Blizzard won’t lock heroes/maps and whatever. It would break the game if you que and one of the players in the lobby doesn’t have a hero, or a map.
Plus they’ve always said all new maps and heroes will be free.
But you are right we don’t know yet (might find out next week). But I’d be 99.9% sure it’ll just be buying cosmetics.
F2P is the “future”. it drives much bigger engagement, and brings in a lot more money. 2 metrics game devs can’t avoid.
But as this discussion proves. They can’t please everyone. And they shouldn’t be trying to.
If they lose 100 players, but gain 1000 new ones. They have won.
i don’t necessarily agree that f2p is the “future”
it’s just a decent model for some games if it’s done properly and not predatory.
as flats say, people who don’t play a lot can probably afford to pay for some to make up for it.
but i still think a free demo and a buyable version that has all the bells and whistles is way better.
for example, you’d get maybe all the basic characters you would need to play overwatch and you can play all you want, but you’re not gonna unlock anything with time investment,
and the buyable version is not that expensive as a result because they don’t need to make up for the losses because if you’re in for a penny you’re in for a pound.
so more people will pay as long as the experience is good.
it’s like having a food sample in a store, if it tastes nice and you can afford it, you’ll get it.
if you can’t afford it, you’ll try to get a better life so you can.
That model for OW wouldn’t work.
People have had the beta/demo available for 5 years now.
But the same works to F2P… If people like it they will stay and buy the cosmetics and stuff (if the price points are good,which I am sure they will be).
If they don’t like, nothing lost, they move on to something else.
But you have given them the opportunity to have a go on the full experience. Not locked them out behind a pay wall. The whole thing should be open to everyone to have a go.
Essentially, OW is old and tired now. They need to inject large amounts of new content (which OW2 should do) and even larger numbers of players. Going F2P is the only way they can do this now.
One + F2P will drive out some of the weak willed who already complain about every other player (you know who I mean). Hopefully that sort of play will just walk away.
but a pve mode that people will have to pay for isn’t really that much of an incentive to buy it, and if you can get things for free in terms of cosmetics there’s really no point in buying anything.
to me that’s just gonna fail because they’ll probably not gonna get a big return on their investment.
the only reason i think they are doing a pvp and pve mode and differentiating between them is that they want to split the playerbase between more competitive players and casual players and ham in on more balance adjustments for pvp that are more rough for new players, for example they could make reapers lifesteal passive 50% again since they aren’t beholden to appease the more casual part of the playerbase.
that’s really only the reason why i think they are even making a pve mode to begin with.
If CoD is anything to go by, the main PvE gain will make them plenty of money.
The free PvP mode will have millions of players and make them plenty of money from the tat they will sell.
In business terms it is a win win. Just they totally S the bed and do an Anthem… Which I just can’t see happening.
It is a gamble they will be taking. But it is the option with the most net positives. The game is decaying slowly and they need to either reverse that or find some miracle way to make money from it.
idk, to me cod haven’t really been relevant except maybe in console versions as of late.
i have this feeling that f2p is like a way to sustain a game long term because it is losing it’s relevancy the longer time goes on.
but that model to me is like begging for money on the street, you gotta be starving to do it and you’re basically living off of the charity of others.
idk, i just don’t think f2p is a good model really.
what’s better to me is keep making sequels but with a good distance between them.
take all the money and split them between making the game they just made supported until they release the next one, because when the next one comes the old one is obsolete anyways and have allready been put on life support.
for example look at blizzards other games, the rts games, diablo.
those are the golden games of blizzard.
meanwhile world of warcraft has rotted away with time.
and well you know what happened to the rest of the blizzard games.
Diablo is going F2P too.
All their games are.
I think CoD games went down in quality over the years, but with Warzone and the CDL I don’t think it has ever been more relevant.
Buy a £50 game once every 5 years.
or
Give them that game free and charge then £5 to £10 once a month when you do content drops.
