I briefly talked about this on the tg discord. I’m new to Kbin, very excited to be here :D
So I am an Overwatch diehard fan. As we know, the franchise is going through a big struggle keeping fans while angering everyone frequently alongside. Hell, the latest episode of Death of a Game discussed Overwatch 2 regardless of the fact it is not shutdown yet.
I went through a few weeks of grief about the franchise fearing the worst for it, as a diehard fan would.
Today, Blizzard announced Genesis, a 3-part animated mini-series on YouTube with about 18 minutes of total runtime. I am cautiously optimistic and believe, despite the length that this could be the first step towards OW’s redemption arc, if ever.
the first part’s premier page in question
As told on the title, OW2’s current controversies is akin to what Marvel was going through in the 90s. Due to constant mismanagement, terrible sales and quality of the comics on top of a declining population of readers Marvel was on the line of filing for bankruptcy in 1996. in 1998, Marvel opened up a movie studio as we know today as “Marvel Studios”. Obviously, Marvel went from bankruptcy to the highest grossing film franchise of all time by a long shot.
Overwatch 2’s current state is very similar IMO. awful mismanagement of the game, declining playerbase and just like comics in the 90s, live service video games are going quite downhill, with many shutting down in 2023 alone.
What Overwatch needs to succeed and gain trust back is not to make the game better, it’ll need more than that. Marvel saved itself with film, tv, animations, merchandise and games alongside the comics. Overwatch shines brightly from the animation, art, characters and narrative work and can carry itself with these talents alone.
A change in direction to a more narrative-focused, character-centric multimedia franchise, not just a team-based FPS could bring in new fans and most of all, make the angry mobs realise the worldbuilding of Overwatch is quality. League of Legends is huge now that they released Arcane and Riot Forge, with a MMORPG and Fighting game on the way. There just needs to be many more ways to appreciate the IP Blizzard has crafted than a heavily-monetised team-game.
Could Blizzard turn Overwatch around this way? is there any hope for the game itself by allowing the world to shine? is it doomed otherwise?
They might be able to turn it around with customer oriented decisions, but truthfully the whole ow2 launch and even its existence is solely a front to remove the old, in comparison almost fair lootbox based shop and economy system established in ow1 in favor of the even more predatory current one. They dropped all pretense making this happen, even cutting the promised pve campaigns that were initially their big argument why they would need to make ow2 instead of adding content to ow1.
Could the game be saved? Yes. Is the corporation interested in that? No. All they want is milking the cash cow for the least amount of investment possible.