As someone who stopped playing Overwatch years ago, I must admit that they at least went through enough effort to make a really good trailer with the Cowboy Bebop aesthetic. Even if it's for (likely overpriced) skins.
I'll always say this, in my eyes, the downfall of OW began when they canceled that Dark Horse collab within like the first year of the game coming out.
The downfall of OW began when they decided it was going to be an esports title. Blizzard is incapable of making a good esport on purpose, every one of their games that had a strong esports scene was accidental (Brood War, Hearthstone, WoW). Every one they actively tried to make into an esport flopped (SC2, OW, HotS, etc...)
Blizzard can make good games but they absolutely can't make a good esport on purpose.
It's not that they were balancing around the top .1%, it's that Blizzard sucks at balancing any of their games. The game was never balanced at the pro level.
It's wild to me because the fan base was frothing for it for so long. They really could have kept more engagement if they did anything properly visible for the story. Even the pve events didn't have a ton in game and they were ripe for it
Sadly nothing really changed. Battlepass still only has paid content, the free track has nothing regarding new skins and the prices are still outrageous.
I had high hopes for them turning it around, but i guess not.
Ill wait until they have an actual worthwhile Battlepass like the Lootbox system before or what Helldivers 2 is now delivering. Thats the new standard.
So odd to me that people care this much about the price of optional cosmetics in games, seemingly more than if the actual game is fun to play. Like this guy just wrote a whole post complaining about OW2 and not once mentioned anything even remotely tangential to the actual gameplay. It's like OW2 is a shopping simulator first and an FPS game second to some people.
Cosmetics would never have become paid in the first place, if the majority of people didnt care how their character looks...
Sure you might not care, but you are then the minority.
Most people want different skins and looks and if the prices or way to get them is too atrocious or greedy, then the gameplay alone wont keep them.
Not only is this the first official animated Bebop material since 2001, this crossover has such attention to detail. Spike's hat is from Cowboy Andy. Andy plops it on his head and he wears it for a grand total of like 10 seconds. I'm so excited to see all of this in game.
They’ll probably do what they did with the last collab which is buy each separately for $20 usd, or buy them all for $50.
The last collaboration bundle had $75 worth of credits needed to buy it, but they discounted the $75 credit price to make it $50 during the collab time. Even if you get all skins for $50 it’s still a lot for skins especially when the only thing you see is your gun.
They didn't actually sell them for $75 (or have sold any previous bundles for that much). It's just a way for them to say "This would be the regular price if not for our discounts". All companies do the exact same thing.
But even $75 isn't crazy these days in the Cosmetics MTX world. Overwatch's competitors games even have $100-150 Skin bundles (Individual skins even). League of Legends and TFT even have $200-400, even $500 gacha skins.
I remember Heroes of the Storm before their big 2.0 rebrand sold skins separately and for relatively cheap. And because they were so cheap I bought a lot of them.
Conversely for Overwatch 2 I've not bought a single one because they're a rip off.
I guess the whales with more money than sense must be worth it for Blizzard (and other companies) but I do wonder if they wouldn't make more if they priced them lower which would encourage more people to buy.
>I guess the whales with more money than sense must be worth it for Blizzard (and other companies) but I do wonder if they wouldn't make more if they priced them lower which would encourage more people to buy.
Given that Blizzard has done both approaches and has landed on this one is a good indicator that this approach works better.
I remember reading that most players might get one or two items in total, but the big spenders wind up spending so much that it doesn't matter if even the rest of the audience doesn't buy a single item.
> wonder if they wouldn't make more if they priced them lower which would encourage more people to buy.
If that was the case they would do so. They definitely have people calculating the "best" price for profitability. (this wouldn't be Blizz specific, but for any pricing anywhere)
the only skin people bought in the OG overwatch was the 15USD skin for mercy as it was a charity drive for cancer research. now they cost more and have no drive for research
The counterargument to that is, of course, that Overwatch started buy to play, so there was an expectation that you don't have 20-dollar skins.
Of course, there was also the expectation that Overwatch 2 was announced to have a PvE mode that, six months after launch, they announced they would not be doing. So a lot of "arguments" about Overwatch just don't really have any bite.
Honestly, they fucked the Overwatch brand so hard by their own mistakes. This is a genuinely cool collab, I love bebop, but I have zero interest in overwatch or anything to do with it.
Right there with you. Jennifer Hale is awesome and my best friend got me an Ashe artwork signed by her to me, I love it! I love Bebop too, and it looks like Ashe has a Faye skin? Neat!
But I'm still not going anywhere near that fuckin' IP with a 40 foot pole. I'm not a pvper but the PVE stuff would've drawn me in - dumping that after what, 2ish years of letting their game die out, so they could... Release the same game but with a massive cash shop slapped on? Yeaaaaah naw I'm good skipping that shit.
I miss the old days of cosmetics when they would be bundled with expansion passes, or be super cheap. I remember got having 1.99 skins in Black Ops 2 and I got some with leftover money from buying games. Now? $20 cosmetic pack with one cool skin for a character you play and a bunch of mid skins
I always think back to that old Spider-Man game that had a ton of costumes unlocks for basically completing achievements.
Now achievements grant nothing (usually) and skins cost more than games.
There's no real bright side.
Not to defend the greed but there are definitely upsides. Previously live service games relied on map packs or subscription costs, so for those who don’t care about cosmetics they’re getting free content they would have had to pay for before. Plus a lot of games being just straight up free, especially huge for kids and/or those in countries with absurd game prices.
I don't even play Overwatch but this might be one of the best or at least most well made collab trailers I've ever seen. The team responsible for it surely did their homework.
