as an artist for a small games company... stable leadership, CLEARLY communicated deadlines, and HUMAN project management/feedback is all we need to thrive 😭 why do we get treated as an afterthought in the industry over and over again?
Once studios get overtaken by publishers creativity and innovation takes a backseat to pure profits. That blizzard of all companies started outsourcing their games to indian graphic studios says loads.
I don't see how the artists aren't the more respected higher paid employees tbh. They draw/design the characters, environments, and other things. Without the artists they would only have a vision of what they want, not a visual interpretation of it. Whether it's character designers or graphic designers they bring the game to life, and it's one of the more important jobs.
That's just wrong. Every step could have been its own masterpiece. The second step was a failure because they turned Overwatch into a cash cow that they could milk dry.
@@MattMama-w2vyour looking at it wrong. Originally Overwatch wasn't going to be a live service game, with the team going to start work on overwatch pvp. However the success meant that they had to continue to update it while at the same time wanting that expansion. In splitting resources between teams they let Overwatch 1 slowly die and Overwatch 2 made little progress. The solutions were to staff up, which Kotick wanted, or not make overwatch 2 at all. Kaplan didn't want to staff up while at the same time wanting that overwatch pvp. Him not being satisfied with overwatch 1 is the catalyst for all the issues we face. It's not so much as milking a cash cow as management.
In my opinion, the shortsightedness prevalent in modern business is heavily tied to the quarterly/yearly timescale any public company is held to. At best, year over year comparisons are the “long” time frame for these companies. Average turnover for CEOs means that prioritizing 5 years plans at the cost of 2 years of on paper results means they’re gonna be gone before the plan could ever succeed.
Yeahhhhh. We seen how they been operating for even the past 5 to 10 years now. Record-breaking profit for the quarter? Better do mass layoffs. Three of the four quarters for the company are showing strong financial performance? Clearly not according to stockholders as that last quarter they were weaker is some sign the company is failing. Whats that? You can't delay a game for one or more weeks, or even a month because you need to cash in on that christmas time for that quarter? Better crunch harder even if it means your employees are going to perform worse later. Want to push up the sales for the coming quarter? Better have microtransactions, chop chop. Meanwhile economists and stockholders and ceos and whatever else wonder "Wait, what do you mean the customers want to buy our games less? What are we doing wrong?"
It is tho. Every other streaming platform is just shit or doesnt have enough users to justify making a show, And the exec sniping netflix pulled off is in 2018 so amazon prime the only decent competitor to netflix didnt even exist.
@@kkcydthere was also Hulu,and wether or not they were shit is irrelevant. They still had options, and what happened with PvE, it is clear that they did it bc they thought it wasn’t going to make them enough money or they were spending too much on it.
Something I think Samito said really strikes too true. The Overwatch leadership just deletes stuff rather then fix it, Or did. 2cp? Remove it. Double shield, remove 2nd tank. Netflix show didnt work out, abandon it. Cant deliver the pve story, just abandon it. There is a bunch of dev stories that follow this. I think its gotten alot better now, but they really were just in this mindset of "delete all that doesnt work now instead of fixing it" and its really annoying to hear about what could have been
They’re still making the show, they’re just having to make their own platform so they can charge people more to watch the same episode, but with the heroes using different skins.
I hope all this publicity brings Jeff out of hiding so we can hear his side of the story. Something tells me he has an NDA and is unable to say things in the ways that his ex-colleagues are and I find that sketchy.
whats there to say he was too stubborn to see making a destiny/borderlands version of overwatch within overwartch using all the characters instead of making custom characters that use the already existing characters abilities to save dev time and resources was the way to go his unwillingness to see his error costed peoples jobs you can have good intentions and still screw people over
Activision Blizzard employees are on NDA for life. Theres an "impossible" zombies easter egg on BO3 which came out in 2015 and a youtuber interviewed the devs recently and they all got in trouble for talking about the game
@@Kishiiknight this mentality is the problem? Does Jeff’s side not matter? Even if I am wrong it’s better to hear his side than to take it all in “good faith.” I don’t believe in it.
@@luiegiii It's only "sketchy" if you're someone who puts Jeff Kaplan up on a pedestal. I bet you never called anything anyone said about Bobby Kotick "sketchy".
