A buddy of mine loved OW1, ranked top-100 for Rein, and preordered OW2 a long time ago. Not only did Blizz not refund his $60 after they changed directions, he said he still has to pay for this content.
Obviously the main takeaway is another reminder to never preorder games, but that is so slimy.
I personally think Overwatch 2 is a great game compared to OW1, especially for going F2P and removing the loot box. I have played OW1 since 2017 but since it is a paid game, none of my friends play it and we all played Apex instead when it came out.
Fast forward to 2022, they actually removed loot box (fuck gambling) and made it F2P. I have been playing OW2 almost every day since launch. Haven’t touched Apex a single time since then.
I never played ow1 but I did enjoy OW2. One of the few multiplayer shooters where I didn’t suck. However I noticed I got very frustrated by it and seemed to get addicted as well. Also noticed I enjoyed other games less. Stopped playing and feeling better now.
I liked the free lootboxes with chances of getting cool stuff than the damn $20 every couple months battle passes where you actually cannot get anything interesting without paying for it.
You liked getting free cool stuff, not the loot boxes. They can still give away cool stuff for free even without loot boxes but they chose to stop doing so and it sucks.
I think the Battle Pass is fair, it’s $10 every 2 months. It helps keep the game running. Overwatch 1 was going to die if they kept going with the old business model.
Let’s be honest. It’s not about the 5v5. It’s not about the CC. It’s not about the balance changes. It’s not about the cancelled single player.
It’s about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody’s angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.
There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that’s why they’re called servers):
Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody’s already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
don’t make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.
I get that it’s disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you’re asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 – I can’t think of a modern popular game that isn’t a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.
It was pretty generous for people who weren’t buying loot, but selling loot crates in a slot machine was far worse, imho. You just know how bad that must’ve been for people with gambling addictions – “here, buy 100 random pulls and hope you get the skin you want”.
The difference being that it was a skin and you didnt need to buy them. I had almost every skin in ow1 just by playing and i didnt even have a silver banner thingy around my character portrait.
In ow2 you are buying characters which you actually need to play effectively.
I wholey agree that gambling mechanics have no place in games, and that cosmetics can have as much pull to addicts and people susceptible to fomo as things that affect gameplay but when the thing you are gambling on can be bought for coins (which you earn tons of by playing the game and pulling items you already have) and the chances of pulling items you dont already have are stacked in the players favour then it does beg the question of wheres the fomo?
The characters are very easy to unlock in game for free. Obviously it’s not as good as getting them at the start of the season, but it’s not p2w. They’re at the end of the free battle pass in their launch season, and have an easy achievement challenge to unlock them in following seasons. I’d say the preferred weapons in tf2 were harder to get.
45 level grind isnt easy for people that have limited time to play. And i needed to win 35 games as a support character to unlock lifeweaver, which as a solo queue player with enough time to play 2 to 3 games on average a night when i actually get to play, is not easy.
I know im not the only person playing the game but i also know im not alone in my situation.
The fact is its not the game it used to be but its pretending that it is.
If they hadnt cancelled the co-op rpg element that was the original reason we all had to abandon ow1 th3n maybe that wouldnt be much of an issue. But they said its too much to develop it so its gone. And now to replace it they want more money for something else that used to be free.
Its all just a cash grab. Its not balanced towards player, if you think its fair then you have been fooled by capitalism too.
It is a lie that they cant provide the resources to make the rpg part of ow2. They have several thousand employess and are one of the richest game companies in the world. Larian have 400 employees and managed to make bg3 in 6 years… so its absolute bollocks. Blizzard spent 3 years developing wat ended up being ow1 witha reskin.
Well that’s a good sign then. That should mean the masterserver is cheap to run, and good chance that the game can be hacked to be fully p2p in the event the masterserver gets taken down. P2p means far less server side code that has to be reverse-engineered.
Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.
But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.
Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.
I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?
Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.
I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.
Define “harass”. LoL and Fortnite don’t “harass” you into giving recurring payments. You can make f2p-friendly games, especially on pc, if you want. Blizzard just doesn’t want.
I don’t agree with the classification of 360 as “retro,” because I can think of multiple 360-era games in the top 50 charts today. The implication being that if the 360 is retro, so are its games.
And I can’t imagine going up to someone playing GTAV or CSGO and saying “bro this game is retro.”
Lame. There’s no reason you can’t have co-op in an RPG. Wasteland 3 was made 100x better with the addition and allowing me to share the experience with a friend.
Nah, the next CoD is most definitely coming to Steam. Blizzard had to know that these reviews were coming from the discourse online alone. Plus, pretty sure that it’s Microsoft’s decision to do so now anyways and there’s no way their going to limit their potential profits by locking out a platform like that just over some bad reviews.
How is everybody just now finding out how capitalism works? Any public company is LEGALLY REQUIRED to care only about shareholder profits. It is literally illegal for them to do anything else.
Fiduciary duty is a real thing. Agent/principal relationships require the agent to try and get the maximum return for the level of risk.
Even if a CEO doesn’t have a written fiduciary duty in their contract do, the company as a whole usually does.
The CEO of a public corporation reports to the board who report to index fund managers who have a agent/principal relationships with all of their investors.
The comment was basically shorthand for “a fiduciary duty exists between corporate leadership and shareholders, creating a legally-enforceable requirement that the only consideration be maximum potential return on investment for existing shareholders and risk.”
It’s absolutely true in practice. CEOs have gotten sued for not acting in the shareholders best interests.
And in relation to the original comment I replied to, are you truly saying that companies, esp. public companies, are not, FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES, beholden to making money for the shareholders? Any “nice” company will make less money, will not compete well, will then fail or be bought out by the less nice, more profitable company.
Im not a lawyer, but I’ve looked into this misunderstanding before and it stems from what constitutes "breaking one’s fiduciary duty to investors. While deliberately acting against the interests of investors is illegal, ive yet to hear of a lawsuit, let alone a successful one, brought by an investor for not making all of the money. Id be interested in hearing an investment oriented lawyers perspective since from what i understand, the full extent of fiduciary duty has not been tested that way in court
Board of directors and company officers have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders and the corporate entity.
Acts done outside their authority as stated in the articles of corporations are said to be ultra vires. They are absolutely actionable.
When the directors or officers breach the fiduciary duty to shareholders, they are liable under what’s called a derivative action, because it is derivative of the contract represented by the stock certificate.
Companies NEVER care about their customers. They care about profit.
Sometimes, it is profitable to be considerate of the consumers, but when customers are willing to give a company money despite their bad practices, they will always prioritize profit.
That’s the problem, if at least a part of us would start to punish companies, not with comments or bad reviews but with their actual wallet, and instead “reward” them for customer friendly behavior, the industry as a whole would be in a faaaaar better state.
I think maybe it requires legislation or a change in systems. It’s not really feasible to rely on millions of individual customers coming together to punish bad companies, it just doesn’t seem to happen effectively or make a significant impact.
thanks for the share, this vid is awesome. love the bumpers between games too.
been watching a lot of old g4tv reruns with commercial breaks on youtube lately, kinda reminds me of that (minus some of the 00s grossness. glad weirdness towards women and homophobia isnt in anymore)
He definitely got some inspiration from those days. I adore the bumpers. He recently made a good video on some of the weirder gaming shows from that era too.
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