Twitch tends to be the big indicator. If you looked at the viewer counts in the first week, we were talking about 400-500k total. Currently it’s 164k, 68% less than it’s starting point.
It’s still definitely high, no doubt about that. Overwatch 1 in its early days was the highest viewed genre on twitch for a solid year, and then lost it to Fortnite when that stemmed into people’s views.
As for the earnings? It generally becomes a sign when companies become less “giving” with their audience. If you look at games like DBD, their earnings are consistent as the rewards and gameplay are relatively generous, and you get things through playing the game, despite it mostly being ingame items and not cosmetics.
Overwatch 2 is literally selling a character, or you grind for dozens of hours to earn her. They’re far less generous atm cause sales are low from the end of OW1.
How many of these were bots, and how many of them were returning players coming and going?
How many stayed out of this 25 million? If I’m not even getting “waiting in queue” messages anymore then that tends to be an indicator that only a fraction remained.
Possible, but I also wouldn’t doubt that the combination of the forums being in a constant state of angry and the fact that half of youtube is ripping into the game isn’t a positive sign.
Largely depends on if another game is released with a better monetisation system. After the sheer success of the Fortnite and Apex battlepasses it’s no wonder that other games are adopting it.
they think anything given away for free is money they are not getting, even tho the point is giving away free stuff so you keep people playing and thus more likely to buy.
they clearly have no clue how to monetize a f2p game, the only reason diablo worked is because it’s a mobile game made for china
Twitch numbers of course peaked dramatically right after the launch. That’s to be expected, lots of streamers are playing the hot new thing before they go back to their stable games. Overwatch 2 has been #1 game most of the time, right now it seems to have dipped to #4 but that’s still hardly representative of a failure.
You can’t tell anything at all about earnings from their philosophy on cosmetic giveaways. Everyone is always doing what they think will maximize their profits. That includes games that are already very successful. If Epic can think of a way to make Fortnite earn even more money than it already is, they’ll do it. Actually, the bigger the game, the more valuable its best cosmetics are (more players = more revenue per cosmetic), and thus the less likely they are to give them away.
This isn’t even that dramatic a change from how OW1 did its holiday events. Those weren’t free legendaries, they were simply added to the loot boxes. In OW2 loot boxes are replaced by the battle pass and the shop, so they added them to the shop since the battle pass is tied to a season. Obviously OW1’s monetization was overall more generous than this, but we knew that already.
refining what it means to be a sequel