The reason why nobody wants to play Overwatch anymore

General Discussion
1

Before I begin, I want to clarify that I still have lots of fun with Overwatch. However, this is not because the game is in a good state or anything, but because my tolerance for crap is just very high.

Several fatal mistakes were made during the transition to Overwatch 2. Besides the obvious marketing and PVE disasters, I want to address two imo even more important points: Overwatch has eliminated its own target audiences.

Target Audience 1: The Casual Skin Collectors:
Due to the switch to a F2P model, many players have simply left the IP because skin prices are too high for casuals. Overwatch is in a unique situation: the average age of the community is unusually high. (Probably because its made by Blizzard) As a result, many players no longer live with their parents and thus have a completely different relationship to money compared to the communities of games like Fortnite.

Why does it work for Fortnite then?

  1. Skins usually cost around $15 there.
  2. The quality of animations, etc. is higher.
  3. The target audience is children with no concept of money.

The fundamental problem is that you cannot fool your audience when they are unhappy. This is why it worked for a while in Apex and Valorant, and why it doesn’t work now. Also why Riot is allowed to make their league community bend over backwards, its because they kept them fed for many years.

Target Audience 2: The Hardcore Ranked Grinders:
With the transition to 5v5, the game lost many hardcore players. The tank role still has people in Masters at the end of the season who are Top 500. In my opinion, 5v5 is definitely the better format for casuals, but you simply can’t keep this if you call yourself a competitive game. This format decision causes you to lose the competitive edge that promotes the game through streams and offers an incentive to climb the ladder.

I wonder if the current state of the community (both in size and mentality) is really what the developers consider okay? These fundamental problems need to be fixed ASAP, and then Overwatch needs to start bringing back the lost players through agressive marketing. Enough time has passed for people to give overwatch a second (or 10th) chance as long as the game is in a good spot. ESPECIALLY now as most other service games are facing major backlash for poor monetisation.

I don’t want to see my favorite game Overwatch linger in this eternal stalemate anymore. Its time to clean up the mess and save the game

2

I thought it was because eight years ago there were slim pickings for reasonable games, but since then quite a few bangers came out. Also, OW is eight years old.

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3

There were other games - one wrinkle it had that they didn’t was massive fan interest and fanart surrounding the characters and setting. I don’t recall anything quite like it before - you had a large community of people who didn’t even necessarily play the game hyping the heck out of it.

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4

Being forced to play through a fomo battlepass because they expire and vanish forever instead of being able to finish it later.

The old lootbox way was much better and you wouldn’t miss out on any content because it would return and when it did return you would have enough to buy what you wanted.

They doomed this game catering to the easily scammed and “professional” players when it comes to game balance.

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5

The only real competition OW had for 2016 goty were from Dark Souls 3 (a more niche title, though I’m glad the series is becoming more popular), Uncharted 4 (a Playstation exclusive), BotW (a Switch exclusive), 2016 Doom (a largely singleplayer shooter, not exactly super popular despite being quite excellent), and several games in niche categories like Forza Horizons 3, Street Fighter 5, and Civ 6. OW was basically guaranteed to win goty with that lineup since it was both multiplayer and a fresh take on TF2’s schtick.

6

botw came out in 2017 and won goty

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7

True, I forgot it won most anticipated game in 2016. I guess my brain autostupided its release date to 2016.

8

Never liked the Battlepasses. They should had kept the loot boxes because when you do play atleast you get rewarded for playing alot of games and matches without quick play and arcade being stressful.

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9

This is debatable (as much as I hate that it is). If you have a 100 million players and 1% of your player base (aka 1 million players) is whales that spend a minimum of 1,000 dollars on the game, you’ve just made a billion dollars.

Since the average amount of whales per game is 2% of the player base, that’s already 2 billion dollars. The average whale also spends about 1,000 a month, so a continuous stream of 2 billion dollars a month seems pretty nice to corporations.

10

i will never play forknife and i wish i could get that game banished to the shadowrealm like to me them battle royale style games are garbage