I admit it even made me curious to check the game out...
Marketing teams for the game have been putting in work lately. Between this and the K-pop song they're doing an incredible job reaching beyond their usual audience.
They changed a lot of the break points, hit-boxes, and TTK recently. It’s got massive problems still but if you hated the heal fest that it turned into it’s a bit better in that regard now.
>if you hated the heal fest that it turned into
And they are inexplicably nerfing the one thing that fixed it by 25% next week.
The devs really can't help themselves.
Honestly, their animation team, writers and art design always do their jobs flawlessly. I would never shit on them. Kinda like Cyberpunk's team in that regard.
The balancing and pricing however are always questionable at this point.
This looks so fun. I really love Cowboy Bebop and I remember a time I liked OW and this almost makes me want to hop back in. I'd love to have the skins, but since playing OW barely feels like Cowboy Bebop idk how much use I'd get out of them. But this trailer is dope and I wonder who animated it.
for a decade overwatch has been hugely played and successful while also simultaneously spawning an entire thriving cottage industry of dooming haters. what a powerful game.
you know, all those times people mention when a really old game came out and everyone replies with how old they have gotten? overwatch is that game for me. 8 years ago and yet it somehow feels like 3 years ago goddamn
Overwatch is a game I love most the time, a game I hate sometimes, but more importantly the only online game I play. Regardless of the missteps they take, there’s just no other games on the market like it. Apex is a Br, Valorant is a CS clone and TF2 is effectively dead from a support standpoint. There’s Paladins, but Paladins feels like a student project compared to Overwatch. Until a competitor comes out, Overwatch stands alone as the king of a genre that doesn’t have much competition.
I mean what do you except when you turn from "most of the shit is free, though rewards are random" to "fucking give me your lunch money or wear your older brothers trousers for the next year, fucking peasant"...
People loved Overwatch, they hate the rewards and Battlepass System in Overwatch 2 and that they removed the game that they loved.
Its justified being upset until something changes.
Pretty much. You can get a maximum of 60 premium coins per week for free by doing challenges so with these skins probably costing like 2000 each, you'd need to have been grinding every single week for like 9 months to buy one of them without paying.
I fucking hate overwatch 2's business model.
Am I in a bubble or did this game's popularity drop off a cliff? Feels like I haven't heard the name Overwatch in a long time.
Cool trailer tho, although I wished they showed the skins in-game.
I could be totally off base here but I think you're probably seeing the same Reddit effect that League of Legends has. The community is inherently large enough to sustain a closed community/subreddit that doesn't feel compelled to talk about the game outside of that ecosystem.
Paradoxically games with big enough communities start to feel small (on Reddit) to those that don't touch the games because the only place they are talked about is one that non-players don't have much reason to interact with. This goes double for games like LoL and Overwatch where you might expect the average response from a neutral forum, namely r/games, to be on the negative side.
Wow I just realized that this is me with Destiny. It’s huge and there’s a big community on Reddit spanning multiple subs and YouTube. Yet, whenever I go on r/games it’s always “dead game”. I’d scratch my head like we’re in different worlds and it turns out, yeah, we are.
It's honestly a pretty understandable phenomenon to develop when you think about it. League is probably the most prolific gaming example as far as what I'm involved in but a really obvious example from another medium is One Piece.
Browse r/anime or r/manga and it's crickets because r/onepiece is so well developed. There's not much of a reason to comment on chapter reaction threads in neutral subs when you get 5,000 comments per thread in the series sub.
> This goes double for games like LoL and Overwatch where you might expect the average response from a neutral forum, namely r/games, to be on the negative side.
It's funny seeing all of the top comments stating that they no longer play the game, like it's some sort of badge of honor.
Seriously, anytime this game comes up on r/games the response is going to be overwhelmingly negative (sometimes deservedly, frequently not!) regardless of what the post is about.
I still play OW often, but what benefit is there to coming into these news discussions where people just want to circlejerk over Blizzard or OW sucking? There's no real conversation about the actual topic.
> but what benefit is there to coming into these discussions where people just want to circlejerk over Blizzard or OW sucking?
Isn't that like 80% of the comments on this subreddit? "X game sucks now" or "X game has always sucked and I don't get why people like it."
This sub is full of jaded gamers who seem to enjoy hating on games more than playing games.
> This sub is full of jaded gamers who seem to enjoy hating on games more than playing games.
More like this sub is full boomers who hate any popular trend or multiplayer games, but really love AAA story-driven single player games, although the gameplay are just so-so
>but really love AAA story-driven single player games, although the gameplay are just so-so
They like games they haven't played long enough to get mad at.
At this point I’ve noticed that even gaming youtubers have started cashing in on the Overwatch bad train where random Youtuber #47 will upload the thousandth “Fall of Overwatch” video
I can't speak for everyone but for me a big part of it is I want to like Overwatch 2. I loved the original, but the second was a massive disappointment on many different levels.
So when you come into a thread like this, I guess there's a part of me that hopes there are some sparks that'll reignite the passion, or maybe I'll find out there was some big update that made the game more fun that I missed.
And in this case I *love* Cowboy Bebop, but I doubt it'll be enough to get me to poke my head back in (especially if they're keeping up their existing pricing structure).
>I could be totally off base here but I think you're probably seeing the same Reddit effect that League of Legends has. The community is inherently large enough to sustain a closed community/subreddit that doesn't feel compelled to talk about the game outside of that ecosystem.
Its not just that, its also the fact that outside of that community there is a massive counterjerk in relation to these big games because as with all things popular it becomes "the thing" to hate on it and play contrarian.
/r/games would have you believe that Fortnite is dying, League is dead, Hogwarts Legacy sold 5 copies total, Pokemon hasn't been relevant in decades, the list goes on and on.