The book mentions that Jeff refused to let a different team handle OW2, and honestly this is something I agree with. Jeff and his team were passionate about OW and OW2, and he didn't want some suits and shills to completely deface OW. I don't think Jeff should get flack for trying to keep the team with passion on the project.
I think two things can be true. I agree that Jeff shouldn’t get flack for wanting to keep a passionate team together. However, I also agree with criticism that his refusal to expand the team is what led to OW dying on the vine while players waited for OW2, a vision that was ultimately unable to be executed.
I dont give him flack for that. I do think OW2 was too ambitious for its own good on Jeff's part. That craving for a fully pve story expansion within the game of overwatch itself vs just letting an entirely different company make that kind of game will always puzzle me. There was no way this was going to work and actually come out good. The pve events they had done before the announcement werent even that great so to me no amount of skill trees would be enough to make that interesting. I say for me it looked like Jeff wanted to make Borderlands customization and PVE within OW. Doomed to fail from the start and expecting his team to be able to handle it all was shortsighted as fuck. edit: Ironic that the game is now defaced by suits and shills.
@@PaulStargasm Its strange. I wanted an Overwatch game but I wanted like a game separate from the pvp game entirely. A nice focused game on the founding of OW during the omnic crisis with the founding members as the playable characters. Make that somewhat borderlands esque or make it a looter shooter with skill threes then you might have something cool. I know I was in the minority on it since everyone would be hellbent on playing their hero so reducing the cast for a game to like 6 even as a separate game would just rub people wrong. PVE to me was just a mistake to take on from the jump in the form they wanted.
@@aerostrafe1075i really dont think ow2 was all that ambitious. They didn't touch pvp for like 3 years. They could have spent that whole time working on what they originally set out to make with ow2 and people would have been happy. Instead they used that time to give us something nobody asked for.
As dev on titan and overwatch, I can assure you that the live service aspect of overwatch was planned ahead of time and intentional. E.g. We were crunching on ana before the game launched.
It was frustrating to hear all the community complaints about crowd control, and then we released brig. I remember watching TimTheTatman quit after being stunned for like 8 seconds on rein. Big sad.
NGL, all this time having people screaming "Papa Jeff left, that's why the game became shit" pissed me off so much, especially already knowing some of the things that were going on behind the scenes.
Jeff was just the face that we all knew. Him representing the idea that "the old Blizzard guard" left and that's why things went downhill, I believe is still a reasonable take to have. Sure it's simplifying the issues, but the philosophy and culture that was nurtured at Blizzard came from that old guard. A shame they couldn't evolve into something more sustainable.
@@oDiiJei Jeff probably could have made it work provided they didn't try make the Superbowl of ESports, sustaining a live game and PVE with one team. This needed 2-3 teams of devs Could have had Aaron lead one and Jeff the other. Say what you want about Jeff but alot of players wanted to see his vision for OW2 PVE.
@@kellywilson137 I'm on the side that pve wouldnt've worked ever with jeff's leadership after this books release, and i'm starting to see the problems that arose with making characters designed for pvp to pve. Like with widow mentioned in this book, how the ult is practically useless in a pve horde mode and how they had to come up with solutions i.e the weakpoint thing in the mirrorverse mode. Jeff also gatekept the dev team wanting it to stay small and focused. Even the big bad bobby k wanted the team to expand.
@@kellywilson137 A lot of players wanted to see his vision but that vision was ridiculously impossible to achieve. Think about it. 30+ unique heroes, with more heroes being released every quarter. Each one with unique talent trees and development. Each hero with a dedicated fanbase that shares a fantaticism about "game balance". How many other games are out there like that? The answer is zero, for good reason. It was always an untenable dream. Most PVE games with talent trees have like 3-8 classes, tops. The OW roster was always just too big for it.
