Asmongold TV - What is this, Blizzard?? | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

What is this, Blizzard?? Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. ------------------------------ ------- Keywords: gaming hot takes, streamer podcast, gaming drama, reaction videos, streamer content, gaming community, twitch streamer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is kind of sad. It looks like Overwatch 2 is actually dead. This stat will make you feel old. Overwatch is about to have its 10th anniversary. It'll actually be this time next year, which is a little spooky. And when we left off with the game, right, they had reintroduced loopboxes, they made sweeping game changes, and they revealed Stadium. Of course, Overwatch 2 PVE will never happen.

Don't even think about it. It's just not realistic. And with so much of their team being axed, it's probably also, well, quite impossible for Overwatch 2 PVE to ever happen. But all the stuff that they did was in an attempt to rehabilitate Overwatch. But for all of that buzz, since it all launched, I haven't really heard much. And that is why I am here today to work out what the hell has actually happened with Overwatch.

Overwatch is a great game, but an awful product. That has been my personal TLDR for this one for a long, long time. The idea being that it's fun, but it's kind of busted by the circumstances of its creation, by the... It's not interesting. That's the problem. The game's just really not that interesting. For business model stuff over the last few years, and lots of the trend-chasing brand-collab skins

that just make me feel old and out of touch. Not because I don't like the brands, but because I'd like my Overwatch to be Overwatch and, you know, not be an advertisement for a bunch of other brands so everyone can make money. Anyway, all of that stuff did kind of piss players off, pissed me off, and pissed off players will not cut you any slack if you're a dev team.

So it seems that's what they worked on first, getting the product part under a little bit of control. Now, on that front, the return of loopboxes basically gave people an incentive to continue playing with only the battle pass as a payment. That's definitely a positive. Even the premium crossover cosmetics for Wow and Diablo are being included in the loopboxes as of season 16. Wow, so they're getting really desperate then.

Holy shit, I didn't even know this. That's pretty good. Jesus. Now, we're still seeing the same high as hell rate of crossovers with Gundam and Street Fighter, but now the players don't have to pay to get access to anything. They're perhaps a bit more willing to extend Overwatch some good faith. It feels a little bit less like an aggressive relationship. So that's Blizzard's opening.

Let's see how they've tried to exploit it and if it's actually worked. Stadium is the big new feature. And to recap, it's a new mode for Overwatch too. It takes the 5V5 formula and it breaks it down into seven round matches. Players basically choose from one of 17 available heroes. and then you play rounds of Overwatch, except that firstly, right? I think that the majority of these hero game and a lot of like FPS games, I think that they begin to die when they actually, whenever they start making it like a,

like a competitive game, when you start making this like an esport is when the game begins to die, because most people don't care about a game being an esport, they care about a game being fun to play. Most people are not e-sports players, right? Just, I mean, you know, what are the odds? And so just like Starcraft, yeah, yeah. And I think in a lot of cases, that's true. And so Overwatch was designed originally to just be a really fun game.

And then they quickly pivoted to making it an esport. And then the design and the programming of the game and the balance of the game is built around e-sport level gameplay. Well, that's not the way that average people play the game. And that's also not the most fun way to play the game. And so, like, for example, whenever you have like four or five tanks on a team, that might be the most effective way to win a game, but that might not be the most fun way to play a game. And the issue is that when you have competitive culture in a game like that,

you always have those metas. And those metas kill games. It's all playable in third person. So that's kind of new. And secondly, every hero can use- It's all playable in third person. Really? Wow, I wonder where they got that idea from. That's crazy. Wow, what are the odds?

Earned stadium cash to purchase new upgrades that will alter your gameplay style in dynamic ways. Basically, right? It's kind of like the Counterstrike shop, right? You do it in between rounds. There are some neat catch-up mechanics around taking out high performers so the things actually stay competitive. It's kind of neat.

It's very much Overwatch's core hero ability formula, but where you're adding in a layer of complexity as you wish, as you build out their character. That's cool. To kind of explain this, Aaron Keller broke it down in terms of three player needs that they've tried to hit. The first one is more downtime, Like literally, the time in between rounds.

