From an outsider perspective it is difficult to understand all the small and big changes OW2 brings. And blizzard is deliberately holding back on a lot of things we only know through a bunch of different posts and tweets. If they aren’t clear about battle passes, heroes, cosmetics and old OW1 content and the game is releasing within a few weeks, it’s blizzard’s fault for not communicating and people assuming things.
Now it’s not just content creators that specialize on OW alone, but major gaming sites take a look at OW2 and are confronted with a lot things that evoke mixed feelings.
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I never thought I’d read the forums and have someone talking about my appearance on Triple Click, although I wouldn’t say I pitched people on OW2 being great, but moreso how the game is changing!
But hello, I’m a freelance media critic (I’ve written for Kotaku, Polygon, Vice, etc.) and sometimes-games critic who is taking time out of filing a draft about OW2 changes to clarify a few things. I am not here to persuade people who are intensely skeptical of journalism because as far as you are concerned, there’s nothing anyone could say to make you think it’s not all propaganda.
I will say what I know here though: a lot of people here do not know how games journalism works. It’s a really bonkers subset that is partial opinion pieces, actual reporting, consumer reviews, critical essays and stuff closer to art criticism all thrown into a hopper. Games journalists are not beholden to the companies, but often still have to “play nice” and obey stuff like embargos if they don’t want to have their access to companies revoked. It’s a really annoying part of the business to have your entire subject matter tied up in whether or not a giant corporation feels like being nice to you.
As streaming and Youtube videos have gotten bigger, video game companies have absolutely seen the benefit of skipping over journalists or reviewers and striking up relationships with content creators, who have an even bigger financial stake in being treated nicely by game companies and have no problem being informal marketing for a company they like. In some cases, they even might be formal marketing and do sponsored content.
It absolutely benefits companies to stoke hostility towards games journalists from fans and content creators, because fans being invested in making the company’s brand/products their identity is good for them. Same with content creators, and a lot of it is really exploitative because a lot of times content creators are young, financially unstable and unaware they are self-employed contractors with streaming as a job.
Overwatch invited a lot of content creators to California to get a hands-on with Kiriko earlier in the month, the same content creators who are also being offered to include links to Kiriko t-shirts directly from the Blizzard store with their own unique ID, presumably to track metrics of content creators who direct more fans to the store to buy the shirt.
A lot of these content creators were under NDA about it until a week or two ago, and under NDA until today about their experiences with OW2 build from the last week or so, playing Kiriko. All of this is to prep them for making content for OW2 launch, which is very nice and helpful to the “most engaged” and “most devoted” fans of Overwatch, streamers and Youtubers.
I mention all of this because I want people to understand that a lot of this is business. Journalists are one part of the relationship with corporations, and content creators definitely are a lot of the other part. Their financial stake in OW2 doing “well” is very different; journalists get paid by their outlets to be writers, content creators get paid by their fans or sponsorships. Overwatch 2 failing financially will not hurt journalists and it will potentially hurt content creators who only stream or make videos about OW2. But “failure” as it stands for Blizzard is in millions and billions, not on the level anyone on the ground being a content creator or a journalist has to worry about immediately.
As far as people who are talking about the criticism levied at OW2 by journalists: every single piece of media on the internet (article, Youtube video, Twitch stream, Instagram post) is designed for engagement. Not saying this is bad or good, but it is all designed for that by the very nature of the internet and the platforms these things are on. Editors, not so much journalists, have to worry about SEO and metrics because all of them work for larger media corporations, which I would hope people are worried about. A lot of honest, hardworking people in media are often subject to the whims of suits who don’t actually care about their work, just traffic. Google changing the algorithm (which funnily enough they did the other day) will ding every single gaming outlet across the board in terms of traffic and how well their headlines work.
The headlines coming out about features that Blizzard itself published in a blog post that you are free to read are all pretty specific to the information contained in the blog post, but journalists and editors (editors often write the headlines for both info and “grabbiness” - note this is to catch attention, like literally everything on the internet. It’s not very often to “generate outrage”, unless you get angry reading a very dry 500-word post about hero unlocks. Most people day to day just want to write stories and go home. It’s a job like other jobs. Youtubers, weirdly enough, operate a lot more on clickbait and outrage “clicks” than games journalists these days, but that’s besides the point. The only people who HAVE to worry about “clicks” are often editors or their managers, because it’s something they report to their company’s board, etc. Everyone gets paid their salary regardless. It’s not as motivated as you think, unless someone is writing for a site that directly looks to top SEO, and those places are often easy to spot. PCGamer is not trying to craft maximum outrage headlines, y’all.
I agree with DKF though - many journalists were praising OW in 2016. So much so that a lot of them voted on it being Game of the Year, and such. A ton of people in that industry have clocked a lot of hours in OW. Specifically, one of the journalists in question who had his article’s headline screencapped on Twitter that AVRL was angry about.
He has like, oh god, nearly 3000 hours in Overwatch and has written about the game for several years, and is probably one of the smartest people who understand the game on a deep enough level to like, do coaching/VOD reviews. I know this because, full disclosure (little journalism joke), he’s my friend, lol.
Anyways, I have a story to file and I wrote more in this post than I have left in this article so I should go but I really, really just want people to engage with everything critically and if people really think they know about the nuts and bolts of games journalism, I assure you, that you probably don’t. It’s so much more mundane than you think, and it’s mostly people exactly like you who are paid to write about stuff while people like on these forums yell at them repeatedly on social media.
I’m just a freelancer with a day job, but we all care about this game as much as you do and I personally think it’s going in a direction that I don’t really like, and it’s hard to deal with that after also playing this game for 2,300 hours myself. But that’s my opinion and it’s fine to feel how you want about the changes happening. It’s just a video game, after all.
