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Comment by rubyist5eva | Hacker News Reader

This is way less egregious than Blizzard shutting down Overwatch 1 (which I paid for) and just replacing it with Overwatch 2. It's not even out yet and previews are not great, especially the new player grind - it seems designed to explicitly fish for the whales from the original game only. As someone that plays OW casually, I'm not happy that Blizzard is taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want in the slightest.

I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.

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I'm becoming more and more hesitant to pay for a game that has an online component because at some point in the future it may go free to play.

Maybe a year ago or so there was a big Microsoft server outage that caused Xbox Live to go down for a few hours. During the outage you couldn’t access any online games. Fair enough. I own a handful of single player games on disc (rather than through the Xbox store) but while Microsoft was having all of their server issues I couldn’t play those games either. It seems, even when you own the disc outright, the system automatically phones home before the game is permitted to launch.

Might setting the console to offline mode have let you start the games?

> taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want

In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game. It's no different from the many games which have previously gone free-to-play.

And to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to be unhappy, I'm saying that your framing is really just not accurate. Overwatch 2 is really just a peculiar name for Overwatch 1's free-to-play update.

> In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game.

Yeah, I totally get it. I'm still miffed that they updated the game in a way that leaves me unable to play the version I actually like. I do not find this new update appealing at all.

When Overwatch came out (when I bought it) "live service" games hadn't really reached a critical mass in the market yet so the idea that they would do something like this was kinda unheard of.

Don't worry - in a few years they'll get you to pay for Overwatch Classic!

Wonderful

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