Imagine that is a player base of 1 million… £50million every 5 years… or £5million a month for 5 years…
I know which one I’d prefer.
Warzone has 80 million active player accounts… OW has somewhere around the 10 million (and slowly declining) now.
It is a no-brainer for them. Even if they only stay at 10 million active accounts.
those content drops are predicated they get steady flow of money and looking at overwatch the only content they are dropping is free, this lunar new year, how much money have you spent on it? just saying that i don’t believe in this type of marketing.
imagine a playerbase of a million and maybe 200 thousand of those pay you 5-10£ every 4 months which doesn’t reach the same amounts short term but atleast makes the game be able to exist 10-20 years from now with some support.
but really, looking at starcraft broodwar, it’s still doing fine, probably better than starcraft 2.
You are forgetting you’ve bought the game.
The game will be free going forward. You will be getting a completely new engine and so much more refreshed and changed that the PvP side will be a completely new game download. For free.
Then you just buy the cosmetic content you want. This will push them to make better skins, rather than peddling recolours and calling it new. Because the better the content, the more people buy. Just look at the Mercy charity skin, people still want to buy that now because it is an excellent skin.
So if you do 3/4 skins to that level every couple of months. Charge people £10 or whatever, you are on to a winner.
The way and frequency of content will completely change. How it is done now is bad, but they are just thumbing a softy with that one atm. It is not how it will work in future, because you are right, it just won’t work.
Everything will change if it is F2P and will be better (in terms of new content releasing).
And yes the content they drop atm is free… But people are crazy and still buy the loot boxes. Making them nearly a billion dollars a year… You make it so it isn’t a gamble and price it right, you are going to make so much more.
I get there will be people that don’t like it. Some very vocal people. But sadly for them, numbers talk even louder.
well random lootboxes is pretty much gambling and have been a part of the gaming sphere for a long time
“looking at card games especially with booster packs and what not”
but yeah i’m just saying that if they make overwatch pvp free to play and rely only on cosmetics to give them a way to sustain themselves.
as far as the frequency idk if they would make more content faster with the f2p model, but with that i think they basically have to, and because they have to the less good the content will be because of simply the amount they will have to push out.
as far as me buying the game really doesn’t matter with overwatch 2.
it really all comes down to if they can fix the current game or if they have to re-structure it for OW2 and if it’s succesfull doing so.
that’s the bottom line.
the game is only as good as the gameplay in it.
right now still the tank shortage is a major problem and if they can’t solve that cookie i don’t know how the game will survive.
But if you already own OW (as you do), you get the upgraded PvP stuff for free.
You don’t have to buy the story mode that is OW2 if you don’t want it.
The game you play now isn’t changing other than the engine, UI, and a few cosmetic changes to maps and skins (all for free). Plus new heroes (could be 5 or 6 on launch, although rumours have it we might get 1 sooner to keep people sweet), and a new match type. Again all for free.
All that will change is that instead of gambling for content, you just look at the list and buy what you want.
Which for most players is what they do now anyways. I only get duplicates in boxes now, so I build up credits and when events come I just buy what I want.
You could see them do a battle pass mode where you pay £5, for example and you open a week long event where you have to win X number of games to unlock certain pieces (similar to Apex and follows their models of mini events).
The lack of players wanting to play tank is more of an issue than the number of thanks (I suspect at least 2 will be in that new bundle). And if you quadruple the number of players, the amount of us fools willing to play tank will increase. Minor balance tweaks will always help, but they are happening frequently and are always going to be hit or miss for people.
it doesn’t matter if i own overwatch now if pvp is gonna be free which it is.
all that’s gonna matter is how much blizzard is gonna be able to make from content that’s free which concerns me because i don’t think it’s enough.
and the lack of tank players aren’t gonna change just because you add 2 tanks, if that were the case then we would have easily solved it with orisa, sigma and hammond.
but really the tank situation haven’t changed since launch despite all these things that they’ve implemented to try and solve it by trying to appease allready existing tank players.
all they are doing is making it less or more fun for different tank players that’s allready tank players.
i don’t think we’ll ever come to an agreement because we see this problem from two completely opposite sides.