@@jasonreid9267 The fanatism about game balance comes from the fact that it's a competitive game, PvP aspect in this game. PvE should have been used little to zero precision balancing knowing that it's not supposed to be competitive (no world firsts and such; some characters are OP but as long as everyone viable it's okay). Borderlands and similar games don't really balance things out too much, some builds/specs are garbage but it doesn't matter since fun is prime factor. Helldivers 2 recently went thru the same rhethoric; and devs gave up doing precision balancing to make every weapon matter and such (while most players were calling it bullshit and playerbase dwindling). "You want this popular weapon to hit hard - it's gonna hit hard then." - for coop shooters it seems to be healthy approach. It also heavily reduces the workload. And apparently Overwatch had started adding some balance changes applied to PvE specifically (on OW2 release no less; without said PvE but with balance changes for it)... but it's probably when they gave up the whole idea completely, thinking about how much shit they need to constantly balance out. Point is they gave up before trying, and it was the second time (Titan). (Not expanding team is still bad, but as I got it the talk was more about casually hiring random people and let them do the thing without experience. Or doing it the Activision way and having 30 separate studios popping Overwatches... yeah, Call of Duty had ~30 different developers over history. Overall it doesn't sound very promising but Jeff's or somebody else's point is probably required to judge better.)
Whatever comes to light 2 things are clear: there is no one person to blame and Bobby Kotic is still a bad game company owner (and person seemingly). If I wanted to throw in a 3rd I would say overwatch 2 seemed a bit ambitious.
I think your approach is indeed pretty nuanced and I appreciate that. A lot of the discussion seems to be “Kaplan versus Kotick” but my position is that both of their ideologies were flawed. The key difference was that Kaplan’s decisions are much easier to be sympathize for or empathize with (even if I ultimately can see now he was misguided-and trust me, I wanted for nothing more than his PvE vision to work). Whereas I think Kotick should be hunted for sport. Dude’s unambiguously awful, even if he was correct once or twice. But the approaches of both men (and Blizzard and Activision) resulted in devs on the front lines being hurt. Early Blizzard made many good games, but no game is worth human suffering or careening careers built from successful projects like Overwatch off a cliff. It’s really changed my perspective on the “golden years.” Activision management and Blizzard management failed their workers, and their workers have every right to retaliate in the form of unions, strikes, walkouts, or destruction of company property. I was overjoyed to learn about the WoW union. While unions are imperfect, the only other option seems to be continued human suffering, and games (good or bad) just aren’t worth it.
The system is messed up. I don’t know if everybody knows this but CEOs can get sued by shareholders if they aren’t prioritizing profits. That’s why the suits are so focused on short term profits over everything else. Something needs to change.
Like this isn't just a video games thing. The vast majority of cash, time, and effort in the world is being allocated according to concerns of 3 months to 2 years. Capitalism will kill us all.
@Apistevist well, who wrote those laws? All these "shareholders" are primarily other rich people and the financial instruments that serve them. The entire system is built to be self-sustaining by people who benefit from it sustaining itself. Whether they're in business or government, anyone prioritizing profit over human life is the enemy.
I bought the audiobook and finished it in 2 days. It’s very interesting and shines a light on a lot of background events that most people don’t know about. It also shows the mess that happens when leaders who don’t understand video games try to decide how they should be made
Once a game developers become publicly traded companies it’s all down hill from there. To much red tape and politics. It’s not even about making good games anymore.
'PvE may have been a failure even if he had the development time'. Bro! He had 12 years and didn't make squat!! This is not in question anymore. Jeff specialised in failing to make the game he envisioned. 12 YEARS! He accidentally made a master piece and then made sure it got destroyed. Very sad.
ive been saying this and people get heated because they like jeff so much but he took the main team for ow and wasted years recording gun sounds, making up abilities for the skill trees, articulating the rigs for characters and making collision and physics tech for the ow engine which is barely noticeable and only had four incomplete missions after years of work with very uninspired skill trees for like 12 characters it’s insane
I am still playing, and still having fun, I have also been hearing that overwatch is dying or falling since 2018, yet here we still are, overwatch is not destroyed, and as far as I can tell these next 2 6v6 and 5v5 modes are going to be my ideal style of play. Anyway when exactly is this destruction supposed to happen again?
@@vodkastudios4170 I've been playing OW since 2016 and while I've consistently liked the game the series had some massive low points. The hero/map drought from 2019 - late 2022 was insane and a lot of earlier OW2 seasons had major monetization or balance problems, a lot of good will and momentum the franchise had was just completely put on pause for 3 years while other live service games were thriving due to Covid lockdowns. I think Overwatch is actually finally on an upswing again with the consistent hero and map releases alongside interesting game modes every season and I hope they can keep this momentum.
