Why is this article trying to spin "all future heroes free" as a failure? If anything it means they did the math internally and concluded that revenue is strong enough that they don't need the desperation tactic of locking heroes behind the battlepass to be successful. Bruh that's a GOOD sign and a net positive for everyone involved. Schreier needs to chill out. I despise clickbait/hyperbole culture so fucking much
Whenever some negative press gets out, all of the people who never had any interest in playing the game in the first place, come out and cry about the game. Love the content dude, thanks for calling stuff like this out
ow at its core is the best fps by a long shot; promises of pve and how they handled that cannot touch the core gameplay and nature of ow. also those promises, were just that, promises. they didn't take money for it; only thing they did is after years of supporting the game, they had about two years of not releasing content, after which they made the game free and started going back to a schedule of constant content releases.
SVB comes in with the traditional objectively correct take as always. Not sure what Schreier is doing here, he's usually doing exposes on working conditions in the industry and stuff like that.
SVB CONSISTENTLY has the best takes in the gaming community. Not the overwatch community, I mean all of gaming. Thank you for not fence sitting and not being afraid to use your platform to speak your mind. W takes, man. Edit: These buffoon replies lol.
Dude he's coping about OW2 because that's where he makes money. You're probably coping as well lmao Noone wanted 5v5 or the new monetization scheme and he's just trying to rewrite history.
@@Theta117 You can be biased and have the correct take. That said, you have not made an argument against the take itself but have instead speculated against SVB's integrity (ad hominem). Then you made a generalisation of the player base without providing evidence for it. Do you want your opinions to be taken seriously?
I find it weird how Aaron explained that they feel confident about removing heroes from the battle pass due to (paraphrasing) having a stable income from the bp already, so they earn enough for the higher-ups to approve basically devaluing the bp - but, according to the article, they underperformed so much they got no bonus? Were they targets too high? They were expecting more people to buy the missions?
The targets included BP sales + Shop sales + Story Mission sales, so yes, the missions were supposed to sell extremely well. A recent Kotaku article interviewed some former devs similar to what Jason did here and they confirmed leadership had high expectations for those 3 Story Missions... Aaron has also said they hope the Mythic Prism shop offsets the revenue lost from Heroes in the BP.
"There are no US troops in Baghdad." "There is no war in Ba Sing Se." "We are meeting all internal profit targets, and this is totally NOT an attempt to get more people in because we fucked up the first time and drove away customers." I do love how SVB got so angry about this just after the big meeting and just before Schreier's book comes out.
I generally agree with your take. It does feel targeted, minimally informative, and hyperbolic. Kind of like a carnival sideshow. To play devil's advocate, Jason Schreier's prior game journalism has two major themes: worker exploitation and abuse in the industry, and business malfeasance. Blizzard, as a subdivision of ActiBlizz, has been profoundly guilty of both over recent years. From Blitzchung to the lawsuits, the wildly self-destructive departure from the Chinese market, OW2's mismanagement by Bobby , Jeff, and co., and Diablo 4's roughshod development, Jason has no reason to treat Blizzard even neutrally. The Japanese have an interesting term, 'black company,' referring to an abusive and exploitative business that chews up naive or vulnerable workers then spits them out for too-little pay; ActiBlizz, and Blizzard in particular, shares some uncomfortable similarities when seen from a birds-eye view. While we as members of the OW community are used to perceiving Team 4 as separate from the rest of Blizzard as a business operation- whether correctly or not- neither Jason nor his target audience with Bloomberg see a distinction in this regard; as you observed, the restructured bonuses are almost transparently a scummy corpo move intended to claw back resources from the 'problem child' in Blizzard's portfolio, and Jason and his audience would recognize as much, hence why it goes unsaid. Additionally, given his prior pieces and investigation regarding worker treatment in games, and again in accordance with the target audience for this piece, he's treating the employees of Team 4 *as distinct from* the organization, or the management structure, of Blizzard overall. The intent of this piece is to show that- as has been the theme for ActiBlizz for the past few years- Blizzard as an org continues to mistreat its workers, bloodletting from a team facing real headwinds while new leadership makes empty gestures towards the institutional problems that led to the situation in the first place ['Read about them in my new book^tm']
The way you interpret a journalist literally just explaining an acronym, PvE, (like any decent journalist should) is incredibly uncharitable. Also there is an interesting debate to be had between the two sides of "reward all employees equally" vs "reward the most successful", and the way you completely write that off with "puppy-kicking Kotick" is so lame. This video was a miss for me.
Yes that bait was hyperbolic clickbait garbage. However Jason Shrier is an acclaimed gaming journalist, definitely the most well known for a reason, that beeing a history of breaking important stories.... such as this one. You can't just antagonize the whole article because the title is bad. And no svb if you are reporting about a games industry happening you dont expect the reader to know the history of development or what the hell 'PvE' means (most gamers do not). Just saying that that guy broke the news there wont be any more PvE, while the last thing Blizzard said was 'well share more soon' at Blizzcon.
Minor correction on the Apex stuff, the hacker claimed he wanted to expose a major security flaw in the game that would allow hackers like him to get access to computers remotely to run whatever code they wanted on the PC itself. The hacker stated that because unlike Riot, that offers monetary rewards to people that find security exploits and reports them, EA offers nothing and that this was his way of making the devs fix the game by bringing a ton of attention to the matter. Even the anticheat for Apex has come forward and said that it's not an issue on their end, with EA backing said claim, so I doubt this guy did this all to sell cheats but you never know.
once you stop to investigate it... you can see that there isnt quite enough ability overlap to really let a hero ban system work well. you ban lucio and that's a whole team comp banned out.