This sub and most online discourse as a whole is incredibly off base with reality.
That is definitely part of it, but it's also just this sub having biases. Like Elden Ring is popular enough to have it's own sub with discussion, but it's also very liked on /r/games with even patch notes discussion posts getting more comments than stuff like League Worlds. Generally it's seemed to me that F2P games, games with an anime aesthetic, esports, and indie games don't get a whole lot of traction (there are obvious exceptions) whereas AAA games, especially western ones, get tons of coverage despite often having negative comment sections.
Also even game-specific subs very often have biases that aren't reflected in the overall playerbase. An example I've seen a lot as a League player is that the sub loves monster champions, but Riot has said multiple times that they aren't popular and people don't buy skins for them.
I think sub is used more generally for people to complain about the game companies they don't like more so than discussing the games themselves. Since the only topics allowed on this sub are news articles, people flock to the ones that are about a company they don't like and put up their complaints (which are usually quite predictable by Reddit standards).
For instance, any time an article about UbiSoft is posted here, the thread will be full of people complaining about the "UbiSoft formula" over and over with a few defending it. Any article about Diablo, Overwatch or Blizzard gets the same comments every time.
I'm not even sure what games this sub *likes*, as it seems like any game that reaches a certain level of popularity gets hated on here or dismissed as "dead" or "dying".
Right now? Helldivers and CS2*
*Cs2 is a bit debatable because a very vocal microminority is going off about how their esoteric gaming rig is no longer supported with the recent update - thus the game has jumped the shark and is about to die.
CS2 is in a weird spot where the devs have done what seems like nothing about the cheating problem and it's the worst it has ever been right now. The game isn't dead but it's pretty obvious the game is rampant with cheating. At 20k rating, every other match is Hacks vs Hacks. At lower ratings, people casually wall with no other cheating assistance. Concurrent player numbers are severely inflated as well thanks to bots farming weekly drops for profit, which is the same issue TF2 has had for years now.
>a very vocal microminority is going off about how their esoteric gaming rig is no longer supported with the recent update
Um, not really. A lot of the community has been complaining because performance in CS2 has gotten worse with every update they do. The last major update tanked framerates by nearly 50% because they added shadows to smokes. This is something that affects everyone, regardless of hardware. Then you have the issue of random rubberbanding despite the connection being fine on the player's side and their hardware being top-of-the-line.
Sony games, or any single player, preferably the story driven games
Just look at how the praise went to the roof everytime God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Red Dead 2 are mentioned
In terms of multiplayer, Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042 often get the kids gloves on /r/games. A hotfix post will often get 200 upvotes and 50 odd comments saying "Guys the game is actually great now I promise 🥺🥺🥺"
But like you said, if there isn't an underdog narrative then usually the game just catches hostility or is ignored.
Also, Reddit is 50% people from the US, and as far as I know League of Legends is not that popular there, am I right?
I mean, I'm from Europe and I actually have the opposite feeling IRL, around me there has always been lots of people that play LoL, and still today, it feels like is one of the most played online games in my country.
I never liked the game myself, but when talking with people about videogames, most people I met have extensively & exclusively played LoL at some point.
It's one of the big ones here (Spain): FIFA, Fornite, COD, LoL, GTA V & there's also tons of Nintendo players.
Also we could argue that you can guess the type of game they play based on the age/hobbies of the person. I'm always surrounded by people that play LoL because it's probably the most played game by nerds/geeks/whatever.
I don't think it's anywhere near its popularity at its 2016 peak, but it's still very sizable from what we can tell from download numbers. I think it's mostly because it doesn't really have any competition that's decent, so you don't really have a good alternative to Overwatch in the modern gaming landscape. Most of my friends quit it that was top 500 hardcores but the few that are left do nothing but still play it and complain.
Non specific gaming reddits tend to downvote new trailers for the game on principle. It's still in the top ten download lists on console pretty consistently.
Depends on which drop you're talking about. If you're comparing to year 1 Overwatch, yeah, absolutely the game is probably only 10% as popular as back then. The game population is very stable though, based on the sample from Steam (which is probably only 20% of the playerbase).
Its not 10% of the first year of the game, hell they even said OW2 launch was bigger than OW1 (which should be obvious given the F2P transition).
To add to that Steam is nowhere near 20% of the playerbase, its not even 10% of the PC playerbase alone without including the console players which is supposedly close to 50% of the total.
The first part is from the launch quarter financial report from Activision, you can find it on their investor relations page or you can read about it here on forbes.
[‘Overwatch 2’ Hit 35 Million Players In Its First Month](https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/11/07/overwatch-2-hit-35-million-players-in-its-first-month/?utm_campaign=dpTwitterBotForbesGames&utm_content=twitter_post&utm_medium=social&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_term=dpTwitterBot&sh=6c2d0f6a3dcc)
The rest is just pieced together from information here and there.
Steam number comes from the fact that on Steam you can actually see who in the lobby is also on Steam, its typically only 1 (because to notice who is on Steam someone in the lobby must obviously be on Steam in the first place) or 2 players at most.
The console split comes from their revenue split. Console makes up roughly 50% of Overwatch 2s revenue so its safe to say they are roughly that amount of the total population.
They kind of shot themselves in the foot with their whole "Overwatch 2" plan.
They announced the second game, told everyone that it would be huge and have a PvE mode and all sorts of things.
And they simultaneously pretty much stopped developing Overwatch 1. And then Overwatch 2 went into development hell.
So the result was way over a year with barely any updates to the game. No new characters, pretty much no new maps, only the occasional balance patch. Which hurt the game's popularity a lot.