@vodkastudios4170 the reputation is torched... the strategy of ow2 was doomed. They didn't even have an engine to run 6v6 but they were gonna run PvE? There's no PvE, no campaign, nothing. And all they do now is repair what they broke. The league also is completely dead. They didn't pivot in the right directions at the right times. There's mountains of work that theyve done that will never see the light of day. All wasted
Jeff kaplan leaves ow to dry for nearly 3 years and a lot of people in this dumb community still talk about him like he would fix every problem ow2 has when this current dev team is making updates frequently. Maybe it's not as easy as just adding one person to the dev team to fix this game after all.
@@verguco6051You can talk when you meet even a twentieth of the double shield era's additions to OW1 (not including OW2's development hell) *without* the harassment of a clique of higher ups sexually harassing you and your fellow coworkers and stealing work lunches (among other things) from the company fridge that you and the others brought in from home.
People have to think Jeff K. literally blew 13 years between project Titan and OW “2” failing at both… he got paid good money by the way to do that. I think we simply at the is point need to drop the name “Overwatch 2” and go to just “Overwatch”.
frankly, if I understand you correctly, this is a blatantly incorrect take. to state he just "blew 13 years between titan and ow 2" while completely ignoring the massive success of overwatch (which was what he was up to during that time) seems very silly.
@ No, you’re take here is incorrect. OW the PVP game was NOT Jeff’s idea, it was a salvage effort green lit by Kotick. Between Titan and OW “2l, Jeff blew 13 years. To your point, OW was a massive success and Jeff utterly resented and mishandled it, the salvage development of OW wax maybe a year heavily using assets including character designs from Titan. Your statement shows a lack of understanding how all this progressed.
@fractalelf7760 you seem very vehement to see something so nuanced as simply black and white. I'm glad you can have such conviction in villains you create
@ I’m just telling you what is clear history. As for “Black and white”, I also said Kotick was no angel in all this but too many backed Jeff not knowing what was going on and his poor management just liking his style. Reality was, he never liked the PVP game and starved it. He just smiled and double-talked fooling many for a long time.
I never really comment on videos but just wanted to say that the gaming space specifically needs more of this analysis. These topics are complex and often require a more in-depth discussion as opposed to the typical reactionary content that is popular in the gaming space and UA-cam as a whole. You really are doing great work. As a side not I think you should really consider getting a new webcam/camera and lighting. The lower production value effects the way people might perceive the content (eg. less authoritative).
I feel compelled to comment on the Diablo Immortal story. There hadn't been a peep about a followup to Diablo 3 leading up to that Blizzcon. They explicitly hyped what turned out to be Immortal as the next big thing in Diablo. As far as anyone knew Immortal either was Diablo 4 or that there was no Diablo 4 in development. Nobody deserves to be threatened over it, but of course they'd get clowned on after that announcement.
The main problem, if people consider it a problem, is the audience. I don't support any of these practices financially. I don't buy skins or do anything at the cash shop. They don't get one cent from me period. If everyone does this, then they will have to change their tactics, but these scummy practices work. And why? Because people keep buying their crap. If Overwatch 2 fails because of this, so be it, something better will come along. Look at youtube for an example, some of the biggest channels are the scummiest of all, but it makes money! The audience doesn't care, they say they do, but they keep shoveling the crap into their mouths and call it Ambrosia. We can complain all day long, but it is not the fault of the company if they keep making record profits on something like Diablo Immoral. Who is handing them that money? The audience. I have a bunch of free games I enjoy playing thanks to these whales, but if I want to play a well done game, I will play something made over 10 years ago.
ah that's an interesting point. I've seen defences of in-game transactions as a way to let everyone enjoy the game for free and there have been a few (mostly multiplayer shooters) that I casually enjoyed in recent years but all the solid, complete experiences on day 1 I've had were with older games or indie/smaller scale products without these monetization practices. I still play Nuclear Throne to this day, man
@@poymannyng1845 My channel is still mostly old genesis, nintendo etc... games and my most enjoyable experiences are single player games. I am starved though for something new though that is like those old MMOs, but sadly, things have changed. Enjoy Nuclear Throne man.
you speak of this "audience" as if the majority of players were pouring money into the game. Every game's monetization gets carried by a miniscule minority of whales. it's not a democratic process.