And that's so that Overwatch isn't just this constant objective brawl that just kind of leaves you tired. You know, you need ups and downs, you need pace. Something that CounterStrike does real well. The second thing is to emphasize strategy, and the third is a big one. It's to let you counter your enemies via your upgrade path for your character rather than just, say, swapping heroes. And for a lot of people... I think that's a good point, right? I mean, that's a good idea because, like, a lot of times people have, like, their main character they want to play.

And so, like, if you can't play that character, character, you're not having fun playing the game. That's very true. Like me, I just have one or two characters I really enjoy playing. Being able to counter my opponents via upgrades without having to change, that's actually really good. So, this all sounds quite great on paper, and it's clearly a fairly huge feature, not just like a random new mode like Clash.

And here's what makes it interesting. The reality, now that it's actually live and in players' hands. Here's the stat that got me interested in making this video. So over the first week of stadium's release, it saw 7.8 million hours of play across 2.3 million matches, and that was approximately 50% of Overwatch's total playtime during that period. So per playtime, this has had a goddamn humongous release. And broadly, the reaction seems to be consistent engagement with the actual mode. So over here, we've been tracking the responses and, you know, all of that stuff, keeping tabs and things.

And the thing that we noticed is that it seems to be one of those quiet success. things where players are just enjoying it. They're playing it. I am such a massive advocate against the meadow, the metaphor of like a quiet success. Do you know what I think a quiet success usually is? A failure that you do not want to accept. Very few games are actually quiet successes. And I think that you can look at wow as an example. Like, come on. Like, come on. I mean, you, like, the problem is that, and this is especially true with a lot of these video games that don't share player numbers, but when every single data point that you can use, you know, you can look at the amount of YouTube videos that are consumed, the amount of Twitch content that's consumed, the amount of searches on, you know, websites that are about it. And I guess Overwatch, there's going to be, you know, it's hard to really know where that's coming from. But like with a lot of these cases, you can look at all of these cases, you can look at all of these three like four or five ten different like points of like third party data and then make a decision off of it and i think a really good way to look at this is you can just look at directly uh you

can look at where is it uh right here let's see what the steam charts are for overwatch and we're not looking at the number we're looking at the trend overwatch too so let's see is the trend causing the game to go back up and to do well. No. No, it's not. That's it. Are you sure that was his point? Something, I think, is not a success whenever it is quietly and slowly leading a game towards its irrelevancy.

Like, that is, that's not a success. Look up Marvel rivals. Well, I'd go back and see what it. Are you scared that Marathon might win game of the year? I don't know if it will be. I've got a feeling it won't be. Yeah, I don't know. And that might seem a bit weird because Overwatch 2 has been in the news, kind of all the time, but never for good reasons.

There's always been a fresh new form of outrage. So the idea that people are actually just playing a mode in the game, that's not really news. It's not interesting. It's not really talked about. It's not why Overwatch caught on in the media, at least in the modern era. Now, it's not as if everything went perfectly. There were some early issues of stompby match. I think most media about Overwatch isn't about the game.

Making some friction with player experiences in the new systems. but after a day, we actually saw the Overwatch team addressing a whole bunch of things. And after a week, they were already outlining changes. Keller then confirmed that a build importer and exporter is going to be coming into the game next season. So you can transfer builds alongside crossplay as soon as possible, which is quite a lot. And I think requests like this coming from players are a huge indicator of product market fit. And Blizzard's responses actually seem uncharacteristically, well, fast. They're not normally fast.