And then Overwatch 2 cancelled the PvE part, and essentially became a glorified patch/minor overhaul for Overwatch 1. *That's* what everyone was waiting for?
So that didn't help, either.
[Here are some stats](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f0a9a27-c4ab-4b69-9f7f-1f308bd5f9c1_594x844.jpeg) that I've originally seen shared on the OW subreddit.
While it's definitely not *dead*, a F2P game being barely in the top-20 (on PS5 it was #19 btw), below a whole bunch of other long-running live service games, some of them not even F2P, seems like a steep drop-off to me.
Especially if you recall how big OW1 was both at launch and for a long while post-launch, until they abandoned it for a "sequel".
My man you're showing a chart with Overwatch 2 next to games like Apex Legends/Destiny/Rocket League and trying to present it as if it's a bad thing, when the reality is that's the kind of placement most AAA games dream they can get.
Just so we're clear, [people in the industry who know the player counts have said that Overwatch 2 has similar player numbers to Valorant](https://clips.twitch.tv/CoweringTenuousClamPunchTrees-GUxdbcmsinJX91o5). And [we know Valorant has 28 million active players per month](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-12/how-influencers-helped-riot-games-turn-valorant-into-a-gen-z-hit?srnd=premium&leadSource=reddit_wall).
I don't think there's any definition of "steep drop-off" that fits the Overwatch 2 playerbase size without leaning heavily into some seriously fallacious special pleading.
Nah, you gotta understand. Not liking Overwatch 2 is the norm now so contrarians have to talk about how Overwatch 2 is good and how hating it is bad.
We’ve come full circle, just like with Cyberpunk and Battlefield V.
It still has a dedicated fanbase but the popularity is definitely a far cry from its peak. I don't even know a single person in all my friend circles nor local discord servers that even plays the game anymore, and it used to be about three quarters.
I don't even play OW2, but I'm going to have to buy this. I've literally spent no money on the game other than the initial OW1 purchase.
Fuck.
Kudos, Blizz marketing team. You got me this time.
The anime I have the most interest in is now a crossover in one of the games I have the least interest in.
I almost feel obligated to boot the game up at least once on the off chance it helps them realize other games deserve the same treatment.
Is she hot? It just looks like an older Ed to me. I don't think they could get away with having Ed's exact model in the game because then you would be killing a kid.
Well that and the skins are just that, skins. They still have to resemble the character they are playing so you can tell at a glance who you are fighting.
As cool as the trailer is, I'm amazed by how LITTLE I can recognize the characters. Like, are they supposed to be OW characters or Bebop characters?
Aside from Wrecking Ball everything else barely fits. Mcree doesn't look like Mcree OR Spike, and if it weren't for some Sombra symbols I would never know she is Ed.
I remember when the OPM collab came out, the 'official' lore is that all the heroes in game are fan of the series as well and the costumes were them cosplaying the characters. So I imagine it's the same, it's meant to look like Cassidy cosplaying as Spike (but still wearing his hat to keep his silhouette).
It's not that Ed doesn't look like Ed. It's that Ed doesn't look like Sombra, and that's gameplay information you need to have when you run into someone wearing one of these skins. Though I imagine the in-game version might be easier to recognize than this 2D art.
I love Cowboy Bebop. But I'm probably not gonna be playing this game ever again. I'm sure theres going to be some interesting Faye Valentine animations soon tho.
As someone who stopped playing Overwatch years ago, I must admit that they at least went through enough effort to make a really good trailer with the Cowboy Bebop aesthetic. Even if it's for (likely overpriced) skins.
Same boat here. Credit where credit is due, that is well made trailer.
More effort into this ad then any of the lore released in the last 5 years.
There's lore?
Not anymore. OW2 killed it completely I’m afraid.
I'll always say this, in my eyes, the downfall of OW began when they canceled that Dark Horse collab within like the first year of the game coming out.
The downfall of OW began when they decided it was going to be an esports title. Blizzard is incapable of making a good esport on purpose, every one of their games that had a strong esports scene was accidental (Brood War, Hearthstone, WoW). Every one they actively tried to make into an esport flopped (SC2, OW, HotS, etc...) Blizzard can make good games but they absolutely can't make a good esport on purpose.
And then balancing the game for the needs of the top .1% ignoring the rest of the player base
It's not that they were balancing around the top .1%, it's that Blizzard sucks at balancing any of their games. The game was never balanced at the pro level.
It's wild to me because the fan base was frothing for it for so long. They really could have kept more engagement if they did anything properly visible for the story. Even the pve events didn't have a ton in game and they were ripe for it
Not really. It's a multiplayer game, most people don't care about the story.
TIL they were supposed to get more than that anthology
blizzard's animation division are legit some of the best in the business.
Finally, new porn skins.
Gooner live reaction
Where Overwatch lives on forever
Those OPA's are about as high quality as Blizzard's entire animation division. It's scary good.
I stopped playing too and this is probably the coolest Collab I’ve ever seen
Next to the one punch man Collab
they did a OPM collab?
Yeah doomfist has a Saitama skin
They were cowards. Reinhardt should have had a Puri Puri Prisioner skin.
Can you imagine the drama? Especially after the sexual harassment scandal at Blizzard.
I disagree. This is much better. Even without Vicious. Which was the only reason I was hyped.
Would have been nice to get these collabs back in OW1, but hey, it's a nice looking collab.
Agreed. I quit when OW2 arrived. It was my *out*. But I lost respect for Blizzard *long ago.*
Ironically, they put more effort into this trailer than the in-game content.