The Cosby room is related to his crimes. Maybe the carpet was part of the “bit” But Cosby’s crimes were a well known and open secret for people involved in the entertainment industry even gaming . Especially for well off California people like them. They knew. Just like with Harvey their crimes were public jokes until someone looked at things criminally. I’m very interested in your perspective when it comes to OWL stuff and your interpretation of the Some of books points too. Cool video Overall maybe add more visuals related to what your talking about.
honestly a large part of my opinion on Blizzard and all of the controversy falls to this: I blame them extensively for staying silent and not creating a narrative or owning narratives surrounding some of the biggest franchises in the entire gaming industry. How they failed to effectively highlight that diablo immortal was a separate dev team, how little they communicated about anything OW2 for YEARS... if you keep your audience and your players completely in the dark, they will always get bitter, and the most negative voices will be elevated above all else. People caring so much about their games is a privilege that they earned by releasing amazing games in the first place. That loyalty and trust was taken advantage of by profit seeking executives and a complete lack of communication and transparency from the company as a whole.
43:28 _Everyone said "You worked on this for 6 years?" said the person, "No we worked for one year on this, we spent those other years on all the PVE stuff"_ Yeah, feels about right
The diablo immortal went over poorly because they primed the community for diablo 4 to be up, just for that to get pushed back in silence. blizzcon 2018 was also pretty bad too overall, not much was announced and I remember it being a pretty big nothing burger outside of wow classic.
Blizzard, was gentrified for its IP. Similar way Wizards of the Coast have. It’s business gentrification… there’s nothing to do with quality, it’s about making large quantities of shiny spam.
The part about the kid dying in The Lost Vikings hits home for me. I am now 43 years old and I still use my dresser from my childhood in my hobby room and it has a dent in it from a Sega Genesis controller due to The Lost Vikings. LMAO
Ok, so like did I like Overwatch 1? It was alright, a lot of my friends would ultimately bounce off as the new car smell went away and we were actually starting to take the game more seriously because there was nothing else left to do. When I was alone I realized that I too didn't care for the game that much and I left right before role-queue was introduced. PvE was the last possible way to make me interested in the game because I don't really care for the gameplay loop but Dragons and Hero live fucking rent free in my head. I suspect one of the reasons OW2 is so hated is because it represents a universe a lot of people really love that Blizzard will clearly never really do anything with. The only reason I'm making this comment is because Spilo said the reason people stuck around was because they love the PvP, and to be fair the reason I have stuck around is I enjoy the passionate community around the game. However I feel like there is probably a massive number of people who have kind of kept an attachment to OW is because they think the universe is cool and hope that someday something interesting will happen to the IP.
So many things revealed thats definitely makes so much sense in hindsight. The Netflix beef was something I never imagined but definitely makes sense given the popularity of OW at the time and they still chose to go with a League of Legends product. It actually goes to show how good Overwatch is that despite the best efforts of incompetent people the game has still survived today.
19:58 This is incorrect. It’s more profitable to inject massive amounts of mtx/subscription based revenue, cut costs anywhere you can where the only reward is long term reward/brand loyalty (the “player sentiment”) dump the company at a higher valuation after a few years and then do the same thing with another company. It’s horrible for product quality, but giving people the opportunity to spend more money works well for profits of an investor that doesn’t need to concern itself with things like “making a good product”. They make the worst product most people will still buy, and charge as much as possible for it.
This is such a good video! The book is super interesting. Might have to pick it up myself. You're super eloquent in this video and made things simple and direct to understand. Good shit, bro.
between the community, fake news and content creators and everyone that does drama and want to take advantage of that by making videos for views, people got a terrible sense of what was actually happening mixing the good and the bad things and everything was taken out of proportion so fast... tbh content creators also have their share of guilt, we can still see some of those videos to this day spreading misinformation.
Outstanding video with lots of problems properly explained in simple words. The creative market is indeed not a cookie cutter bussiness that can be measured in a simple factory blueprints and it's not a numbers bussiness either. I'll def look more into that book
I've gotta finish the book before I watch this. I'm on the part before WoW launch and it's honestly a great read if anyone's on the fence about picking it up even if they're only invested in Overwatch stuff like myself.
