Is it finally dead?
Did Marvel put final nail into to the coffin?
+2 min wait in unranked open que … +2 min waiting for server connection … guess that’s what they meant by “Blizzard Standard”.
3 Likes
Nope.
OW seems to be doing ok.
Not yet but it may be only question of time, it will depend a lot of next two seasons.
We can already notice a decline in OW2 playerbase. As you say longer queues, negative records in steam/twitch, OW2 will need to fight hard, they have a few magic tricks like 6vs6, OWC, but if that doesn’t save them, they’ll be in trouble.
To early to say that, but this is what gonna happen:
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Players will be divided between MR and OW2, they will stop spend money in OW2 because they already have a lot of skins and they will want now buy skins for MR
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OW2 will invest to improve the game, either by making crazy collabs like we have now Avatar, either by making devs working as slaves for new improvements. Thing that Marvel Rivals will also do.
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By the end of S16/end of first semester of 2025, they will realize that the revenues of OW2 is worst than ever, they will eventually cut the resources allocated to OW2 dev team, which will cause less content in the game. Is quite possible that S16 will introduce the last hero ever in OW2. Playerbase will drop again.
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By the end of 2025, they will realize that there is nothing to do for OW2, I don’t think they will kill the game, but is quite possible that around S18/S20 they will annouce the end of life of OW2. They will simply keep the servers running without any new content until the game becomes really unprofitable, and then, bye bye OW2.
You need to forget a lot of players are “F2P sheep”. They’ll bounce from game to game, depending on who has the shiny new skins to buy.
That’s the money put they are all fighting for.
It doesn’t really matter to either of them if you play 20 mins or 20 hours.
F2P sheep seems like a made up word.
If I play one game with 50€ budget for skins in that game, once I start playing a new game I’ll start spending 25€ in each game. Or maybe all the budget to the new game since is a new game and I have no content on it.
You and I are different.
I get a F2P game and I play it. Skins don’t change the game so I don’t buy anything.
But, there are large amounts of people who will just bounce from MR to ow, to Fortnite to wherever buying the skins for that season because they need to be seen to have the new thing.
Is like you’re saying that people chose the games depending on the skins that game proposes, it’s nonsense, is like a compulsory problem for people that buy things without control. I really doubt people are like that.
We play the games that we like, then we decide to buy skins or not.
If people are spliting their time between 2 games, pretty sure they will also split their money between 2 games.
If you like the game and you want keep it alive and see it evolve the minimum that you can do is leave a little contribution. Otherwise F2P would never work, which would probably be a good thing.
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Theory: People need an “OW killer game” to feel justified in abandoning a game they simply don’t like anymore.
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Fact: It doesn’t depend on any OW killer but on your simple action of ignoring a game. totally.
As long as you follow what happens in Overwatch or play it to make comparisons… well, something in the “great plan of death of the game” is going wrong. 
However I wouldn’t put this responsibility only on Overwatch. A lot also depends on Netease if it will be able to manage its game and its balances. The optimization issues are solvable, but on the balance with so much freedom to the players… I don’t know, time will tell.
a bit decontextualized: a new game of a similar genre obviously moves people from other games also out of curiosity. it’s… well, natural. even for smash I heard the same old speeches with the arrival of multiversus. Or to make a more blizzard example, when wow actually lost players because FF14 had improved significantly. it just takes time to understand how things will go.
About 6v6 I think it’s something simply due to the players: even assuming that in the end we will have a competitive 6v6 part or simply even just an unranked / arcade availability… it’s a victory for “how players have fun”, something that objectively OW2 got wrong at its debut in COMPLETELY erasing this possibility.
and to be a bit brutal with the truth: NOBODY out there among the new players really cares about the difference between 6v6 or 5v5, it’s a paranoia of the old players. the hypocrisy of “2” will always be that of having returned to behave EXACTLY like the live service PVP game that OW"1" was always supposed to be: updated? Yes. New heroes and maps over time? Yes. Calibrations and experiments? Yes. but if you ask someone who doesn’t know the game what that two means, the first thing they remember is “ah, the one whose history was erased?”.