Be good people, and be nicer to each other.
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Exactly this.
One example of misinformation that I saw from an article from some website was something long the lines of “Overwatch players will transition into OW2 with only 34 out of 35 heroes, with the new hero, Kiriko, being locked, except for Watchpoint Pack owners.”
And 1 of the 3 comments under that article corrected that misinformation by mentioning that Kiriko is available for all OW1 players, since she is included in the Founder’s Pack.
And I came across that article with that comment being posted, over half a day later, & that article still wasn’t updated with the correction, despite being obviously pointed out by 1 of the 3 comments below the article.
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Who gives a flying flip about CCs? They don’t live in the same reality as regular players. If they had to work a real job then they wouldn’t be shilling for $20 skins. They con their viewers into buying it for them.
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It is stupid how all these websites are trying to dunk on Overwatch for things that other games have been doing for longer. Like the whole unlocking heroes or recording voice chat thing. Valorant does the exact same thing yet barely a peep is heard about that. Plus their anti-cheat is literal spyware lmao.
It’s just popular to dunk on Overwatch so people do it for clicks. That’s all there is to it. Oh well, ever heard of the phrase “any publicity is good publicity”?
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yes, because they are told by blizzard in their private discord to be their PR council online and they suck at it. Theyre not coordinated and they suck at handling bad PR and trying to spin it to something positive.
Theyre being good employees and saying, “misinformation” because they were taught by the corporate press to say it and their new corporate partner.
I mean they have literally came out and said that they want to make sure these people have all the information in their hands so they can be financially stable.
Youtube/Streaming is not a comfortable job… it can be if youre a really great entertainer, its a risky job. And the other thing about that post is that they also admitted that they care about these certain streamers more… one overwatch youtuber says, “well just work harder and you too can be invited to the next streamer resort.” How can one work harder at these favorited streamers when they literally get all the information BEFORE HAND, literally months and more like a year at this point, and they get to plan and they get to be coached by blizzard to know when and how to release this to “show their genuine reaction and thoughts.” No theyre getting a script, theyre making a script and making sure everything they do is perfect… making like 80 cuts making sure theyre not stuttering, while other people who may want to do youtube full time will always be behind the favorited streamers because of the fact that they get to be first every single time when a new announcement happens. flats has honestly been super obvious about what he knows and gets the most defensive when people press him about it, and its sad. i like flats, i think hes a good streamer, but how these streamers are letting their “fame in overwatch” get to them and believe that they are somehow all knowing and deserve to be kings and lords over “their chat” and the entire community/game in general.
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Thank you for the honest insight into the field. It must be tough past the age of print media.
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So what I gathered from this thread
Any negative opinion/ article is immediately labeled as misinformation, even if it is factually correct.
Your Overwatch naming their video “OW2 has the best battlepass in gaming” = Acceptable
Gaming journalist naming their article “Overwatch 2 will require phones” = Biased, misinformation, hopping on the hate train
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They lose their income and need to find new jobs if OW2 fails. Of course they want it to succeed. I’d be hyping it up as much as I could if my job was tied to OW2’s success.
There are a bunch of clickbait journalists out there spreading misinformation about OW2. That cannot be denied. Best to wait until the game comes out and play it for yourself and make your own judgments.
Any examples of reputable gaming outlets spreading misinformation?
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But the articles that AVRL quoted were factually correct. The titles for some of these articles are definitely clickbait but “Misinformation” ???
I’m starting to think that OW fans don’t know what Misinformation actually means. It’s giving “Fake News!” All over again
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For some, they probably don’t think they can. Some T500 Reinhardt/Mercy/Winston/etc is not going to translate into the top on an actual pure FPS shooter game.
Some tried other games, and get stomped. Not to say they couldn’t practice and ‘git gud’, but the fear is there that if OW dies, their fanbase of people who come to watch the top level play are not going to stick around to watch them be mediocre in another game.
Their whole streaming persona is tied to a game and not the creator themselves.
And that’s why some of them are shilling hard for OW2.
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I’m was sure that people should bee poorshamed in this game, well, the game is not even out and people already are poorshamimg people here in the forums…
Blizzard and many players need to learn that free to play games need free player to work. Whales need someone to play against and with, and need someone to show their fancy new dress 
…
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Could it be because their source of income has been completely wrecked and tarnished because of monetary design focus rather than gameplay focus from Blizzard, leaving a shell of what it once was, which is actually a steaming pile of crap?
No, it can’t be.
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Blizzard already said they are special “partners” so now they are on the payroll and blizz has to use its little minions to make a good impression of this mess of a game
Sounds like a terrible business model.
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Wow, who do I trust at face value? The content creators who have a financial incentive to prop up the game and build hype so they have more content to increase viewership? Or the media outlets who love stirring the pot to get clicks from sensationalist headlines?
Answer: Neither. I treat both as extreme outliers that will only highlight the good or bad as it fits whatever narrative brings in the most income.
However, that said, from what I’ve seen with my own eyes from hands-on experience and Blizzard’s own press releases, in terms of Blizzard’s overall package for OW2: I expect it to continue to be a dumpster fire of tonedeaf/P2W balancing decisions, painful monetization and grindwalls, and a poorly implemented and maintained code that carries forward bugs from literally six or more years ago (seriously – ice wall bugs from at least as early season 3 were still present in OW2 beta 2).
I would like them to course correct and see OW2 to succeed, but for every good thing Blizzard does, they do several negative things to kill any goodwill they would have earned.
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Blizzard is dead, long live activision blizzard.
I really want literally anyone in this thread that thinks all games journalism outlets do whatever “get clicks” from “sensationalist” headlines to explain how you think traffic, or revenue in these things work
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