Remember Junkertown “The Plan” where they rendered a really good short with mostly in game assets. It looked a bit worse than previous video’s but it seemed to indicate blizzard was willing to drop animation quality a bit to push more lore forward…
Then they utterly gave up. Sigma’s intro was mostly still frames from what I remember and we have had really nothing to go on since.
I’m excepting Animated Shorts for OW2.
I’m expecting we’ll get another one at BlizzCon since it’d be nearing release. Anything they’re making now likely involves characters or places we don’t know about yet so they wouldn’t want to spoil. Disappointing we didn’t get one at last BlizzCon (the one they barely talked about OW at all) but Covid was much worse then so delays are understandable.
Sigma’s intro was mostly still frames
most of the Hero Origin ones were like that, and Sigma’s Origin video was still better than most of the “real” cinematics
Sadly we don’t get any/very little content until OW2. It does suck 
But it’ll be nice once it comes.
The same thing what happened with statues and comics.
COVID, losing popularity and bad management is what happened.
I think the animated shorts are served as promotional media. That explains why there were so many the first few years OW launched. When Blizzard feels OW already reached its peak, and the population is only going down, why waste money making more?
With this logic, we definitely gonna see more shorts when OW2 launches.
Honestly they could of done something that make them money then. Though I can’t imagine the hits on places like YT didn’t get them millions of views and add revenue. But seriously they put out that some what lack luster World of warcraft movie.
A Overwatch TV series or something would of done wonders to promoting the game while also being something I’d imagine a TV network would want.
i do hope we get some for overwatch 2 or at least one. i really hope for a mercy or pharah cinematic but ill go with anybody really lol
maybe we’ll get a sojourn cinematic since she seemed to be featured for OW2
There will be in-game cutscenes for the intro and outro of every OW2 story mission (similar to the ones we got for Storm Rising), so there won’t be a lack of animated content when OW2 comes out.
If the Youtube view money would cover the cost and even make a profit, sure they can (and probably will) do more. But it may not. The animated shorts is not like LPL picking a lock and getting a million views. It costs (maybe lots of) money to make each one.
There’ll probably be an OW2 release cinematic.
The fully rendered ones sure, stuff like the Reinhart or Dva one took a full animation budget to make. Though I have seen similar if not better quality ones put up on YT by high school students just for a school project… so yeah.
The in game assets one though like Junkertown? I have to imagine it cost way less to make. Add to that it doubles as both development for game assets in addition to Marketing and able to possibly lower the budget requirements for both.
And when it boils down to it BLizzard is a multi million dollar company that was willing to throw money at making their E sport a thing. Even going so far as to build a stadium for live matches at a huge cost. If they wanted to make shorts and movies they could. Even if they had to sell it for a couple bucks on their store like all the other Merch.
I think they had decided as far back as mid 2018 that OW 2 was the only way to recover from the debacle they had created in the game and subsequently in OWL. Jeff K. unquestionably wanted to “make a big splash” again with OW 2 as a reset, and I think pushed that agenda. That of course easily fed into the glacial processes Blizzard long had and combined with a team that was way too small for such a game to survive in todays world, that all came to a halt. I mean we did get some animations, but there really should be one per character no question at least, not just comics.
They were also a bit ambitious. As others have said they could of gotten away with far less to more effect. A quick bio page with a few paragraphs of back story would of been amazing for many characters. All we have is off 3rd party sites and is often ret-conned or ignored by the Official lore when ever it gets around to addressing the character.
Rather like the infamous Dva no longer being a Starcraft Pro player. Which was I believe listed on the Bio page of the website or something for ages from a Dev comment and latter said to not be true.
Oh and then you have “In game lore” clashing with “Out game Lore”. For game play reasons characters can be gutted like Mercy to no longer have abilities they previous had. Or you know be able to freely fly when she previously never had the ability. Over all it’s very confusing and several times points to the fact the story teams and the game dev’s don’t really talk to each other.
Community: We love animated shorts, please give us more!
Blizzard:
Yeah… i miss the animations.