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> Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years

A quick search tells me that Overwatch has 6M players, which seems significant.

A note that Jeff Kaplan the director of the title resigned in May. He was heavily involved from its inception and throughout the development of Overwatch 2, and was a huge part of the community.

As a former Overwatch player, you're right. But my (so far glad to say mostly unfounded) fear is that Jeff "Tigole Bitties" Kaplan was part of the problem we're seeing play out the past few weeks.

So far Kaplan hasn't shown up as even an incidental participant in any of the photos or group chats, and hasn't been named as someone who brushed off requests for help. The Titan team that he lead prior to it turning into OW was by all reports a toxic mess for totally unrelated reasons, though.

What were you doing when you were 19 that's any better than calling yourself tigole?

At 19? Getting an engineering degree and all the hours of work that entailed while avoiding getting roped into MMOs by classmates as if it was Corrupted Blood.

We're all very proud of you.

Haven't played Overwatch myself, but isn't it very similar to the other games that came before it?

From a layman's perspective, it seems like a copy of Paladins, TF2, etc.

Upon it's release, it didn't seem like something original (at least not to me), but rather something to compete with the unique games other studios had already created.

As a 500hr+ Overwatch player and 1000hr+ TF2 plater, I also thought this at first. While Overwatch was certainly heavily inspired by TF2, it plays considerably differently. Overwatch has six players per team each playing one of 32 different unique heroes. TF2 has 12 players playing one of 9 classes. The abilities feel much more impactful in Overwatch. TF2 was all about supporting your engineer and racing for Uber, while Overwatch is much more about positioning and mechanics (though ult economy matters too). Removing the ammo mechanic entirely was brilliant IMO as well. Anyway, just a few cents from someone who has played a lot of both of those games.

That's what Blizzard's always done - they didn't invent RTS games, or MMOs, or collectible card games, or roguelikes, they just refined and productized them. I think it's fair to call Overwatch a huge success if you're counting e.g. Diablo and World of Warcraft in there.

It's a bit like Paladins. It has elements of TF2. Regardless, compared to games in genres like battle royale or real time strategy, or more traditional first person shooter, Overwatch is pretty lonely. I don't want to sound like I'm frothing at the mouth over their product, but I feel that it's well beyond any other first person game in terms of the variety of heroes to play and the huge scope of the balancing act that entails. The 30-some pickable heroes all play like their own game to some extent.

2D top-down MOBA games have huge numbers of heroes and a lot of variety, but I think that's an easier lift to balance in that type of game and with that type of control scheme. Other 3D "hero shooters" opt for less variety between heroes or a smaller number of them, or rely on other gameplay elements to help balance things.

I think that the design effort that it took to produce Overwatch is tremendous, and it isn't easily replaced or replicated, though it will be eventually as long as game design keeps on marching forward.

I'd say that the hero variety wasn't a good thing honestly, they never did a great job of balancing it. They shut down duplicate heros, then the game lurched from one overpowered unpopular meta to another until it got stuck on goats meta and they gave up and forced 222 team comps, which is when I stopped playing. There's a good reason other hero shooters kept the scope low, noone knows how to balance a high scope game for all levels of competitive play, and it's likely that you can't.

Fair criticism, I guess. I think the state of balance is very good right now, it's just a highly cooperative game with specialized roles.

They perfected and introduced a lot of concepts that are now part of the genre of competitive FPSs. As much as I thought it was just a me-too kind of game before playing it, once I did manage to play it, I had to admit they went beyond what would be expected. They tried a lot of novel things.

I do think Activision-Blizzard is a shell of what it once was, but that game was definitely a positive, not something they just phoned in.

there is absolutely no way that Overwatch has 6M active players

when I was playing a week ago (not anymore), more or less every single game I was matched against the same 20 or so people after a 8-10 minute wait

and it was the same 20 people in month in month out

and if someone quit the 6v6 mode while a game was ongoing (leaving it 5v6): the leaver's position wouldn't be filled most of the time

> The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.

Hearthstone was release March 11, 2014. Overwatch was released May 24, 2016. Both of these were hugely popular titles.

Damn, I'm not an Apple fanboy but that soundclip by Jobs makes so much sense; I've seen that play out like a hundred times. Here's a related one by a former IBM CEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cHVgA2tgWI

it resonates so closely with this[0] excellent article by berthubert.

[0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

> hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.

Let's talk about Heroes of the Storm. Not as a counter to your argument, but as a perfect illustration of your points.

First thing to know is that HotS started out as a Starcraft II arcade game. It uses the Starcraft II engine. Nothing new there.

Next, for those who don't know, HotS is a MOBA. Just like DotA (and DOTA 2), and League of Legends. DotA was a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, created by the community. League of Legends is a standalone game inspired by DotA.

In HotS, all the player heroes are Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo heroes. It's free-to-play. After a brief legal spat with Valve over rights to the name DotA and Blizzard trademarks, the two companies settled.

It's a decent game, but it's just repackaging Blizzard assets for a type of game that emerged out of Blizzard in the first place. To me, HotS is exactly the sort of thing a company coasting on its franchise would release.

Epitaph: AB completely abandoned the game three years after release, to the complete surprise of the small esports community that had grown up.

>This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits.

it doesn't unless you know the exact peopel hired are the union busting ones. It sounds like this is their HR consultants.

People really need to read past their title. This is a century old firm that has been on all sides of the fence for a signifigant part of American history. They don't have an agenda to regress society (no more than the legal system does).

If the adults in the room have 'taken over' Acti-Blizzard, it wouldn't have been ran like a frathouse.

The reality is that over the years, Activision has kept their hands off their golden goose, and that the company's rot originates with the original management team. Notice how most of the harassment, and the retaliation that followed took place under the leadership of Mike Morheim (And that he's been personally called out for the latter.)