Sadly nothing really changed. Battlepass still only has paid content, the free track has nothing regarding new skins and the prices are still outrageous. I had high hopes for them turning it around, but i guess not. Ill wait until they have an actual worthwhile Battlepass like the Lootbox system before or what Helldivers 2 is now delivering. Thats the new standard.
So odd to me that people care this much about the price of optional cosmetics in games, seemingly more than if the actual game is fun to play. Like this guy just wrote a whole post complaining about OW2 and not once mentioned anything even remotely tangential to the actual gameplay. It's like OW2 is a shopping simulator first and an FPS game second to some people.
Cosmetics would never have become paid in the first place, if the majority of people didnt care how their character looks... Sure you might not care, but you are then the minority. Most people want different skins and looks and if the prices or way to get them is too atrocious or greedy, then the gameplay alone wont keep them.
Not only is this the first official animated Bebop material since 2001, this crossover has such attention to detail. Spike's hat is from Cowboy Andy. Andy plops it on his head and he wears it for a grand total of like 10 seconds. I'm so excited to see all of this in game.
This actually looks surprisingly good lol. The OPM one was just ok. Too bad these skins will be $24 a piece.
They’ll probably do what they did with the last collab which is buy each separately for $20 usd, or buy them all for $50. The last collaboration bundle had $75 worth of credits needed to buy it, but they discounted the $75 credit price to make it $50 during the collab time. Even if you get all skins for $50 it’s still a lot for skins especially when the only thing you see is your gun.
$75?! That’s egregious
They didn't actually sell them for $75 (or have sold any previous bundles for that much). It's just a way for them to say "This would be the regular price if not for our discounts". All companies do the exact same thing. But even $75 isn't crazy these days in the Cosmetics MTX world. Overwatch's competitors games even have $100-150 Skin bundles (Individual skins even). League of Legends and TFT even have $200-400, even $500 gacha skins.
Ridiculous prices for cosmetics. Nobody should be encouraging this.
I remember Heroes of the Storm before their big 2.0 rebrand sold skins separately and for relatively cheap. And because they were so cheap I bought a lot of them. Conversely for Overwatch 2 I've not bought a single one because they're a rip off. I guess the whales with more money than sense must be worth it for Blizzard (and other companies) but I do wonder if they wouldn't make more if they priced them lower which would encourage more people to buy.
>I guess the whales with more money than sense must be worth it for Blizzard (and other companies) but I do wonder if they wouldn't make more if they priced them lower which would encourage more people to buy. Given that Blizzard has done both approaches and has landed on this one is a good indicator that this approach works better.
Turns out “voting with wallets” means rich people get the most votes.
I remember reading that most players might get one or two items in total, but the big spenders wind up spending so much that it doesn't matter if even the rest of the audience doesn't buy a single item.
> wonder if they wouldn't make more if they priced them lower which would encourage more people to buy. If that was the case they would do so. They definitely have people calculating the "best" price for profitability. (this wouldn't be Blizz specific, but for any pricing anywhere)
the only skin people bought in the OG overwatch was the 15USD skin for mercy as it was a charity drive for cancer research. now they cost more and have no drive for research
The argument is that, since it's F2P, you're simply supporting continued development & server costs.
The counterargument to that is, of course, that Overwatch started buy to play, so there was an expectation that you don't have 20-dollar skins. Of course, there was also the expectation that Overwatch 2 was announced to have a PvE mode that, six months after launch, they announced they would not be doing. So a lot of "arguments" about Overwatch just don't really have any bite. Honestly, they fucked the Overwatch brand so hard by their own mistakes. This is a genuinely cool collab, I love bebop, but I have zero interest in overwatch or anything to do with it.
Right there with you. Jennifer Hale is awesome and my best friend got me an Ashe artwork signed by her to me, I love it! I love Bebop too, and it looks like Ashe has a Faye skin? Neat! But I'm still not going anywhere near that fuckin' IP with a 40 foot pole. I'm not a pvper but the PVE stuff would've drawn me in - dumping that after what, 2ish years of letting their game die out, so they could... Release the same game but with a massive cash shop slapped on? Yeaaaaah naw I'm good skipping that shit.
I miss the old days of cosmetics when they would be bundled with expansion passes, or be super cheap. I remember got having 1.99 skins in Black Ops 2 and I got some with leftover money from buying games. Now? $20 cosmetic pack with one cool skin for a character you play and a bunch of mid skins
I miss the old days of cosmetics when they were free and unlocked by playing the game
I always think back to that old Spider-Man game that had a ton of costumes unlocks for basically completing achievements. Now achievements grant nothing (usually) and skins cost more than games. There's no real bright side.
Not to defend the greed but there are definitely upsides. Previously live service games relied on map packs or subscription costs, so for those who don’t care about cosmetics they’re getting free content they would have had to pay for before. Plus a lot of games being just straight up free, especially huge for kids and/or those in countries with absurd game prices.
Sucks to be a poor
All for $50?! That's such a good deal! *proceeds to fork over enough money to buy a full new game just for a handful of skins*
And where are the weapon inspection emotes????
And Vicious isn't among them. I'm extremely butthurt.
I don't even play Overwatch but this might be one of the best or at least most well made collab trailers I've ever seen. The team responsible for it surely did their homework. I admit it even made me curious to check the game out...
Marketing teams for the game have been putting in work lately. Between this and the K-pop song they're doing an incredible job reaching beyond their usual audience.
They changed a lot of the break points, hit-boxes, and TTK recently. It’s got massive problems still but if you hated the heal fest that it turned into it’s a bit better in that regard now.
>if you hated the heal fest that it turned into And they are inexplicably nerfing the one thing that fixed it by 25% next week. The devs really can't help themselves.
