaking PVE sequel that no dev team in the history of the industry could hope to bring to light and it stalled in development for years. Eventually the OWL team owners said “fuck you blizzard you promised all this shit and we have nothing” and basically pressured them into releasing a PVP only beta WAYYYYY before PVE content was ready to be shipped. OW2 is such a failure because they abandoned OW1 for years to work on a PVE game that was never going to be completed. They (foolishly, to make the media forget about the Blitzchung situation) announced OW2 in 2019 and still 3 years later hadn’t done enough to release anything. It’s an all time great disasterclass from Jeff Kaplan and the blizzard executives who abandoned a game of the year winner to create an impossible sequel. Just thought I’d clear that up because the mainstream perception of OW is so far down the drain that it’s hard to find objective journalism on it anymore. TLDR: OWL had nothing to do with OW2 being a failure. OW2 PVE was a failure from its inception thanks to poor leadership and impossibly high standards.
People casually forget how intensely they butchered Warcraft 3 - the only reason they have anything these days. "The end of blizzard" will not happen because of shit like this. They will always have their blind followers that buy their shit, even if they ate kittens live on stream. You could call blizzard the "sunken cost company", people will play their shit until they drop dead. WoW hardcore is the best example of that. And if none of that is making money for them anymore, they will transition more and more into gacha mobile games, which they are already doing.
The way blizzard handled the whole OW 1 to OW2 shift is just horrible. Basically just taking a massive dump on the people that bought OW1 and supported the company by their purchase. They stole the game that we loved playing for which we PAYED and then just gave us a micro transaction / battle pass nightmare. I would rather pay 60€+ for a game with no micro transactions than a free game that uses this predatory business model.
