I’m still patiently awaiting the day a developer/publisher of a game turns out to be the makers of something I actually want to play so I can enjoy charging up the hill of this glorious morale high ground.
So far my experience has been rather mundane in that no one I’d boycott makes anything I want.
I like my glorious moral high ground but it’s less fun than WoW classic would have been. Oh well.
Like I wrote earlier, good luck.
No communication from leadership in 3 weeks. How insulting.
“We are currently reviewing our partnership with Activision Blizzard, given concerns about the progress being made to address continuing allegations regarding workplace culture, especially the treatment of female colleagues and creating a diverse and inclusive environment,” Lego wrote in a statement.
I wonder what percentage of this is driven by the allegations and what percentage is driven by the overall decline of Overwatch in popularity?
That is an excellent question. Maybe LEGO is super progressive and wouldn’t work with Activision in any circumstance, but most businesses would move ahead if they thought they were going to make a lot of money from the product.
LEGO is pretty progressive. The only hole in that would be their continued relationship with Harry Potter, but I think that’s with WB and not directly with JK, although I’m sure she must get a cut.
Honestly Overwatch is an odd fit for Lego in general. Most of the similar properties, such as Halo, tend to come out in the Mega Bloks Mega Construx line. It would seem a better fit for their market orientation.
Lego’s adult oriented stuff tends to be more aligned with things like the Apollo lander, architecture, high detail large scale licensed (Batmobile, Vaders helmet, 2000 piece Winnie the Pooh set), and Overwatch doesn’t fit that mold. Its neither. all family friendly, or nostalgic for the 35+ set.
Has Overwatch had a decline? Surely not related to any of the issues we’ve been talking about, right? Is Fortnite just eating its lunch or something?
-Tom
McCree was a bad boy IRL, so they ended up changing his name to something else.
Overwatch has declined hard, and the Actiblizzard boycott in general hurt,
I just went to the Overwatch 2 website and it’s embarrassing. They have a slider to compare the old to the new characters, and… they look the same. Yes you can tell they changed a few things but if you threw up the OW1 design next to the OW2 design you would never be able to guess which is which. Most of them actually look worse, especially Reaper.
I haven’t played OW in years. I know I’m not indicative of a trend, but I don’t hear about it anymore either. I remember there was an Overwatch league, with people buying jerseys and whatnot like it was a real sport. What happened to that?
Certainly part of it. Plus Harry Potter is broad appeal and has a strong affinity with younger groups too.
Additionally the problems with HP, such as they are, are not inherent to the property. Its mostly Rowling making an ass of herself on social media, something below the notice of the average person. And they take place well after the completion of the original work. The problems with Blizzard are much more inherent in company culture and creation process. The problematic elements also appear more directly in the game, Mcready or whatever the cowboys name was. So it is harder to separate out because it is a top down problem that comes across every part of the property.
Add in the more narrow appeal, lower marketability, and general odd fit within the Lego portfolio and yeah, much easier to cut ties.
Overwatch has definitely had a decline, at least in terms of the zeitgeist. The community has really just moved on to Fortnite and other games, especially when Fortnite started pushing branded characters instead of generic skins.
As far as player count, it seems to be holding steady at around 6 million per month based on current estimates. Lots of games would kill for a 6 million-per-month player count, but it’s tiny compared to Fortnite’s 280 million, Apex Legends’ 116 million, and it’s lower than Valorant’s 11 million.
Those can’t be right. That’s insane, like social network numbers. Minecraft has 90 million players and I thought that was the top game in the world!
Overwatch is pay to play, Fortnight and Apex are ftp. I’m still surprised Overwatch isn’t ftp, but it’s probably too late now.
One of the lingering OG Blizzard traits was an unwillingness to make games that relied on monetization, and that’s ended up diminishing Blizzard compared to Mobile and eventually Chinese publishers all-in on ftp and monetization and gacha. The way Blizzard designed games made it almost impossible to monetize them.
Minecraft was 131 monthly million players in 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_video_games_by_player_count
Wow, PUBG had over a billion players in March 2021? That’s crazy.
PUBG mobile, which is F2P.
I believe the vanilla PUBG is about to go FTP as well.
These numbers are preposterous. 1 in 7 people in the world played PUBG?
Maybe they have a billion accounts, but it’s not a billion unique users, and certainly not monthly users.