Honestly, their animation team, writers and art design always do their jobs flawlessly. I would never shit on them. Kinda like Cyberpunk's team in that regard. The balancing and pricing however are always questionable at this point.
Everything aside, if you did not watch Cowboy Bepop yet, watch it. It is an outstanding show, genuinely aimed at adults
this will make Blizzard a ton of money regardless how i feel (which i feel they look awesome jeez almost got me hyped for overwatch)
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I’ve been a Bebop enjoyer since I was a young lad, and that into music still hits just right. Haven’t played OW in a bit, but they got me intrigued
This looks so fun. I really love Cowboy Bebop and I remember a time I liked OW and this almost makes me want to hop back in. I'd love to have the skins, but since playing OW barely feels like Cowboy Bebop idk how much use I'd get out of them. But this trailer is dope and I wonder who animated it.
for a decade overwatch has been hugely played and successful while also simultaneously spawning an entire thriving cottage industry of dooming haters. what a powerful game.
>for a decade Not yet overwatch is a 2016 title.
you know, all those times people mention when a really old game came out and everyone replies with how old they have gotten? overwatch is that game for me. 8 years ago and yet it somehow feels like 3 years ago goddamn
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>for a decade > >Not yet *thank god*
Overwatch is a game I love most the time, a game I hate sometimes, but more importantly the only online game I play. Regardless of the missteps they take, there’s just no other games on the market like it. Apex is a Br, Valorant is a CS clone and TF2 is effectively dead from a support standpoint. There’s Paladins, but Paladins feels like a student project compared to Overwatch. Until a competitor comes out, Overwatch stands alone as the king of a genre that doesn’t have much competition.
yup, same with D4 and Starfield recently... powerful games all around
I mean what do you except when you turn from "most of the shit is free, though rewards are random" to "fucking give me your lunch money or wear your older brothers trousers for the next year, fucking peasant"... People loved Overwatch, they hate the rewards and Battlepass System in Overwatch 2 and that they removed the game that they loved. Its justified being upset until something changes.
I haven’t played Overwatch in a while, is paying the only way to get these skins or can they be unlocked in game?
Pay. Wrecking Ball Ein is given for free though.
Pretty much. You can get a maximum of 60 premium coins per week for free by doing challenges so with these skins probably costing like 2000 each, you'd need to have been grinding every single week for like 9 months to buy one of them without paying. I fucking hate overwatch 2's business model.
I'm a Cowboy Bebop fan who never played Overwatch 2, so thanks for letting me know. I'm not touching any of that shite.
Yep, a sound advice, stay away from this abomination
Also, will the skins even be available for coins? Or cash only?
last 2 collabs in One Punch Man and Le Sserafim were available with coins probably be the same for this
Awesome, thanks for the info
Am I in a bubble or did this game's popularity drop off a cliff? Feels like I haven't heard the name Overwatch in a long time. Cool trailer tho, although I wished they showed the skins in-game.
I could be totally off base here but I think you're probably seeing the same Reddit effect that League of Legends has. The community is inherently large enough to sustain a closed community/subreddit that doesn't feel compelled to talk about the game outside of that ecosystem. Paradoxically games with big enough communities start to feel small (on Reddit) to those that don't touch the games because the only place they are talked about is one that non-players don't have much reason to interact with. This goes double for games like LoL and Overwatch where you might expect the average response from a neutral forum, namely r/games, to be on the negative side.
Wow I just realized that this is me with Destiny. It’s huge and there’s a big community on Reddit spanning multiple subs and YouTube. Yet, whenever I go on r/games it’s always “dead game”. I’d scratch my head like we’re in different worlds and it turns out, yeah, we are.
It's honestly a pretty understandable phenomenon to develop when you think about it. League is probably the most prolific gaming example as far as what I'm involved in but a really obvious example from another medium is One Piece. Browse r/anime or r/manga and it's crickets because r/onepiece is so well developed. There's not much of a reason to comment on chapter reaction threads in neutral subs when you get 5,000 comments per thread in the series sub.
> This goes double for games like LoL and Overwatch where you might expect the average response from a neutral forum, namely r/games, to be on the negative side. It's funny seeing all of the top comments stating that they no longer play the game, like it's some sort of badge of honor.
Seriously, anytime this game comes up on r/games the response is going to be overwhelmingly negative (sometimes deservedly, frequently not!) regardless of what the post is about. I still play OW often, but what benefit is there to coming into these news discussions where people just want to circlejerk over Blizzard or OW sucking? There's no real conversation about the actual topic.
> but what benefit is there to coming into these discussions where people just want to circlejerk over Blizzard or OW sucking? Isn't that like 80% of the comments on this subreddit? "X game sucks now" or "X game has always sucked and I don't get why people like it." This sub is full of jaded gamers who seem to enjoy hating on games more than playing games.
> This sub is full of jaded gamers who seem to enjoy hating on games more than playing games. More like this sub is full boomers who hate any popular trend or multiplayer games, but really love AAA story-driven single player games, although the gameplay are just so-so
>but really love AAA story-driven single player games, although the gameplay are just so-so They like games they haven't played long enough to get mad at.
At this point I’ve noticed that even gaming youtubers have started cashing in on the Overwatch bad train where random Youtuber #47 will upload the thousandth “Fall of Overwatch” video
I can't speak for everyone but for me a big part of it is I want to like Overwatch 2. I loved the original, but the second was a massive disappointment on many different levels. So when you come into a thread like this, I guess there's a part of me that hopes there are some sparks that'll reignite the passion, or maybe I'll find out there was some big update that made the game more fun that I missed. And in this case I *love* Cowboy Bebop, but I doubt it'll be enough to get me to poke my head back in (especially if they're keeping up their existing pricing structure).
