With the large player base, it won’t be hard to make regular PVE missions profitable. Charge a small fee per mission pack and you will have plenty of sales if the quality of missions are similar to the first three missions we have received so far.
My children and I love playing cooperative missions and the cinematic story telling is captivating. You have a limitless IP, excellent voice talent, and top tier animation studio.
Don’t let it go to waste when there is sufficient demand to support it.
Thank you.
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They did this, and the PvE content they released was a sales failure, and all the people working on it have be laid off.
Can’t see it happening.
The stories will probably end up being recycled in to books, comics and (fingers crossed) a TV series.
I can’t imagine that someone who is willing to spend a few dollars on skins (which funds the current content) would not also be willing to spend on mission packs.
Do you have a source to indicate that they did not at least break even sales wise. Maybe Kotick just didn’t like not having 1000% ROI.
I imagine they were thinking the same… But here he are.
PvP comfortably beating all their targets while PvE was a massive flop.
The information broke with the news it was canceled and some staff got zero bonuses because of it.
I’ll be a little honest but… they’re both right and wrong.
They are definitely wrong in saying that the PVE was supposed to indicate marketing success or failure based on what they offered with the invasion package. objectively it didn’t offer much as a “first chapter”, nor did it leave enough narrative satisfaction other than finishing too soon to really enjoy it. see starcraft 2, which with its story mode expansions still offered very substantial chapters beyond the replayability factor. The worst part is basing this type of marketing on the role it played in the compensation of the developers who worked on it (the Bloomberg article is very specific on this): it is extremely unfair that developers are not paid for work they have done but above all on a project that the management has distorted from the beginning. We should also blame the gaslighting they do in saying “it would have been like developing another video game”, since OW2 was actually justified with that “2” on the title precisely with the concept of developing something different.
On the other hand I think they were right to stop the project due to the sales idea it should have. We generally liked archives as an event because it was a temporary thing, but having PVE available all the time just goes to show how extremely difficult it is to invite 4 players to play the same story mode again in a month, a year or 10 years. it simply works badly as a product to sell, and the replayability has not found real solutions to avoid emptying the servers in the extremely difficult modes, which are also the ones that theoretically give the most gameplay satisfaction. The AI would be a job as an end in itself, and in the end what changes in developing a single player story mode? and generally I find that the PvP buffs are remarkable, although I hate that they pretend that PVE has no reason to be a good investment.
in short: I can understand them, but somehow it would comfort me better to know that there is a narrative future in any case. and I wish it wasn’t a return to 2016 when the only expedient was just the arrival of new heroes, well before archives existed. by the way: what happened to archives event in all this?
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Just no, they cant even have their matchmaking in order, matchmaking is priority number 1 or the game will die out
I think the point is that there is a market for the overwatch IP beyond the PVP aspect of the game and good matchmaking is not a requirement. If they could make a theampark set of regular pve content it would bring in and satisfy many folks that are not as interested in the pvp.
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I agree there is.
I think that market is on TV/streaming though.
The problem is we have lots of passive content to consume. Interactive content where much of the story telling can be done in game is special. Many successful TV/movie IP eventually have games made about them because people want to play as those characters. Well, we already have a game that is cross platform and is of higher quality than most TV to videogames adaptions. I guess I just like playing games more than watching television (the occasional cut scene aside).
Which is fair enough. No matter what move they make, it won’t be for everyone.
As shown by the PvE stuff… enough people just didn’t want it, hence it failed. I do think the TV format is ideal for this IP. A run of 6-8 20min episodes in similar style to the shorts. Time it right and use it to reveal a new hero and you will get people watching.
Netflix already has an agreement to have first option on publishing any series. But I think CoD and Diablo are priorities.
i can’t find anyone t do the missions on legendary
cant even find a player in missions
I’m not surprised. The missions are terrible. To say they cancelled OW to develop PVE where they just delivered boring/linear missions just shows the present level of creativity and skills of their development team.
The OW team pre OW2 would never have allowed it to go out into Live service.
They are the ones that made the decision 3 years before OW2 was launched.
They even surveyed people in that time to see what they wanted.
They followed what they players were asking for, just executed poorly.