Overwatch just turned a year old and Blizzard is celebrating its one-year anniversary with a new seasonal event. The limited-time event will run until June 12th and will feature three new Arena maps and over 100 new collectables which include new skins, voice lines and dance emotes. Along with the anniversary update, Blizzard also released the much-awaited Game of the Year Edition (GOTY) for Overwatch.
When Overwatch was first announced in 2014, gamers were slightly sceptical about how the game would play out. Up until then Blizzard Entertainment had diverted all their resource and focus on their core franchises – World of Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft.
It was also for the first time in over a decade that they had broken their silence and went out of their comfort zone to develop an FPS game. Faith in this newly announced game dropped even more when Blizzard confirmed that all their contents and heroes will be free-for-all once the game is launched.
Cut to 2017, and the game is played by over 30 million players and has generated a revenue of over $1 billion. How did Overwatch manage to do so well and become the game of the year in such a short time? The game’s success can be attributed to Blizzard’s dedication to make the game stand out.
Blizzard’s revolution
Most games these days lose their audience quite quickly and become a game that only a niche group is passionate about. Gamers jump from one game to another in hopes of finding the next big title and developers have a hard time trying to maintain a successful fan base.
It doesn’t help that every FPS games online follow the same pattern. You play as a generic soldier equipped with weapons, armour, skill tress, and explosives that you’ve probably unlocked by playing the game over and ranking up your character.
You probably spawn in only to get shot, and if you’re lucky you managed to bag a few kills and contribute to your team’s overall score. This, however, was not the case with Overwatch.
With Overwatch, Blizzard deliberately downplayed the importance of individual playstyle and made it clear that playing the objective as a team meant everything. Even if every player in the team could hold on their own it wasn’t necessary that they would win the match.
They also tweaked the gameplay in such a way that gamers could not craft or equip weapons and armour. Instead, they could choose a character from a cast of 24 heroes, each with a distinct skill and play style.
These characters were also intelligently designed to be diverse and inclusive, a risky move considering that most gamers believe that identity politics should be kept away from video games. These characters, mixed with a new and different gameplay, were also able to break the stereotype that all shooter games are hostile and managed to release the game with a kid-friendly PEGI 12 rating.
Free content
When Blizzard announced that all their updates after its launch would be free, investors though that it was a missed opportunity to make more money and gamers started to have doubts about the game. Blizzard, however, defended their decision and said that that they wanted to create a level playing field where only skills mattered. And they could only do that only if all players had access to all the in-game characters (21 at launch) and game modes.
But Blizzard wasn’t flying blindly into a storm. They had a sound financial plan that relied on micro-transactions. While a player couldn’t purchase a hero or a map, they could purchase loot boxes which would reward you with in-game cosmetics.
You could either earn this by levelling up your account or you could skip the hard work and pay just Rs.139 (the cheapest) for two loot boxes.
Despite the fact that almost all gamers hate micro-transactions, they chose to ignore this when it came to Overwatch. The idea that game developer wanted everyone to have the same gaming experience was good enough reason to forgive them for having micro-transactions.
While the core developing team is busy with the game’s anniversary event, game director Jeff Kaplan has confirmed that they are already working on the next update.
"Right now we are literally working on content all the way through the end of the year, and that's cool content drops every single month between now and the end of the year," Kaplan said on a Twitch stream. "There's also some really cool hero news just on the horizon, so hopefully people will be excited by that," he said
Since its release last year, three new heroes, have been added to the roster with Ana in July 2016, Sombra in November 2016, and Orisa in March 2017. The pace with which the heroes have been added suggests that we could see the fourth hero very soon.
Balancing
Over a period of time, Overwatch players managed to come together as a community and raise issues about the game. This made it for easy for Blizzard as they could now listen to player feedback and they did this without overreacting.
This was a very important moment for Blizzard because up until then, only Bungie (with Destiny) had such a relationship between players and developers and Bungie has often been criticised for making bad decisions. Blizzard, however, made sure that the players knew that they wouldn’t treat popular opinions as the right one.
For instance, when Overwatch had just launched, new players had a really hard a really hard time dealing with the hero Bastion, a robot who could turn into a turret and heal itself. When a significant population of the community requested Blizzard to nerf Bastion, they simply said no and instead encouraged the players to adopt long-range play styles that could counter Bastion.
E-sports
Overwatch was launched into the market around the same time when the E-sports market was booming. In a year, the FPS game has had over 400 tournaments and has already given out about $2.7 million to players as prize money. Blizzard also has planned to launch their own Overwatch league later this year where players can represent their cities for contracts in a system very similar to that of other professional sports.
Blizzard will be selling Overwatch GOTY for Rs.5000. However, Blizzard has put a temporary hold on the sale of GOTY edition to new players but is allowing players who currently own the standard edition to upgrade it to GOTY edition for a price of approx Rs.600 (or Rs.1300 after the anniversary sale)
