The thing is, when you work for a company that has rival companies offering a similar product, you generally tend not to like their product. Or you look at their product, point out all the flaws, and pride yourself on the fact that your product doesn’t do any of that. Because then you can use that as a selling point for your own product. And OW1 did exactly that.
“This is our FPS shooter game. We have different heroes divided up in to different roles, and your goal is to play with other players and win objectives! Our price point is a box price purchase and we plan to continue being a live service game with regular updates, all of them free. Every item in the game is earned by playing the game, but if you’re so inclined, you may purchase loot boxes. We will not charge real world money for each item. We will not offer a battle pass that makes the game a second job. We will not charge for crate keys. You know exactly what you’re paying for in a singular purchase.”
OW1 was working. People even asked Jeff Kaplan how the model was sustainable. He said that it made back it’s entire development cost on preorders alone, and had enough money left over to keep the game sustained. It’s decline wasn’t because of it being a box price entry, it was due to corporate meddling. They literally reassigned the majority of team 4’s employees to work on other unrelated games and proof of concepts, all of which got scrapped, and still expected them to work full time on OW1 and OW2 on top of that. That’s why content stopped. They simply couldn’t meet the corporate demand, and had to choose what to focus on.
D:I is in a similar boat. Because the moment you take away monetization from the game, it becomes a fantastic Diablo game that could even be considered a mainline game, not a side game set in the same universe. It’s as if they had an entire team of passionate developers work on the game, present it to corporate, and then corporate said, “That’s fantastic! Now we just need you to pass the game over to this new group we created, they’ll just do some final polish, that sort of thing, and then we’ll release it to players!” And then the team it was passed over to was a team dedicated to looking at every aspect of the game, seeing how it could be monetized, and then added monetization to it. There’s no other way what happened to D:I makes sense. No developer in their right mind would make such a fantastic game only to intentionally sabotage it like that. It’s not worth the resources. It’s much easier to produce something mediocre, slap monetization on it, earn back all of your money + massive profit, then abandon the game and repeat the process with something else.
They would never sell OW2 as a one-time purchase because it is obvious that OW2 is barely a sequel, its mostly a redesign patch. There is barely enough new content or changes to call it a full blown sequel.
At its current state, with only 3 new heroes, 1 remake and few new maps and 5v5, It would be a hard sell to convince people to once again shell out money for the game as they did for OW1.
Thats why they are going to the F2P route and of course, being greedy with their monetization for now, they need to test how much they extract from this playerbase to see if this franchise is worth saving after it has fallen from grace.
well ill just put this 40 dollars get in beta thing in my tab so
-$40 … lets see what happens in the future
so say i got the first battle pass automatically now and dont have to worry about that once ow2 releases and i supposedly got 2000 currency whatever (still vague). when that expires what will i pay next? lets say its 20 bucks per battle pass so ill be
-$20 again so now im -$60 bucks
-$10 for an ingame store product?? (mercy bikini skin maybe?) so now im -$70
-$5 for a playboy charm on my weapon (they wont do this but hypothetically) now im -$75
now im thinking what the hell am i doing!!! will i continue to go down this road… hmmm
I appreciate the responses, it’s helps me understand more of the perspective
Whoa, was there a new game in the works with team 4? I’ve heard about a new survival game IP the company was working developing, was it that or something else?
Undisclosed. And they were split across various projects. Basically, they took the OW team and made them make a bunch of tech demos and such that they could show off to the other suits, and none of them were looked at favorably. It’s one of the reasons why Jeff quit, because they were forcing his team off on to other projects and ultimately wasting development time. Plus he was in conflict with other members of the team, as he wanted OW2 to be released when it was ready, as a full package. And that would have worked, was it not for corporate meddling and reassignment. Now we’re stuck with OW2 not releasing with PvE, not releasing with all of it’s content, and a game lead that is much more open to corporate’s push for more monetization of the game. ABK higher ups were never pleased that Jeff refused to heavily monetize OW, but now they have Aaron…
I Agree, I Don’t mind paying 60 dollars again for Overwatch 2… I Want to be able to get PvE and Battlepass by grinding the game rather than paying for everything.
