Online Toxicity
Let’s face it: Online games are more toxic than single player games. This is by virtue of the fact that they are online with a nearly limitless supply of anonymous players, as opposed to being local multiplayer (people you already know as friends) or being bots or AI in single player. In many games, such as World of Warcraft or Diablo, this is a minor issue, since there is an incentive for the player to work together with other players to overcome difficult content. In other words, the player is not always directly pitted against other players (although this is the case with PVP). In Overwatch, it’s always PVP all the time, so you will always get toxic chat from enemy players. Even if you disable match chat, there is no real incentive for players to be polite to each other, and the toxicity from match chat tends to bleed over into team chat. But let’s say for a minute that you are one of the few players who disables all of the toxic chat by turning off all chat options. Good for you. There is still the problem of: cheaters, hackers, smurfs, throwers, leavers, teaming, and griefers, both on your team and the enemy team. All without anything being directly said to you. This is because the players ARE the content. This brings us to the second problem:
Players are the Content
Why is this a problem? If players ARE the content, then NO players = NO content. Perhaps an even worse implication is that BAD players = BAD content. A video game lives or dies based on the content that it provides in proportion to the cost of playing the game. Nobody wants to play bad content, even when they are incentivized to do so. In Overwatch 1, players were incentivized with loot boxes, skins, and digital currency to suffer through bad content (other players). In Overwatch 2, players not only are not incentivized at all, but are actually required to PAY for the experience of bad content in order to get the full experience, which is a horrible business model. But this doesn’t just affect the experience of the game, it directly affects the gameplay itself. Which brings us to the third problem.
Player Dependent Gameplay
In most video games, there is a concept called Difficulty. Depending on your skill level, you are able to set the difficulty to a certain point where you feel you are comfortably challenged, yet not overwhelmed. In Overwatch, this is not the case, because the players you are matched with and against determine the difficulty of the game. This results in wildly unpredictable difficulty swings from one match to the next, with no real indication of whether you are actually progressing or improving in skill. Let’s say you have one match where your team completely stomps and rolls the enemy team, with no real resistance. Then the very next match, the enemy team does the exact same thing to your team. What happened between these two matches? Did your skill level suddenly fall off a cliff? Did the enemy team suddenly become gods at the game? Or did the difficulty simply radically change based on the players you were matched against? This causes the experience of the game to fluctuate randomly between not challenging enough (boring), and overwhelmingly challenging (stressful). The point that you WANT to play at in the middle (fun) is rarely if ever achieved. So we are left with a game that is usually both boring AND stressful, yet rarely fun.
Monetization of Players
Monetization is a thing. It has been with us since the beginning of gaming. But what makes Overwatch’s model in particular so egregiously bad? If you are developing content for a traditional game, where the game is the content, it is fairly straightforward to monetize. More monetization = more content. But in a game like Overwatch where the players ARE the content, how does that concept translate? Does more monetization = more players? No, the reverse is true, LESS monetization = more players. The more you monetize the game, the fewer people will be able to afford to play the game. This is basic economic reality. So despite more and more attempts at monetizing the game, there is not the payoff of the players receiving more content, since they are the content. The game’s revenue depends on players buying (and advertising) Shop skins. That’s it. That’s the only incentive to keep playing the game. And so the Shop skins have to be outrageously expensive, despite adding almost nothing in terms of content to the game.
Conclusions
Overwatch is a game that despite having very little content, expects a huge amount of revenue from monetization. It is a game that is both stressful and boring, yet demands the players to keep playing it anyway despite the lack of fun and engagement. It is a game with built-in systems that contribute to toxicity without any alternative of being able to avoid it. It is a game that immensely depends on the players as content, yet punishes the players for the very act of playing. Will Overwatch continue to survive in 2023? 2024? I don’t know for sure, but I think it will ultimately depend on whether Blizzard can correct the deep flaws inherent in the game. Maybe PvE will finally be released and all of our concerns will be addressed. At this point, when we have no PvE mode in the game, no alternative to an endless unrewarding Competitive grind, and a slow drip feed of updates that barely qualify as “content”, it doesn’t look to be very hopeful to me. Thanks for reading.