And the reason why I think is real simple, institutional power and backing. Essentially, this is a game feature that has got backing and buy-in up and down the chain. I mean that like structurally within Blizzard. So in practical terms, that means that while it's not like there's an entire team making a parallel game, Overwatch 2 does have, and I just quote Aaron here, totally separate team of people that are solely devoted to working in stadium. Now, of course, there are shared teams like, you know, map design, hero design, but basically you got this seems to me like it's going to create the same problem that solo

Q and wow did and a few other things that wow is implemented is that instead of actually fixing and improving the base game loop they create a separate mode and they improve that instead and i think that what that's going to end up doing is it's going to create a issue somewhere down the line where you have to make decisions for the direction of the game and you have two different audiences of people that want different things, and you have to choose who to disappoint. It splits the community? Yeah, it does. The point here, this is them kind of opening up a new front in the war. And I think that's why their roadmap covers four seasons worth of updates, just like the rest of Overwatch. So this doesn't

seem to be an experiment. So far, by the way, that roadmap is new maps, more characters, more abilities, and sub-modes. One of those is a payload race that will come with two bespoke maps, which seems pretty cool. And what it looks like is a commitment. But I actually would say it isn't just that. It isn't just a commitment. What it is is new. This is a new game mode. And yeah, there's inspirations from other games, but this essentially is new creativity. It's a new vision finally coming to Overwatch. To me, that's what makes all the difference. I think this is also a really great example of the thing that I say a lot, which is very true, is that competition breeds excellence. And I think that you would have probably never seen this

level of innovation and change and improvement and willingness to try new things by Overwatch if Marvel rivals didn't exist. For far too long, Blizzard's modern teams have felt like stewards of other people's successes, right? And when you are just a steward of someone else's success, you get just stuck into tweaking little things here or there while your players look at your game and think, we're bored, there's nothing new, we don't care. So in that context, and with all the bullshit headwinds they faced, no wonder that's a team

that has continually been a day late and a dollar short. But with this, you're creating something new. And this is the problem that all, this is the problem that a lot of Western AAA game studios have, is that they cannot move in a way that is agile. And they can't actually respond to like market desires in a fast way. And so because they're so big and they're so like, you know,

there's so much bureaucratic red tape that they can't actually like adapt to an audience until it's way too late. Tremendous signaling value to lapsed players because it's actually them moving forward on their own terms, which is, I'll be clear, the only way that they will ever escape from the shadow of PVE being well and truly dead.

Okay, you know me, if numbers exist, I've got to take a big gap than so season 16. And by the way, using Steam numbers from what we understand Steam is a fairly tiny proportion of Overwatch overall. We're just using this as kind of an indicator. So, season, 2016 launched with a 60k peak, which is neck and neck with season 15's 59.5k peak. Yep.

And those peaks are actually of numbers that used to be their weekly norm. I mean, the overall graph really doesn't look good, does it? But as anyone in software as a service will tell you, churn is king, retention is king. And that's where this season is looking at least initially a little bit different. So, you know the way that movies are tracked in terms of their week-to-week box office drop? Well, season 15's week 1 to 2 drop was 41.66% in peak numbers. Season 16s is 33.19, which is drastically lower. But there is a problem.

That's just peak numbers. If you're to ask, what about the averages? Well, the data is early, but at least right now, the average player numbers do seem to be stronger. And overall, this is the way it's going to be with any sort of a game that has an established player base that's losing players over time. And the reason why is because player base is like that, what happens is that you have such a core audience that as more casual players move away from the game, that core audience remains relatively closer to the same. So as that core audience becomes a larger percentage of the player base, the fluctuations between high and low become more minimal because those fluctuations are generally with casual players primarily and not. with that core player base. So when a game is going down in popularity, but the popularity is still

like it's not changing as much. The reason why is because casual players are continually leaving and hardcore players are maintaining their popularity or their presence. That's the, but if they peak higher, if the peak is higher, then that's better. Yeah, definitely. It is too early to call this a success. But if retention numbers, appear to be better, whilst 50% of playtime is going towards the new mode, then that certainly is a good sign. What it also can be is a pressure valve. You see, Overwatch has suffered from trying to please everybody, right, with broadly the same sort of game mode. Stadium arriving and being a better fit for a sizable chunk of players will help to ease that tension. I mean,

already, we've seen character-changing perks get added and be well-received, plus patches to introduce and adjust those things as the feedback comes through. That's fairly agile looking pretty good. While over in ranked, well, pick bands and map voting have seemingly reinvigorated some interest, not a transformational amount, but hey, some. And across both, there's now a 6v6 queue that's attracted a 25% pick rate, and so it's actually getting to stay around after a few months of testing and tweaking. Now, none of those things are generating the buzz that Stadium is able to generate, but what they do kind of represent is the foundations being stronger.

