Hi Hive, it seems like it's been a while...
I remember a couple of years ago when games like Valorant or the first Overwatch were still booming, it was said that this model was close to stop being profitable for its developers.
Hero Shooters are a specific type of genre of which there were already some exponents that were played by millions of players, games like Paladins I think were in their time a favourite of many and allowed to play online against a huge amount of players choosing characters each with unique abilities, I think this is what sold for many the idea of hero shooters as we know them today.
A couple of million years later, we are perhaps facing one of the lowest points of this genre, games like Overwatch even had to promise a renewal in the form of a sequel but they have fallen behind with their proposal even cancelling one of their biggest bets with this second game.
I think it's much more serious in this case than in other games because Overwatch 2 had as main objective a PvE at least functional, a story mode that would be developed with the seasons and a progression system for this particular mode, the 4 years that have passed so that in the end it all came to nothing, erased like dust in the wind.
money
as it usually happens in these huge games the budget is not always there to cover everything the devs want to add to a game, considering we are talking about blizzard we can say that money is not a problem or at least not the main problem.
I think we can attribute that to the vision that Blizzard has regarding this kind of games, multiplayer games of this size are difficult to handle with all the servers they have but much more complicated is to put content, or even worse a new mode that would force the creatives to develop many processes and spend a lot of resources, the project has already taken 4 years of the life of this sequel, and it seems that those were enough to cut the funds.
While I can see the sense in blizzard's move I think hypeing up an entire community, putting out a sequel where you advertise that this new mode will be revolutionary for the game only to cancel it after a couple of teasers just leaves me with doubts about what blizzard can really do.
I've seen improvements in game balance and heroes, there are improvements in this new second installment but I think it's still a long way from what was promised and advertised in the first place.
It is good news that this time everything is free, I think they realized that they were not going to be able to compete if they had to charge again for an update of the first game, also having other free multiplayer I think the fight to see who gets more players is tight this year.
Also entering the conversation is the changing trends, hero shooters have been at the top for almost a decade now and we are seeing another style of game dominating the scene apart from the well known multiplayer games like CSGO or Minecraft, it is a change that blizzard must be aware of and I am hopeful that with the purchase by microsoft they can get the ship back on course.
I don't think they can repeat the massive success of the first game but I think betting against xbox and microsoft would not be a wise move.
All yours, @slashint - Gamer, Video Game Analyst.