I think that what should have happened in hindsight is someone like Aaron Keller should have stayed on OW1 and done what they are doing now, churning out content, maps, etc to keep it going, and Jeff should have moved onto the second phase with whichever devs wanted to move onto the new team. Then OW1 wouldn't have lost so many players, and if OW2 failed then it could have been cancelled and we wouldn't have had the drought. I'm someone who would have kept playing OW1 until the PVE came out and then would have switched to a Looter shooter style OW2. If the PVE still failed then it would have been sad but Jeff could have left as he did and we would still be in a better place as a game.
Spilo bro. You are my favorite Overwatch creator and every video you make seems to solidify that opinion. It’s crazy how I haven’t had that amazing feeling from a newly released character since wrecking ball. Since I’ve watched your Venture videos it’s unlocked my ability to play that character and have some genuine fun in this game again. Thank you kind sir.
20:50 this is why everyone has been complaining about getting banned and silenced for 'no reason'. the customer service is gone and all player behavior is handled by a bot. it used to be outsourced to india but they dont even want to pay for that anymore.
@47:00 I'm sorry but that's 100% BS. In that panel meeting there was a literal question on whether they had plans for another PC diablo or whether Diablo Immoral was going to be released on PC and they said no.... They gave a literal "no" to the question on whether there were plans for a diablo on PC.... That's the whole reason why that guy asked whether it was an out of season april foolsjoke... they did an interview with the guy who asked that very question and why he was motivated to ask that so Jason saying it was to seperate Diablo immoral from D4 or to alleviate worries of it taking resources away from the D4 team is either plain BS or really incompetent and having seen how blizzard has been operating for the last couple of years I would say either answer would be just as bad.
Blizzard set itself apart as the game dev that did all of that other stuff. i.e. worrying less about direct profit, trying to hype up games, make what they enjoy, etc. As soon as that stuff went away, it lost the trust of its customers.
During the time this was all going down I knew it wasn't anything to do with the 'ftonline' developers, it was all coming from upper management. It's the same in a lot ofindustries/companies, there are people who genuinely want to make a thing or provide a service they really care about. But as soon as you have upper management restricting you or prodding you in directions that maximise profit you get bad results. I've never blamed the Overwatch devs themselves, they've really been through some stuff.
OK, yes, the response to immortal was unacceptable, but did blizzard actually make it clear at all that it was a separate project that wasn't affecting 4's development? I feel like people wouldn't have had nearly as bad a widespread reaction if that was made clear. If it was, then I guess that's just a show of how bad a narrative can get distorted.
I like this yapping content. Low-key, I think just a little bit more production would add a lot of value to the video. Doesn't have to be fully edited b-roll type of stuff, but maybe some text/quotes on screen, some minecraft gameplay, something other than only sitting in front of a web cam.
One lesson here is, maybe curb your MMO hires, but especially those who admonish "care bears" to excuse broken game mechanics, and are demonstrably averse to offering a fun user experience. Or you're gonna have a bad time.
i did hear what samito said regarding the book and its a big shame but i do agree that it was a mix of the change of times of a person whos been there for 16+ years and how they fought to try to stop ow from becoming something like call of duty if they decided to bring anyone over since the activision blizzard divide in culture is very different
Wayy too late for recovery now imo. I never got to experience Overwatch 1. I joined in season 1 of Overwatch 2, so from the very beginning all that game has done is disappoint me. I got sick of seeing this game which had so much potential get slaughtered over and over again by its greedy scum developers due to their insatiable greed for our hard earned cash and their laziness to deliver on promises. Never seen such a sad excuse of developers in any other game I’ve played. I moved over to BO6 recently and I’m having a blast🔥
People spend more around the holidays. Its tradition, they have extra time off, they have extra money. Company wants to make more money on the holidays, bring in more labor, take away all time off during holidays, cuts holiday bonues.... Holidays don't do as well as they used to
I really appreciate you making this type of content. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing with anything specific, but it's nice to see content creators show a mostly neutral opinion on these subjects. It's always refreshing to see someone saying facts and talking politely about it, instead of either screaming their lungs on "how everyone but them are stupid for believing in anything" or about how "they talked to these people once in an event so they are my friends, so they're the only ones who know the truth".
I don't agree with the idea that we should have stuck with the pvp we had with OW1. I did love it, I do think it should have been supported of course, but I do think the full plan was good and I would have liked to see it be successful. Obviously, they would have needed two teams to work on them both at the same time. Blizz did the same thing with Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft which were developed simultaneously.
ive been telling people for years. video games are trash now and it is a labor issue. this is a worker issue. nothing would get done in any industry ever if managers had the power they have in the video game industry.