the hypocrisy of calling it 2 isn’t even in the monetization or the change of the game engine, many other games have done it before and after OW. 
again, this ALSO depends on Netease and marvel RIvals itself, if it doesn’t find itself screwed in the freedom it gave to players without specific rules in compositions. or simply in the management of META that often translates into nerfs (and EVERYONE hates nerfs on heroes with which they were used to winning by a landslide, it’s inevitable). I repeat, marvel rivals is granted the benefit of novelty… but not that of total certainty that OW will fail or be closed. It mostly depends on them and skins are not the only thing that make the game.
one thing where Overwatch can improve is definitely analyzing how Rivals behaves in the next few months and above all not daring too much with the idleness of future plans. one of Blizzard’s flaws is that of counting too much on its historical player base, but it has also been one of its strong points in the past (as I said, the survival of WoW which with Shadowlands was practically a failure).
No, it doesn’t. 17 minutes Q on a Thursday evening in gold/plat rank, just to enter a match with 2 leavers. While just before Rivals launch it was like 2-3 minutes. OW is mega dead.
2 Likes
That sounds like a long queue (although no mention of mode, role, and what not). Not a dead game.
If it was dead, you’d not find a game.
I mean I had 45 minutes to spare to jump in and play one or two matches with my friends. First we waited 17 minutes for a match that ended after 10 minutes with leavers, so not a full match. Then we Q for another 15 minutes before I have to leave Q and logout. SO technically I didn’t find a match. A few months ago I would had been able to play 2 maybe 3 matches in 45 minutes. Now I played none. And this is role-Q ranked in the most populated rank of gold/plat. I wouldn’t call that a live and healthy game. Meanwhile we’re popping 10 second Q’s in “the other newley released hero shooter game”
1 Like
I just played. No queue longer than 2 minutes in ranks from gold to masters and 2 different accounts. So not seeing the issue.
That is unsurprising. It is doing alright atm. But if I hear that annoying af “boing” noise again I am going to throw it out the virtual window.
Most of that game is solid… But the sounds are f’ing awful.
I mean that’s fair, but it is also just an opinion. First one I hear to think so. Personally I think “the other game” has MUCH better visuals, FX and sounds. The “new style” sound FX in OW2 sound like wet noodles. I never liked them.
Fair. You’re the only person I’ve seen say they prefer MR sound tbf (expect others to chip in now just to prove me wrong).
Some of the voice acting in MR really puts me off. Peni Parker for example. Now we know her voice actor is good, she voices Kiri and did a really good job. But Peni Parker just sounds annoying af.
Spider-Man is another one that just made me laugh when I first heard them.
Maps look great. Most the heroes look good. But I don’t like how the different art styles for the two makes the heros not look like in the world… hard to explain, just something I can’t unsee now.
But, the core of the game. Good fun. It’s just quite fundamental issues that would stop me playing more, or again (I’ve not played it for a few days now, just been chilling playing ow ranked and other games instead).
We are currently here.
Blizzard is already desperated throwing collab skins as free rewards and offering login rewards. This came sooner that I was expecting.
A Collab that was done and accidentally teased by PlayStation in season 6. “Desperate” lol
i dont think so.
also there are alot of problems with marvel rivals to begin with.
first off the constant crashes that havent been fixed.
And second, there is no role queue which means the majority of the bad players always pick dps as a personal choice.
Role queue will mean massively increased queue times, as OW showed, because there isn’t enough tank players. Both games have that same issue.
Do they want to risk that, because atm, the biggest selling point for MR is that the queues are short, almost instant.
if thats their biggest selling point then that game wont last long because the last thing you would want is 4 dps and no tank in your team.
Yeah, if that happens a lot, then it’s doomed. They’ll need more flexible players.
Something OW struggled with. Hence having RQ forced into the game. It’s not what people really wanted, but it did improve average match quality.
It’ll come to MR in time. But they keep saying they aren’t thinking about it (which is what Kaplan used to say, then changed his mind)
There is definitely one thing MR has that OW could consider. Hero bans in ranked only and above a certain rank. If it was in master and above, that would be a good start. I’m not really for hero bans, but it’ll happen one day. Might as well start with the better players and work down over time.