I'd argue with too much ability overlap, a simple Hero Ban system wouldn't be able to "work well". What's the point of banning a hero if I can just play another hero that does the same stuff? Banning a whole team comp with 1 ban is the reason most people only suggest banning 1 hero. If we have 100% ability overlap, then we'd need more bans to make them meaningful. When you look at games with Draft Modes or a Pick phase and/or a Ban phase, there's intense overlap and there are multiple bans.
They change monetization to make the game make more money than OW1 could typically pull in. Then they don't give their employees bonuses and lay a bunch of them off. So the company making more money makes the employees lives worse.
I wanna see what a gaming studio could achieve, if ceos went away for 6-12 months, and let studios do whatever they want with game improvements/directions
23:00 that's not the argument, the argument is that there are some heroes that, when banned, make some other heroes uncontestable. Particularly for tanks.
Maybe if you're talking within a role specifically. But from the top of my head I can't think of any heroes that go unconstested if you ban 2 heroes. There is a skill, teamplay and map component that always gets overlooked when talking about hero matchups
I enjoy trashing bad articles as much as the next guy but this is a bit ironic. Literally everyone on the core group up podcast has put out "Overwatch is dead" and "We're so back" videos at various times. They justify it the same way I expect this journalist does, it gets the most clicks so they are just serving their audience. Double standards abound.
The only way to consider our roster "too small" for hero bans is lucio's speed being unique. If there were 2 lucio heroes, literally everyone could be replaced in this game. That's not a terrible thing, variety is the spice of life. Some people playing don't think so I think
theres anti-nade and suzu, too. these arent as essential to a particular team comp as speed, but theyre still very important answers to specific heroes and especially in lower ranks, need to be accessible at all times
The bonuses honestly went to all of the severance packages for all those layoffs. They are still on their paid leave of absence portion through at least the rest of March if they announced the lay offs in January
As a guy who's played since OW1s closed betas I can honestly say OW2 is NOT struggling. It's a great game with a lot of people emotionally reacting and not logically looking at the game as a whole. I think the new map designs are better. The new game modes are great. The 5v5 and dropping of a ton of hard CC opened up the roster a lot more. Like everything about this game fixed so many flaws that OW1 had in my opinion. The only real L for me is the dropping of PvE. But the core game itself (The pvp) has received nothing but love since OW2s launch. And the roadmapping and communication has been higher quality than literally 99% of the other games out there right now. We get told whats happening SEAOSONS ahead of time and whats being worked on and such.
1. Watch your tone there bud. I don't know who you think you are but you're no ones boss around here lol. 2. I watched enough of the video enough to know where he was going with it before commenting and my comment still stands. I'm watching it at 1.75 speed. Sorry not sorry this makes you incredibly upset. @@zage932
You said absolutely nothing, their revenue and player retention is on the downward trend and has been getting worse as the seasons go by. It doesn't matter about the changes to the game. They are still struggling atm nothing wrong in admitting it. The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one.
to be fair, it IS very unlikely that overwatch 2 is making a ton of money and i do think its plausible that the game so far is not meeting activision blizzards (unrealistic) expectations. that is why they fired ppl, scrapped the pve and decided the pvp is not good enough. they are still in crisis management mode and probably will remain there for the remaining ow2 lifecycle. history tells us over and over again how games that fell off and are no longer hyped recover extremely rarely. the comeback stories of AAA or indie games that failed in recent years can be recounted on one hand (ESPECIALLY AAA games).
let’s be frank here: ow1 was only truly succesful in it’s 1-2 year of its life cycle and also made about 90% of its lifetime profits there. then it started to massively fall off and made basically no money at all and also eventually stopped putting out content due to all the “future pve stuff”. since ow2 launched, the game has seen a massive increase in players as well as regular good profit margins. in fact, they must be good enough to confidently take heroes finally out of the BP. the chance this is still being seeing as a “failure” is most likely very much atributed to insane expectations from AB (as well as seemingly coupling their success to the 3 pve missions but not the overall health n success of the game despite everything that happened to it?) . with s9 and the recent developer updates, ow is in the best state since it’s launch and i am just so damn tired by now of the hate boner journalists have for OW as well as the constant sticks AB is throwing into Team 4s wheels. they’re getting treated like the ugly stepchild and they really deserve better (especially after they have been left with the burning house that was ow1 and now also had a big chunk of their team fired to save money. how team 4 keeps up any moral at all is a miracle)
How? The article makes good points and tells people that blizzard devs aren't getting their bonuses while the other companies are which literally means ow2 is doing poorly lmao.
Bobby Kotick's business acumen is fire. Curse him all you want but his decisions regarding OW2 were on point from a monetary perspective. Rerelease OW1. Make minor changes. Make game free to play. Sell skins. He's like Noah Vanderhoff in Wayne's World; make a game with no second level so the kids keep throwing quarters in the machine. How can I hate a guy with balls that big?
imo i think bans can be cool, but i'd personally like that after we get like 2 more supports so there's still more effective comps we can play even if certain picks get banned (didn't explain that to well or go much into it but just saying).
I actually think Support would need as many heroes as DPS and we're still 10 behind. And characters would need more counters because of how the game is designed