And that's probably all playing into why Blizzard have opted to bring Bliscom back for 2026 and not. Overwatch 3, guys, okay? This time they mean PVE for real. Okay? Yeah, guys, for sure. This is it. 2025. Nothing impacts the future of a game more than the conditions under which that game is made. So, why did Overwatch 2 happen? I think the answer is in many ways, tension. Because on the one- I heard Bobby Kodick put pressure on them.

to have a big release and that's the reason why. The Overwatch devs want to crawl themselves towards their cancelled MMO called Titan. On the other hand, Bobby Cotic was personally invested in pushing the Overwatch East Coast. That was a recipe for disaster. Now though, we have a new, perhaps slimmer team four that at the very least is not left cobbling together a sequel from components of a dead PVE game that they tried to make without proper support from their C-suite. Because that's how Overwatch 2 happened. They cobbled it together in no time, and this is all happening without C-suite mandates around e-sports, which, to jog your memory, was absurdly overhyped at the time and was something that Bobby Cotic had, you know.

I think that's what killed Overwatch, and it lost its popularity, was the Overwatch League. And it's not the league itself. It's the community that it creates and the way that it forces game design. I have saron himself over to and seemingly latched onto from a lot of reports. Seriously, people in the Overwatch team really seem to have hated Kotick. And while many of those staff members will never see the thing that they wanted in the game, at least to me, Stadium is this new team progressing from stewardship to authorship. That's where I think there's a fairly significant change, and it's one that we can contrast with Apex Legends, right? Because Apex feels like managed decline. And the best way to dispel feelings of managed decline, funnily enough, is to ship new content that doesn't feel like it's an old thing that's a old thing that's.

being cheaply thrown into the microwave. In Chipping Stadium, that is what they have done. Now, this is by no means a guarantee that Overwatch 2, line go up and it's all going to be good in the future, right? It's not a guarantee of that. But I do think it marks a changing point. And if you want to understand just how bad EA situation... I think they're trying to just do whatever they can in order to maintain their player base.

And I think that makes sense. But making these crazy new modes and doing all these new things, I think that all that's doing is really staving off the fundamental problem that the core game loop is not great. And I think this is an issue that wow has as well is that instead of wow improving the retail wow experience, they create all these different versions of wow for other people to play if they're not happy with the current wow experience. And I think that the more that you do that, the more that you have a disconnected product and it's harder, like you're spreading yourself out more and more thin and at a certain point

you just can't meet demand from that many different types of audiences. It's more problems. Yeah, exactly. There's an option for everything great at none of them. Yeah, exactly. The core game group is great. That's how people kept playing for two years with no content prior to Overwatch 2.

But people playing it with no content, it was going down, though. Like people were losing interest playing the game. And also a lot of people were playing it in the anticipation of Overwatch 2. And I think that when you really saw Overwatch die was, when they announced that Overwatch 2 wasn't going to happen.

I think that's when the game really died. Because the game can survive on hype for years. Look at Star Citizen, for example. But if you kill people's hope for the game to grow in the future, that is very detrimental. And why the Apex Legends players are very much not happy? Well, what's your report in that situation next? Well, there it is. The league didn't kill the game.

was doing great until YouTube, until it went to YouTube and Brigg was released. Well, what I'm saying is that, like, the way that the game, I do think that leagues kill games. I do. I absolutely think so. And unless a game is made for e-sports, it probably shouldn't have e-sports. Yeah, W-video. Yeah, I, that's the, the league was too expensive. It was too much of a focus. It was disconnected from a player's wanted. And Brigg is fun, though. Well, I don't really, I mean, like, look, I didn't play overwatch at that time, so it's hard for me to say. But here's what I would say is that the popularity of the game, I think, has tremendously gone down. And I think one of the big reasons for why that popularity has gone down is because of games like Marvel rivals that are more dynamic and they

offer updates more often. And so that's really the main reason. I mean, like you, like, I'm not sure, but that's kind of what I think is going to happen.