Ok makes sense to me. /s
We never got an official reason why the PVE was cancelled, as in what was the defining roadblock that a triple A studio with skilled developers couldn’t accomplish that made them scrap an anticipated project with four years of development sunk into it?
UPDATE Aaaand news released that they let go of several employees despite making this insane amount of revenue.
That’s because you’re working under the false pretense that the money the game generates goes towards the game
They didn’t go f2p because they wanted to improve on it
All the mumbo jumbo they spit out about how it’ll be great for the game and allow for all this content is just the BS company line they spit out to sell everybody on the idea
You ‘officially’ got scammed.
Greedy Bobby working his magic. At least he’s finally gone… good riddance.
Cause from higher management they expected the same team, without significant upscaling to work on 2 games at once. Both provide consistent updates for the live service model and make an entire PVE campaign. They should have had two entire teams working on this. One just focussed on PVE, one on the live service PVP game.
This is still the fault of Blizzard, not denying that. But don´t think I would put the blame on the Overwatch team itself. We saw what happened when they put all resources on PVE. Then they got rushed back to PVP cause the lack of content on the game was doing serious damage and could not continue for even longer than it did. But they did not get an increased budget or more team members it seems. At some point you have to then make a choice which you will make, PVE or PVP.
it goes to the new esport thing after just burying OWL ofc.
Why would they waste money developing PvE if they can make hundreds of millions without it?
How does that not make sense to you?
Oh they most certainly can make PVE. But they chose to not because they believed that they didn’t have to go through the effort because there would be a decent % of the playerbase who’d just bend over and take it + still spend dozens of dollars on cosmetics we used to get for free. Clearly they were correct.
So instead of them suspending the PVE they preferred to cancel it because it was easier… And now they don’t understand why the community is so angry?
That’s a great excuse.
When you look at the snippets of things that have been mentioned it is clear that PvE is something they wanted to do, but knew they didn’t have the resources to pull it off while maintaining PvP.
That + the absolute clownery from Bobby moving the goal posts constantly, they kept working on it until the plug was pulled.
So why was it cancelled… Because it couldn’t be done with any certainty of quality or timescales.
Whilst “OW2 made $225m” sounds lovely… That is purely revenues over an undefined period. Not factoring in costs. I imagine, given the amount spent making PvE, the actual profit for the first year is pretty “low”
In hindsight, this would have been the perfect way to do it. Blizzard was never going to sanction the spend though.
Overwatch 2 became famous solely because of the PVE announcement. If it weren’t for that, this game would have already gone bankrupt and fallen into oblivion. But the director and producers knew exactly that.
And right after blizzcon in 2019 they canceled it internally and didn’t notify ANYONE so the game wouldn’t be massacred with negative reviews. But with the game’s release on Steam they knew they couldn’t censor people
If they wanted to end PVE quickly and focus on PVE, they could focus entirely on launching the story mode, and making the conclusion as if the null sector had been fought and every existing life had been saved, so they could perhaps put a temporary end until we can release other DLCs (yes, it could even be DLC) to expand further and perhaps tell another piece of each character. Meanwhile, keeping the PVP constantly updated. But there was so much laziness… We didn’t even have PVE (there were only Archives style missions that you need to pay for) and PVP was barely able to keep up with the demand.
Look at the mauga… Fire debuf… Wow, where have I seen this before? Maybe on Ashe’s dynamite…? JQ healing debuf in ult. The kiriko and ramattra finally had innovative kits, something not seen before or unusual.
The comics of Mercy saving DVA in the world of destruction would definitely make an excellent PVE-style DLC mode.
History oh S76 and Ana Bastet.
Continuation of maximiliam after Storm Rising.
The game is full of lore and stories. Would they mind reading/listening/playing a little to understand this?
I’m not going to say Jeff was a “saint”, but he at least played the game and understood the needs of the players. And he didn’t do it like people do now. Cash grab, to extract the most money from people in any way.
Has anything gotten better? No, no it has not. So who is to blame for that???
It means nothing. Revenue is at the top end of a business. What matter is “Profits”. Between Revenue and Profits are all the bills, expenses, and liabilities to maintain a business. It’s possible for a company to generate revenue but have a net loss.
We did get an official reason for why the hero missions were cancelled. Scope creep. I mean just look at the talent trees. They were bigger than Borderlands trees, and there was gonna be 40 or so of them… plus one more for every new hero they release 
We also got unofficial reasons related to Bobby’s meddling too.
Because they chose money rather than reputation and doing what a game developer company should be doing: developing games.
I understand why, but it doesn’t make it sting any less
if that’s all they’ve made I doubt they’ve even broke even on Overwatch 2
Yup.
A vast majority of the time, new money isn’t invested into new games. The goal is to spend as little on games as they can get away with for as much profit as possible. This is constantly the push in the industry, and pretending otherwise is silly.
Why make PvE when you can make nothing and still get $225 million
It’s a publicly traded company. Their first duty is increasing profitability to shareholders. That’s how any public company works.
It’s been only a few weeks. New management still needs time to make changes happen.