I’ve been crap talking OW2 for a while now but honestly, besides the only 2 new heroes at launch, I am kinda hyped to play the game.
I don’t want to give Blizzo money for pausing dev on OW to rebrand OW into a F2P Battle pass game with limited currency for F2P players. But now we are all hit with immediate FOMO because we experienced OW. The polish of OW is extremely good it has a lot of character, but now you miss out on this polish because you gotta get the the premium BP to earn the new hero faster or whatever other cosmetics you want.
Plus the BP does not pay for the next BP so each season you gotta fork over some money over to experience as much of the game as possible.
Atleast Valorant originally is a F2P game so there is no expectation of getting a lot of things off of one purchase.
Man I hate the era of Battle Passes.
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Well yeah it was nice. For about 2-3 years after launch.
But then the content dried up because the monetization model didn’t support it.
Consider Team Fortress 2. It came out as a box copy game.
Then it went Free to Play, with the older equivalent of a paid battle pass. (Season Loot crates that require paid keys to open).
Apex Legends, they were able to consistently pump out quality content during the whole time Overwatch was a barren desert of a lack of content. Because they had a monetization model that could support it.
Like, you can’t get the “Live Service Game” content, without a monetization model to support it.
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Lets be real here. OW1 model was not the norm. The norm was you buy boxes and hope that you get something you want. If that would still be the case in OW1 and non of the loot box buffs they made over the time hit the game, everyone would be cheering for the new system. But because everything was free and easy to get, no matter what you present them, they will be mad. They overdid it with some prices and the hero in the pass but the model on its own is fine.
Thank you! This did not get mentioned a lot and people act like they suddenly decided “lets abandon OW1 and work on OW2 lol”.
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Tbh, I just look at OW2 with 5v5 and F2P as “What they should have done 2-3 years ago”.
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100% agreed but this applies to all the changes for PvP. If it was done over time and not everything at once like right now, people would not be so skeptical. It also does not help that blizz made some shady stuff over the last years that killed their reputation.
Yup… I made a post about 5v5 with Role Passives… in February 2020.
✅ Next Experiment: 1-2-2 SoloTank
If BP means we actually get devs doing something instead of nothing, then it’s the better model.
It is unrealitic and impractical to wish games went back in time. Best we can do is buy games on GOG. But then again GOG was barely making CDPR money a few years ago, proving people literally do not give a darn.
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Don’t forget that TF2 actually offers great value with that model. That’s to its community market, you can turn a profit by buying into their events.
I bought into the alien event, sold my alien crates that I got on the market, and made my money back. It really opened my eyes to what monetization schemes could be if devs wanted it to be that way.
Instead, we get $10 battle passes.
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Well, not every company can operate like they own Steam.
I get that, BUT, you don’t need a pay to win model to support your live service game. If your cosmetics are good, you can support the game based on a purely cosmetic model.
Not to mention the PVE is confirmed to be seasonal, so players will be paying for PVE missions over time as well.
As for cosmetics, you could have it so once they’re gone, maybe they go for a while, but during the anniversary, the vault opens up and you have a chance to get any cosmetics you’ve missed. They don’t need to disappear permanently.
There is plenty of routes the exist for making the game sustainable while also making it non-predatory.
On a side note we actually have no confirmation as to whether the old model was sustainable or not. Those specific financials haven’t been made publicly available. All we know is they stopped creating content for OW1 because they wanted to switch to OW2 which, at the time, we were told would be a pay to play model like OW1. That indicates to me that the existing model was probably fine.
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Well yeah. But if anything, the vast majority
- Either everybody on a team will have Kiriko or at least 1 Support on a team will.
- For the most part, unless you are headshot god, Kiriko is largely going to be a “pay to lose” character.
That said, they do really really need to figure things out differently whenever the “December Tank Hero” comes out. Since I don’t think they can afford to make any Tank be “Pay to Lose” because of 5v5.
And like 3-5 weeks to grind to unlock “December Tank Hero” with only a 2 week delay on them being usable in Comp, is going to be a trainwreck.
I’ll be worried when OW is pay to win then. Yeah I have some concerns over hero locking too but lets not jump that particular gun.
BP is the fairer model in the end. Lootboxes might as well be glambing your money away while a MTX store you simply get what you like, just like any store.
That is the most bullcrap excuse for OW’s state. OW didn’t die becuase of lack of content, it died because of dev apathy, it died, and became a putried diseased corpse because of slow patching cycle and problems that never were never addressed by a group of devs who couldn’t change a simple variable every once in a while.
An engaged dev team, under better leadership (Goodman’s is out), is going to bring more longevity to OW than any amount of content could ever. T4 is shameful when it comes to patching and if expanding the monetization allows them to compete with the likes of Respaw, so be it, let the whales pay for it, everybody wins.
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Blizzard could, I’m sure. They’d probably make more money if they had some kind of community marketplace, right?
Actually the fiscal reports showed a steady stream for Overwatch, both through loot boxes and through E-Sports. The problem was that the E-Sports started drying up and they didn’t earn as much money as they would like to.
They could easily have gone on with the same model as Overwatch had, but it didn’t work when you primarily make decision in terms of getting max profit out of it, by any means necessary. Basically greed made them go F2P, not necessity.
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yea but we still had a 3 year content drought after echo BUT it was nice to get free skins every now and then from events by just playing. wonder if any live service game does that nowadays lol!?!?
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Maybe for lootboxes, but I’m highly skeptical the box copy sales were anywhere near 2016/2017.
If Blizzard wants money, they should sell us something with value, not poke our faces with a sharp sticks every 10 seconds, demanding we pay them to get the face-poking to stop for a few minutes.
Why does this have to be adversarial? Why can’t just Blizzard just work with customers?
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We really gonna compare Valorant to OW?
Their cheapest skin line tier has skins that are as high as £41. You could buy an Elderflame skin set for £100 only for the cool animations and sounds to not be included.
I think OW2’s price points for individual cosmetics is too high but Valorant just blows it out of the water. They were F2P from the beginning and I still wouldn’t buy their absurdly overpriced skins.
The box sales doesn’t matter, it’s the total revenue stream that matters from all operations connected to Overwatch. That’s the total revenue that Overwatch generates. That was sufficient enough as it stood to cover the costs as well as generating profits. The key point however is that ActivisionBlizzard isn’t content with “sufficient enough”.
The interesting point would come in a couple of years, to see if the F2P model actually earns them any more. My guess is that it won’t, because OW2 is essentially OW1, and while it was new in 2016, the competition has caught up with them. So my guess is that it won’t do any good, because there are far better F2P alternatives out there and Blizzard isn’t a household staple of quality any more.
I tried Valorant recently and I didn’t have a problem with their free tier BP to unlock characters, because it only takes single digit hours to do so, since they are very much at the beginning of the tiers and they are as a whole nowhere near as important as in OW, because everyone still uses the same guns. The design of the OW2 BP feels more harsh towards the player.