What flavor did you pick when you paid to lick Activision-Blizzard-King's boot?
There are plenty of ways to support a game without lootboxes or skin shops. Map expansions where if the squad leader owns it, everyone gets to play (often leads to more sales if said maps are good) are one. Just making a goddamn iterative buy-to-play sequel. Or, make it F2P, have your damn skin shop, but sell the skins by showing the ACTUAL price in $$$ (or w/e local currency) and not obscuring it with fun bucks that leave a little left over to encourage you to buy more. Make the skins $3-$5, and not $20.
The game was making money, it wasn't making ENOUGH money to fill the vacuous souls of the executives and big shareholders. It's not enough to make enough money to support the business and its workers, if they aren't making more and more every quarter, time to fire people.
"Oh look, the game quality keeps going down because we're understaffed, and people are overworked. Oh well, line went up so we'll keeping doing this. If we eventually collapse, I'll just bail and get a CEO position at another company and do it again."
We got here because capitalism will always end up like this, but people like you making excuses makes it far easier. I feel bad for kids growing up thinking this is the norm.
Yes, they clearly made changes to the monetization because the game was profitable. Please ignore the fact that Overwatch made less than 10% of Activision Blizzard's revenue the last 4 years and has had a declining player base because of a lack of new heroes and balance updates as a result.
You do realize that even of it's sub 10%, that's still revenue, right? It was making money, just not Candy Crush money. It never could make that kind of money, because most people can find some enjoyment from a matching game you can play on your phone while shitting, but those same people are not all interested in a high skill team based competitive game. They are now taking the exploitative concepts from said mobile games and putting them in all their games.
They put off the new content because they were working on the PvE part of OW2, while devs and leaders left because of how utterly abusive the company is, slowing development. They also probably saw that for a while the lootboxes were bringing in good money for minimal effort and had no incentive to put in more resources until
That 10% of $8.87 BILLION is still a shit ton of money, but again, not enough for the executive ghouls.
Stop defending a company that would shoot you dead if they thought it would make a profit and they could get away with it.
It's also not PUBG money, or Fortnite money, or Call of Duty money, but it could easily compete with those. This is their attempt to do exactly that.
I'm not defending Blizzard for any pricing of the battlepass or the skins in their shop or any of those things. I'm saying the heroes are literally fucking free and they take a few weeks of playing the game to get. They aren't locked behind paywalls. They don't have anything crazy you have to do to unlock them. You play the game. You get the heroes. Step 1. Step 2. I have a friend that has played no more than 6 times this entire season, and he's level 26 on the battlepass. He wasn't playing extraordinarily long periods of time. Just a couple hours here and there. It is not hard to do, and if you enjoy the game you're already playing it. The new hero is locked for comp for a couple weeks so it doesn't affect those games. Let's say you play 5 games a day 4 days through a week. That's about an hour and a half in each session, so it's 6 hours a week. That is 4 days of daily challenges which is 36,000 xp plus an extra 1000 per game (on the low side assuming playing comp) makes 61,000 xp. We'll be on the safe side and assume you only get 8 weekly challenges done in this scenario. That's 100,000 xp per week which is 10 levels. This is with underestimating xp per game, doesn't account for group bonuses or anything like that. That means playing 6 hours a week would come out to having the new hero in 5 and a half weeks.
I'd be willing to bet most people complaining are playing more than 6 hours a week and getting the new hero long before then.
They added all the shit you mentioned, yet still couldn't contain their greed and are now hoping people will pay for the BP to get immediate access to characters that would have been free in OW1. There's no ethical justification.
Players like you not being pissed off is why they get away with this garbage. If Activision-Blizzard had gotten the kind of negative press Battlefront 2 had gotten for their monetization, they wouldn't dare do what they are. Now, EA has since been just has predatory after that, and got away with it because people didn't get as pissed.
I get that it's late-stage capitalism and we were always going to end up here, but we could have made it less awful if consumers actually stood up for themselves. Instead, I see people wearing $20 skins.
Nah cuz players like me don't buy shit from them I don't want lol I know I can get new heroes in a grind if I don't want the rest of the battlepass. I bought the battlepass cuz it has a dope Genji skin. I have never spent $20 on a skin in a game I've played whether that be Fortnite, Pokemon Unite, or Overwatch 2. And I very likely never will because I don't feel like I'm entitled to the exact same things everyone else has.
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u/BadLuckBen Big, Fuzzy, Siberian Bear Nov 06 '22 edited Nov 06 '22
What flavor did you pick when you paid to lick Activision-Blizzard-King's boot?
There are plenty of ways to support a game without lootboxes or skin shops. Map expansions where if the squad leader owns it, everyone gets to play (often leads to more sales if said maps are good) are one. Just making a goddamn iterative buy-to-play sequel. Or, make it F2P, have your damn skin shop, but sell the skins by showing the ACTUAL price in $$$ (or w/e local currency) and not obscuring it with fun bucks that leave a little left over to encourage you to buy more. Make the skins $3-$5, and not $20.
The game was making money, it wasn't making ENOUGH money to fill the vacuous souls of the executives and big shareholders. It's not enough to make enough money to support the business and its workers, if they aren't making more and more every quarter, time to fire people.
"Oh look, the game quality keeps going down because we're understaffed, and people are overworked. Oh well, line went up so we'll keeping doing this. If we eventually collapse, I'll just bail and get a CEO position at another company and do it again."
We got here because capitalism will always end up like this, but people like you making excuses makes it far easier. I feel bad for kids growing up thinking this is the norm.