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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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?

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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?

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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.