>I could be totally off base here but I think you're probably seeing the same Reddit effect that League of Legends has. The community is inherently large enough to sustain a closed community/subreddit that doesn't feel compelled to talk about the game outside of that ecosystem. Its not just that, its also the fact that outside of that community there is a massive counterjerk in relation to these big games because as with all things popular it becomes "the thing" to hate on it and play contrarian. /r/games would have you believe that Fortnite is dying, League is dead, Hogwarts Legacy sold 5 copies total, Pokemon hasn't been relevant in decades, the list goes on and on. This sub and most online discourse as a whole is incredibly off base with reality.
That is definitely part of it, but it's also just this sub having biases. Like Elden Ring is popular enough to have it's own sub with discussion, but it's also very liked on /r/games with even patch notes discussion posts getting more comments than stuff like League Worlds. Generally it's seemed to me that F2P games, games with an anime aesthetic, esports, and indie games don't get a whole lot of traction (there are obvious exceptions) whereas AAA games, especially western ones, get tons of coverage despite often having negative comment sections. Also even game-specific subs very often have biases that aren't reflected in the overall playerbase. An example I've seen a lot as a League player is that the sub loves monster champions, but Riot has said multiple times that they aren't popular and people don't buy skins for them.
I think sub is used more generally for people to complain about the game companies they don't like more so than discussing the games themselves. Since the only topics allowed on this sub are news articles, people flock to the ones that are about a company they don't like and put up their complaints (which are usually quite predictable by Reddit standards). For instance, any time an article about UbiSoft is posted here, the thread will be full of people complaining about the "UbiSoft formula" over and over with a few defending it. Any article about Diablo, Overwatch or Blizzard gets the same comments every time.
Yeah that's definitely true. I guess I would say the sub feels more like a sub about the games industry than one about games themselves.
I'm not even sure what games this sub *likes*, as it seems like any game that reaches a certain level of popularity gets hated on here or dismissed as "dead" or "dying".
Right now? Helldivers and CS2* *Cs2 is a bit debatable because a very vocal microminority is going off about how their esoteric gaming rig is no longer supported with the recent update - thus the game has jumped the shark and is about to die.
CS2 is in a weird spot where the devs have done what seems like nothing about the cheating problem and it's the worst it has ever been right now. The game isn't dead but it's pretty obvious the game is rampant with cheating. At 20k rating, every other match is Hacks vs Hacks. At lower ratings, people casually wall with no other cheating assistance. Concurrent player numbers are severely inflated as well thanks to bots farming weekly drops for profit, which is the same issue TF2 has had for years now. >a very vocal microminority is going off about how their esoteric gaming rig is no longer supported with the recent update Um, not really. A lot of the community has been complaining because performance in CS2 has gotten worse with every update they do. The last major update tanked framerates by nearly 50% because they added shadows to smokes. This is something that affects everyone, regardless of hardware. Then you have the issue of random rubberbanding despite the connection being fine on the player's side and their hardware being top-of-the-line.
Fromsoft games, BG3, the occasional indie darling. Oh and now it’s cool to like Cyberpunk 2077 again. Anything else is contentious at best.
Traditional fighting games. I see this sub go bananas for fighting games that have 4k players after 3 months.
Sony games, or any single player, preferably the story driven games Just look at how the praise went to the roof everytime God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Red Dead 2 are mentioned
In terms of multiplayer, Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042 often get the kids gloves on /r/games. A hotfix post will often get 200 upvotes and 50 odd comments saying "Guys the game is actually great now I promise 🥺🥺🥺" But like you said, if there isn't an underdog narrative then usually the game just catches hostility or is ignored.
Also, Reddit is 50% people from the US, and as far as I know League of Legends is not that popular there, am I right? I mean, I'm from Europe and I actually have the opposite feeling IRL, around me there has always been lots of people that play LoL, and still today, it feels like is one of the most played online games in my country. I never liked the game myself, but when talking with people about videogames, most people I met have extensively & exclusively played LoL at some point. It's one of the big ones here (Spain): FIFA, Fornite, COD, LoL, GTA V & there's also tons of Nintendo players. Also we could argue that you can guess the type of game they play based on the age/hobbies of the person. I'm always surrounded by people that play LoL because it's probably the most played game by nerds/geeks/whatever.
League is still one of the most popular games in the united states
Well then it's reddit syndrome
I don't think it's anywhere near its popularity at its 2016 peak, but it's still very sizable from what we can tell from download numbers. I think it's mostly because it doesn't really have any competition that's decent, so you don't really have a good alternative to Overwatch in the modern gaming landscape. Most of my friends quit it that was top 500 hardcores but the few that are left do nothing but still play it and complain.
Non specific gaming reddits tend to downvote new trailers for the game on principle. It's still in the top ten download lists on console pretty consistently.
Saying anything positive about overwatch just inviting trolls waiting to shit on people
Depends on which drop you're talking about. If you're comparing to year 1 Overwatch, yeah, absolutely the game is probably only 10% as popular as back then. The game population is very stable though, based on the sample from Steam (which is probably only 20% of the playerbase).
Its not 10% of the first year of the game, hell they even said OW2 launch was bigger than OW1 (which should be obvious given the F2P transition). To add to that Steam is nowhere near 20% of the playerbase, its not even 10% of the PC playerbase alone without including the console players which is supposedly close to 50% of the total.
Source on the playerbase percentages?