Just look at the amount of money Warzone is making, Fortnite still makes, Apex is making.
The models for them to follow/learn from are out there.
A game like OW should be easy to farm out sellable cosmetics. Just look how people react when the skins come out now, and most of them are barely worth looking at.
They already make a lot from stuff “outside” the game. Licencing, merchandise and so on.
More players will also make the licence for making the animated series jump in value.
overwatch is different to battle royales.
battle royales have basically taken over the arena shooter genré as the casual shooter.
that’s why overwatch can’t be compared to those.
the sales models work for those and might not work for overwatch.
just look at starcraft 2, that’s basically how it went for them, and they are backing down from battle passes and such for starcraft 2 right now basically putting starcraft 2 on ice.
look at quake champions for example, that should give you a good idea where it’s headed in terms of economic success.
It doesn’t matter about the game type. The business model and dropping of content can be very similar.
It might not work. But they have to do something to reverse play number decline, and that is making the game free. And after that selling cosmetics is the quickest money maker.
no, game type definitly matters, success of the game also matters.
marketing helps if done correctly but marketing doesn’t make or break a game unless it’s pay to win.
and selling cosmetics don’t make up for the lack of good gameplay, and that’s the issue when tanks are bottlenecked and it’s a team based game that is so chaotic that it just breeds resentment between players.
really i’m surprised overwatch have survived this long despite everything and i think they can owe their fantastic character artists and fantastic game devs creating such addictive characters for that.
If PvP OW is F2P… That doesn’t change whether is is good or bad in terms of game play.
But getting more people in and the need to make them buy stuff means they will be more focused on keeping the game in shape.
Right now, you pay for your account, and now you are done… why would they care if you are happy or not. They have your money.
If you have a skin for a charecter and sell it for £5… doesn’t matter if that game is OW, a battle royale or a racing arcade game. If it is good quality it will sell. That is why I don’t think the game type matters.
But at the basics. All these games are the same. They survive on having as many active accounts as possible, hopefully spending as much on cosmetics as possible. F2P is the only way to do that.
people will play a game and really the price isn’t the end all be all as long as the game is good, i thought people understood that with mmos.
but as with mmos and online pvp games, it’s really only good if it handles well and there’s no obstruction and it’s sufficiently populated.
and they want to keep their games populated by keeping the game good and making their customers happy or else it dies because a good pvp game can die if it lacks a population, tribes ascend is a very clear evidence of that.
there was really nothing wrong with tribes ascend, it was free to play and they were supporting it with new characters and new cosmetics and such, it just simply died out because of a lack of players.
and do you know what that studio made? fortnite.
same formula, different game, but not really wildly different.
so f2p is no guarantee, hell it’s not really something that changes anything except maybe the longevity of a games direct support in terms of new content and balance patches which really isn’t necessary, a good game can stand without patching or new content.
i’m just gonna say this, i don’t think overwatch will be more popular than it is now, especially not for going free to play.
Are you counting active players as popularity? Because active players will definitely increase.
It is then up to them to keep the game fresh to keep the new/returning players and to add more of them.
F2P is the only thing they can do now to drive increased revenues. That is their focus.
If the game makes more money, more time is invested into it.
On it’s current path we will just get more years of limited content because it just isn’t generating the revenues they want.
This is why they keep banging on about mobile games (and Overwatch is getting something on mobile too). Candy Crush makes Activision more than any of their other games combined. They just want revenue and if they’ve done their research and seen that F2P is the best way to increase that significantly… Then that is the only reason they’d be doing it.
this is where i think we diverge, because i don’t think free to play makes the game anymore popular than it is.
a good game is a good game, money don’t matter that much.