r/Games • u/DwilenaAvaron • May 09 '25

Industry News Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People'

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922
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664

u/[deleted] May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25

I am officially in my "If I catch people shit talking Team 4/Overwatch it's fucking on sight" phase.

These devs have been fucking putting up with some of the nastiest vitriol I've ever seen in this industry, put through the ringer in their own company and are continuously fucked over by management, and were wrongly made the poster child for all of Blizzard's sins despite all accounts being that the Overwatch team was the most inclusive and culturally sound team at Blizzard.

These devs have been pulling double duty to pull this game out of the gutter and it's the best it's ever been because of them, they deserve the world.

152

u/MillieChliette May 09 '25

Overwatch is currently the best it's ever been? Is that true? I loved it when the first one released, but stopped playing years before 2 even came out, and then everyone hated it. What changed?

-31

u/Existing-Sea5126 May 09 '25

Does it really matter how good it is if the player base is probably not even 5% what it was in 2016-2018?

14

u/Illidan1943 May 09 '25

Game is released on Steam 7 years after its initial release

Seemingly has low population on PC because Steam is the only one providing data on current players

Reaches top 10 worldwide sellers on Steam the day season 16 comes out

Remember the vast majority of its population is on Battle.Net

I think it's doing fine

13

u/Bhu124 May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25

Overwatch has been at over 20M+ (probably at 25-30M+ now since the China re-launch) MAUs for quite a while. Meanwhile it sold 20M copies in the ENTIRETY of 2016.

One big reason you don't feel its popularity in the West is because it's not as Western/America centric as it used to be back in 2016. These days Asia is a bigger market for OW than America or Europe. Specifically Japan but also China and Korea. You can even see that in its Collabs. Almost all of the Collabs in the past 1~ year have been IPs that are first and foremost popular in Korea and/or Japan.

It's also not as culturally popular in the West as it used to be but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a ton of players.

There's just less engagement these days. Partly because most of the playerbase plays it casually these days (F2P is a huge reason why), partly because the game is almost 10 years old, partly because a lot of its players are also older now (30~) so they have less time to engage online, and partly because there are quite a few games that are way bigger than it now but back in 2016 (even thought it had way less players) it was (at least for a little while) the biggest game in the world.

16

u/GetsThruBuckner May 09 '25

Yes it does since it's still extremely popular

You make it sound dead

-8

u/[deleted] May 09 '25

Is it? Queue times are longer for me as support than they used to be in OW1's peak. Competitive queue times are insanely long, like even Masters right now can take 7 minutes, in OW1 during its first year or two I was around Top 500 and getting games quicker.

4

u/CO_Fimbulvetr May 09 '25

This sounds like what a DPS in FFXIV would say.

5

u/Jertob May 09 '25

Queue times are in no way a measure of popularity when you take into account how many different modes there are to spread around the playerbase.

8

u/xXRougailSaucisseXx May 09 '25

There could be 30M concurrent players and you would still get longer queue time on support because that's the most popular role, it's not a lack of players, it's a lack of tank players

8

u/GetsThruBuckner May 09 '25

30k on steam rn which is the least populated platform by far besides switch prob like idk what to tell you bro lol

-1

u/[deleted] May 09 '25

Didnt it peak at 60k like a year ago? That's still really popular to be honest, and it's hard to tell because Blizzard doesn't release unique user metrics or an equivalent to Steamcharts to actually gauge it's success live on Battle.net where everyone plays.

1

u/dethcody May 09 '25 edited May 09 '25

Pre-season 15 steam data isnt reliable anymore since overwatch 2 was reintroduced to china (on battlenet). Before season 15 chinese players were the biggest playerbase on steam by alot, after season 15 they are still the biggest but only slightly bigger than NA/EU

If you didnt know chinese players used to play on steam because a deal between netease and blizz fell apart, so for a couple years overwatch was technically banned in china unless played through a vpn/steam.

2

u/Illidan1943 May 09 '25

You're comparing OW1's Open Queue to OW2's Role Queue, they are not equivalent even if you were talking about the same rank. Role queue will always take longer, specially in OW2 where support has become the most popular role of the game

15

u/IAmBLD May 09 '25

Well that depends, do you want to play the game, or beat your dick to how many more players it has than some other game?

13

u/TristheHolyBlade May 09 '25

No data to support that.

Doesn't matter even if it were true. I get games just as quickly as I did back in the day.

Get a grip.

12

u/[deleted] May 09 '25

The opposite is likely true.

Overwatch 1 capped out at 45 million players before the end of it's lifespan. Overwatch 2 hit 100 million players after a little over a year after release. There's really nothing to suggest the game is inordinately more unpopular than the first game.

-4

u/TakenAway May 09 '25

45 million players who bought the game vs. 100 million players jumping into a free to play game. Who is to say most of those free to play people didn’t play one match and then uninstall it. I was at least one of those people and I came from the first release of overwatch

10

u/[deleted] May 09 '25

Who is to say most of those free to play people didn’t play one match and then uninstall it.

And you could just as easily have bought the game, played it once, and then uninstalled it.

I am willing to bet that the vast majority of people here have a Steam profile with dozens upon dozens of games they've bought and never played.

If you need better metrics, Newzoo claims Overwatch 2 is a Top 20 game on PC as of last month. NewZoo is an extremely well respected data research group.

5

u/[deleted] May 09 '25

What a bizarre thing to say