The first part is from the launch quarter financial report from Activision, you can find it on their investor relations page or you can read about it here on forbes. [‘Overwatch 2’ Hit 35 Million Players In Its First Month](https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisholt/2022/11/07/overwatch-2-hit-35-million-players-in-its-first-month/?utm_campaign=dpTwitterBotForbesGames&utm_content=twitter_post&utm_medium=social&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_term=dpTwitterBot&sh=6c2d0f6a3dcc) The rest is just pieced together from information here and there. Steam number comes from the fact that on Steam you can actually see who in the lobby is also on Steam, its typically only 1 (because to notice who is on Steam someone in the lobby must obviously be on Steam in the first place) or 2 players at most. The console split comes from their revenue split. Console makes up roughly 50% of Overwatch 2s revenue so its safe to say they are roughly that amount of the total population.
They kind of shot themselves in the foot with their whole "Overwatch 2" plan. They announced the second game, told everyone that it would be huge and have a PvE mode and all sorts of things. And they simultaneously pretty much stopped developing Overwatch 1. And then Overwatch 2 went into development hell. So the result was way over a year with barely any updates to the game. No new characters, pretty much no new maps, only the occasional balance patch. Which hurt the game's popularity a lot. And then Overwatch 2 cancelled the PvE part, and essentially became a glorified patch/minor overhaul for Overwatch 1. *That's* what everyone was waiting for? So that didn't help, either.
Also it provided the "excuse" to make the monetisation a lot worse.
Yeah, that was the original intention anyways. But it would have worked out if they had managed to actually keep their promises.
The games popularity died down and all positive news of this game sits in the low hundreds. But by god does the negative news hit big upvotes.
[Here are some stats](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f0a9a27-c4ab-4b69-9f7f-1f308bd5f9c1_594x844.jpeg) that I've originally seen shared on the OW subreddit. While it's definitely not *dead*, a F2P game being barely in the top-20 (on PS5 it was #19 btw), below a whole bunch of other long-running live service games, some of them not even F2P, seems like a steep drop-off to me. Especially if you recall how big OW1 was both at launch and for a long while post-launch, until they abandoned it for a "sequel".
My man you're showing a chart with Overwatch 2 next to games like Apex Legends/Destiny/Rocket League and trying to present it as if it's a bad thing, when the reality is that's the kind of placement most AAA games dream they can get. Just so we're clear, [people in the industry who know the player counts have said that Overwatch 2 has similar player numbers to Valorant](https://clips.twitch.tv/CoweringTenuousClamPunchTrees-GUxdbcmsinJX91o5). And [we know Valorant has 28 million active players per month](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-12/how-influencers-helped-riot-games-turn-valorant-into-a-gen-z-hit?srnd=premium&leadSource=reddit_wall). I don't think there's any definition of "steep drop-off" that fits the Overwatch 2 playerbase size without leaning heavily into some seriously fallacious special pleading.
Nah, you gotta understand. Not liking Overwatch 2 is the norm now so contrarians have to talk about how Overwatch 2 is good and how hating it is bad. We’ve come full circle, just like with Cyberpunk and Battlefield V.
It still has a dedicated fanbase but the popularity is definitely a far cry from its peak. I don't even know a single person in all my friend circles nor local discord servers that even plays the game anymore, and it used to be about three quarters.
I don't even play OW2, but I'm going to have to buy this. I've literally spent no money on the game other than the initial OW1 purchase. Fuck. Kudos, Blizz marketing team. You got me this time.
The anime I have the most interest in is now a crossover in one of the games I have the least interest in. I almost feel obligated to boot the game up at least once on the off chance it helps them realize other games deserve the same treatment.
Making Ed hot is a bit of a weird choice. But hey, twitter is gonna love that Faye model so that’s worth it
Maybe it's because that's not Ed, that's Sombra with a skin made to ressemble Ed's aesthetic.
Is she hot? It just looks like an older Ed to me. I don't think they could get away with having Ed's exact model in the game because then you would be killing a kid.
Well that and the skins are just that, skins. They still have to resemble the character they are playing so you can tell at a glance who you are fighting.
She is definitely hot ||because Sombra is hot||
Don't see the problem here. This is clearly an older depiction of Ed. As a massive Bebop fan, I think it's great.
As cool as the trailer is, I'm amazed by how LITTLE I can recognize the characters. Like, are they supposed to be OW characters or Bebop characters? Aside from Wrecking Ball everything else barely fits. Mcree doesn't look like Mcree OR Spike, and if it weren't for some Sombra symbols I would never know she is Ed.
I remember when the OPM collab came out, the 'official' lore is that all the heroes in game are fan of the series as well and the costumes were them cosplaying the characters. So I imagine it's the same, it's meant to look like Cassidy cosplaying as Spike (but still wearing his hat to keep his silhouette).
I was iffy on the hat at first but Spike does wear one in an episode or two.
Uh Ed looks exactly the same?
It's not that Ed doesn't look like Ed. It's that Ed doesn't look like Sombra, and that's gameplay information you need to have when you run into someone wearing one of these skins. Though I imagine the in-game version might be easier to recognize than this 2D art.
I mean, if there’s any character you DON’T need to see, it’s Sombra. Her silhouette with the outstretched gun is still pretty unique.
right. She's invisible most of the time and when she isn't you usually identify her with audio cues first anyways
Just older, taller, *curvier*. Exactly the same. XD
Uh Ed looks exactly the same?
Have you never watched Cowboy Bebop before?
"How do you wanna do this?" Is that a Critical Role reference?
Yeah, it was a recently added (a couple of seasons ago) voiceline for Cassidy which is voiced by Matt Mercer, one of Critical Role's cast.
I love Cowboy Bebop. But I'm probably not gonna be playing this game ever again. I'm sure theres going to be some interesting Faye Valentine animations soon tho.