In OW 1, I Used to buy Lootboxes…I realised how boring it is and decided to actually grind so I can have a goal (Which is get a skin or emote I like) and it would let me play the game more.
I Never liked the Fortnite/Apex/Valorant’s way of obtaining Money from Us and would always Prefer Overwatch at the end of the day!
It doesn’t have to be a good game. It can be rubbish and if the release a really “cool” unicorn head on a stick hammer for rein, they make thousands upon thousands.
The only way I can see this applying is in the PvE.
If you don’t care about skins/emotes or the PvE, and only enjoy Overwatch for what Overwatch 1 was, I doubt much will change.
Until they start locking entire heroes or maps behind paywalls, we’re safe
Blizzard wrote pre-approved press release articles to put here on the OW news page, the Xbox news page, and the Playstation news page. At some point, the article was revised before publishing, to remove a singular line. Playstation either didn’t get the memo, or forgot, and posted the original article. To sum it up,
“Hit the ground running with the Premium Battle Pass for Season 1, which offers unique cosmetics and early access to new Heroes and will launch alongside Overwatch 2 Early Access on October 4.”
They removed the “early access to new Heroes” bit, but not before people saw and screencapped it. They clearly edited it due to bad publicity from Diablo Immortal, and had yet another publicity blunder the other day with the whole, “Activision reports no systematic harassment, according to research done by Activision.”
So yeah. New heroes will be locked behind premium pass holders, and will supposedly become F2P after their introductory season ends, or a new hero is released.
More money doesn’t equate with more content. It equates to more paid cosmetics. Skins, hardly noticeable gun charms, banners and such. They have already stated their road map for hero releases. Their “goal” is a new hero every other 9 week season. This is still only 3 heroes a year. They really haven’t said much about map releases but I’d expect a lot of those to be FFA, elimination, CTF maps like in OW1. While they are played, they aren’t play nearly as much as other CP, escort, and hybrid maps. We can assume there will be a new map with some hero releases. There isn’t going to be a surge “playable” content with the new system. It will be pretty much the exact same as OW1. We will see a lot more cosmetics though since that will be the source of income.
If you want to get a neutral analysis on the whole Diablo Immortal situation, I highly recommend the video of Josh Strife Hayes. He is not an innate Diablo fan and do not rage out of nowhere because “my favorite franchise is ruined”.
People have very good reasons to be skeptical of whoever will be offered by the in-game shop of OW2. Especially when you remember that Candy Crush is still responsible for most of the profit of ABK, and rely a lot in predatory MTX.
I remember that quote, I think it was around the first anniversary.
It’s really sad when you remember how much of a hit OW1 was at release and how Blizzard dropped the ball hard by bad management choices in general. People like to blame balance, but to be honest, most players don’t give a about balance, as long as it’s not egregious unbalanced. If you can pick any hero and have fun playing them, the game will survive.
It was entirely on management decisions. Things like prioritizing OWL viewership and merchandising at the cost of the casual side of the game.
I was 97.5% sure that the main reason to push the title change to “Overwatch 2” was to get away with Jeff Kaplan’s promise that all new heroes and maps would be free for all players of “Overwatch”. Thanks for the final push to change that value to 100%.
OR, they could be talking about in terms of the beta, and when the game is fully released all heroes will be available to everyone, and future heroes are available as soon as they’re out of PTR like how the game normally is. Neither of us know, so it’s best not to stress yourself jumping to conclusions.
I believe everything we’ve gotten since 2016 was worth the price of the game. You can’t expect them to keep a live service game alive for years from one payment of 40/60$ per person
Rocket league is fine. I have a really nice car that I got completely for free, I don’t even remember how. You find games really quickly as well. Free to play has definitely benefited rocket league.
Admittedly one thing that does annoy me is when I open the game and I see a ton of pop-ups and items that I have to close out of before I can queue for a game. Hopefully they don’t do that for OW.
about balance, as long as it’s not egregious unbalanced. If you can pick any hero and have fun playing them, the game will survive.
(why is there no Mug emoji?)