To poach players from other games. It isn’t going to happen.
You know why Apex, Valorant, Fortnite and Destiny have player retention?
Immense content dumps every season, constant balance updates, and significantly higher player autonomy and carry potential, are all consistent themes with their developers.
Overwatch has none of these and the beta only solved one out of three (content).
They should stop trying to redesign the game to poach these playerbases if they aren’t going to a.) Continue with the content dumping, b.) Consistently and effectively balance the game, and c.) Grant greater individual impact to players.
Either fully commit and do away with the core principles of OW or fully commit to making OW it’s own breed. Right now they have their hands in both bowls. It’s not going to work long term because it will be impossible to both balance the game and grant greater player autonomy if they try to do both. This will ultimately result in poor player retention regardless of how much content dumps.
You’re either a team based hero shooter or individualized hero shooter. Overwatch is at a crossroads now and must choose correctly or end this franchise for good.
You are suggesting that Overwatch shouldn’t “poach” players of other games as if that is going to remove them from that other game and bring them to Overwatch. A game can appeal to people in multiple ways and a person can play all of them.
Overwatch needs to focus on making a good game in any regard rather than being a bad game. Then who cares where the players comes from.
There is an element of players coming and going to and from other games. Especially Tanks / Supports, since there is a pretty limited population of players of those overall.
Overwatch was big enough that when groups left, you would see a population spike in other games.
No, poach is 100% the term here. It’s frequently used within the gaming community to describe when a developer inputs a hero/weapon/game-mode/aesthetic not original to its own game and a directive copy from another franchise in the hopes that players from this mimicked franchise comes to play your game (cough SOJOURN cough).
Tanks broke the game from the start. Limiting each team to one tank will help game impact balance between the roles immensely.
5v5 is a great idea to revive a broken game.
Everyone bemoaning OW2 played less than 10 games and was not able to pick up on the nuance of the changes.
OW2 has far superior match gameplay in both an individual sense and team sense. Players that played 5 games and cried because of lack of shields don’t even know what they don’t know because they have so little experience with the new design.
The only “bad” part of OW2 is that a couple of heroes are ‘left behind’ due to the more fluid and dynamic gameplay.
But in reality… even more heroes are currently ‘left behind’ due to shield stacking and CC spam. So OW2 is still better.
The main players that are crying over OW2, should wake up and realize that they prefer Tower Defense games and not shooters.
It’s not even a niche game. It’s weird blend of traits from various games. Frankenstein monster of game design.
What else are they supposed to do, if they can’t find their own formula of success? Overwatch is a mess, as developers, after all these years, still didn’t seem to find that recipe of a good game.
I feel like they had their own formula of success at the start of the game. They’ve just been moving away from it ever since and slowly turning the game into a cartoonish Call of Duty
They tried to improve upon their recipe, as it wasn’t esports-oriented - it didn’t work. Now they need new recipe, and at this point, we may question, how many games it will take for them to perfect it.
Team Fortress 2 went a long way, after all - from Quake TF mod, to TF Classic, and then finally TF2. How many it will be for Overwatch - 2 games? 3?
They had, the game appears to be meant as a product not a live service. Each “change” they made gives hints about that.
Heroes had more internal purpose and more balanced around that purpose. Were a unpolished design but was a stable one.
With the release of comp, ana and university perks, when afterwads became OWL. Were on things got derailed.
The game wasn’t perfect, but had purpose, at least on launch had.
Casual play with diverse cast of OP characters balancing themselves. When they tried to shift the focus to esports and release heroes not “fullfilling” their previous checkboxes generated some problems.
Also, OW2 are repeating the same mistake. The current OW1 and the future OW2, just really needs to abolish RQ and use it inside the match paired with one hero per match.
Things will fall on the right places and they could both balance and rework heroes properly. Because folks would use the cast more often and their flaws would be exposed to be adjusted.
Their formula was being named Blizzard and having a reputation. They made a game that was casual, but then slowly made it too esports focused while also bleeding players who naturally discovered the games FPS with roles concept was terrible to begin with.
yeah I’m not sure why people place all the blame of overwatch player decline on blizzard. Even if they did things perfectly a player decline of some sort was inevitable. With the popularity in hero shooters that OW created there was bound to be some competition from other big companies and naturally some players will gravitate towards those other games.
The recipe was there the first two years of the game. They just intentionally moved away from it, because it wasn’t E-sports friendly. And no, a game doesn’t thrive for two years on novelty. Games that live on novelty come and go in 3-6 months, like among us, valheim and whatever flavor of the month come and go. They don’t dominate charts for 2 straight years.
I think a lot of it is on Blizzard still. At the end of the day all these games are competing for players time. Overwatch needed to stand, at least, at level with the rest. It fell behind hard though.
If there is lesson, is that loyalty of fans isn’t something you can just purchase. Blizzard assumed, that by keeping streamers and pros interested, they would keep their more casual audience too.
But it turns out, that it works in reverse too - casual players dislike game, which reduces views, which makes streamers also leave for more popular games.