In Activision Blizzards most recent shareholders earnings the shared that Overwatch 2 didn’t hit key monetization goals. This comes as no surprise to hardcore fans, but may surprise. After all with positive ranked changes and re-vamped esports scene have been the talk of the town.

Blizzard has failed with Overwatch 1. What once was the 2016 game of the year had been boiled down to a horribly imbalanced game with an ever dwindling player base and esport. With Activations greedy Bobby Kotick breathing down the Overwatch team, they knew they had to do something.

Soon Overwatch 2 was announced, boasting much needed changes to competitive. Alongside new maps, game modes, and of course heroes lied its main drawl. A complete PvE story expanding on the main overwatch story. Along side individual hero leveling progression and unique upgrades. It’s what every Overwatch fan could ever want.

So here we are, Overwatch 2 has indeed be upgraded to competitive we’ve asked for. The most recent Season 9 has introduced massive changes to competitive and ranks, adding the new Champion rank and forcing MMR reset. Yet these changes in retrospect seem almost desperate changes to hit revenue marks after the recent shareholders meeting.

_{Credit: Blizzard Entertainment}

Upon the initial release of the first Season of PvE missions they sold horribly. To actually nobody’s surprise the quite frankly steep price for what seemed like little to no upgrade from the Overwatch 1 Archive events didn’t sell well. This was apparently a large part of Overwatch 2’s revenue strategies.

Supposedly the sales were so abysmal that the rest of the missions were imminently canceled. With a new batch of episodes covering lore planned to be released alongside the release of new competitive seasons. This obviously never happened and the Overwatch team is paying for it.

Blizzard has been in the news for there toxic work environment news, and sexual assault allegations. However this time news focused on pay of Blizzard Employees.

In a report by Jason Schreier in his Game on Newsletter they discuss how overwatch developers will not share in the revenue the game has made. This is against long standing tradition at Blizzard, and reflects the shifts in behavior at the company. Schreier is quoted with saying “Previously, employees would receive bonuses based on the overall performance of the company. But last summer, the payouts became tied to the performance of each specific franchise”.

This is just one of the cascading effects from the disastrous launch of Overwatch 2. Reportedly the development teams from Diablo and other teams inside Blizzard got there reward. While this might not directly affect us and gameplay, its interesting to get a look behind blizzards mysterious inner workings.

What doe this mean for Overwatch? Well us hardcore and honest fans know this doesn’t change much. We’ve had some really horrible meta’s, and the fact the dev team wasn’t even distracted with PvE works concerned me. What are your opinions? Be sure to leave a comment on the post.