Why are Custom Games disabled in Overwatch 2 Season 18?

The rollout of Overwatch 2 Season 18 hasn't exactly been smooth, with many players facing login and authentication issues. While the game's development team has been hard at work scheduling maintenance to fix these issues, some unforeseen problems have surfaced. This has led to Blizzard Entertainment disabling the Custom Games feature for the free-to-play hero shooter game in order to carry out some server maintenance.

Without further ado, here's everything readers need to know about this current problem in Overwatch 2.

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Will Custom Games be back in Overwatch 2 Season 18?

Overwatch 2 Season 18 has many new exciting modes, like the updated Stadium, but Custom Games are a fan-favorite side diversion from the chaos and action (Image via Blizzard Entertainment)

Not long after Overwatch 2 Season 18 dropped, several players had to endure long wait times while queuing, and some even got kicked out mid-session. While most of these problems have been fixed, one still remains elusive, and it pertains to the Workshop. This is a Custom Game feature in Overwatch 2, and as of writing, it has been disabled in the game.

The outcome is that the player's saved custom games are gone, and searching for game modes doesn't yield the expected results either. Trying to import custom game codes brings up a notification at the bottom of the screen, pretty much confirming that the Workshop has been disabled. So what is the issue here?

The official response from the developers, as seen in a post on the Blizzard Forums page, reveals that the Workshop has been taken down for server maintenance. Furthermore, fans worrying over this issue can rest easy, as it is only temporary, and their saved custom games will return once the Workshop is back online. Here's the full official response:

"Hey everyone, we’ve temporarily disabled Workshop functions from custom games until we can complete some overall maintenance on the game servers overall. The functionality and your saved game modes should return when we get it back online."

The Workshop has a huge popular following of its own, with a decent chunk of the playerbase spending hours in-game across various user-created game modes. As for when the server maintenance will be over, it's hard to say, as the issue has persisted for more than a day now.

While the main game modes are generally functioning properly, players can expect some minor issues until the Workshop problem is resolved. Right now, all fans can do is wait for further updates from Blizzard Entertainment.

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Overwatch 2 is a free-to-play game that is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.