Dude, what you dont know is OWL itself was stolen (from me.) i had a developers liscense with them in which they approved the project but then sued me for it 6mos later. i was heartbroken
The Heroes of the Storm take is just wrong. The got good again when the esports scene died and it was allowed to be silly. It should have never been so hard pushed to be an esports title. It was just supposed to be a fun map for SC2 and the execs tried to turn it into a cash cow and something to push towards esports.
i understand if people were hyped but from the moment they announced overwatch 2 i knew it would fail, dont get me wrong blizzard is known for their pve i just didnt trust a team that had been doing such a lackluster job at the final stages of their game, even before slowing down (even more) the updates to focus on the sequel. You just cant turn around your managment nightmare overnight.
I think the PvE was going to be a huge step forward. And ultimately it was poor management that slowed it, and greed that halted it. The Hero Missions, leveling up my heroes to make them absolute gods, was the number one thing I most looked forward to. Using the heroes I love, and the few that I don't, in an environment where I get to power them up and make them stupid op to mow down baddies. As someone that likes Vermintide 2 and LOVES DRG; I was super looking forward to it. The thing is, whatever many may call bland and boring, there is an audience for this kind of repetitive gameplay. This was largely about broadening its audience and catering to a certain kind of gameplay loop. Not everyone was down for it. But many try speaking for all, stating that no one liked what we saw and no one asked for PvE in the first place. This is disingenuous and tries to not only cope with Blizzard's failures, but to discredit further dissenters. Same as when Flats states that it's not fair to complain about the things we didn't get for Overwatch 2. No, it's absolutely fair. They fucked up, they didn't give us the promised product really in any form, and now it's a skin shop with a game attached. We've every right to dig up those wounds and state what a pathetic fucking failure Overwatch's rebrand as a sequel has been. I at least continue to call it Overwatch, because that is what this is. This is not a sequel. It's a cash shop update that went to a worse monetization scheme. And I, among others, will continue to state the game would have been better off with the promised additions than without. As well as "Blizzard quality experience" being a nebulous dodging of personal responsibility while holding no weight. (On account of Blizzard quality becoming steadily more and more Hi-Rez quality.)
Lets see: They didn’t do updates frequentely (Ana was release and she didn’t get nerfed for months, boring ass strats didnt get nerfed for months also) shield were a problem and they never fixed forced competitive (real competitive games need to evolve naturally to have a long longevity like all Valve games) devs too afraid to make the game less casual blizzard sick ass employees In the end overwatch was always mid.
This is like Xbox pinning the blame on Phil Spencer or whoever did the Xbox One unveil panel, how the fuck is a whole company going to blame one person? And if it really was his fault why didn't the company give him more time to cook? Like make it make sense PLEASE
You say that the fact that we are watching the video is proof that the PvP element, or phase 1, is the golden goose of OW, but I have to disagree. Speaking only for myself and those I played OW1 with, nearly every time we hopped on, from the release of Brig all the way up until OW2, at least one of us would say "ugh, I can't wait for this game to have real PvE." The PvP has always been full of toxic people with loser mindsets, and all we ever wanted was phase 2. Look at the success of games like Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2, and a slew of others like them, and I bet you'll find more than a couple disappointed OW fans who just wanted more cinematics and the PvE game they were promised. The PvP was always a holdover, and treating it as the main course was bound to turn it into a slightly better version of Paladins, like it is now.
What part of the video (time stamp) talks about these wrongdoings of Jeff? I literally don’t have enough time to watch an hour long video about this, but I’m interested to hear the part about Jeff.
A shitshow on a lot of fronts. These "businessmen" need to appreciate and respect that the design process, a quality one at least, involves lots of unpredictability, investment, and is a labor of love. Internet is shitty and reactive as always.
The main reason that OW1 failed was because Jeff did not recognize what was important and take action to change high priority problems. He had some vision of OW2 and OW3 and had no concern for OW1 (the game that everyone loved and was playing). The main reason that OW is not as good as it was in 2017 and hasn't been so since is that Jeff changed the balance of the game entirely, changing the experience of the game entirely. He buffed and reworked easy characters so they could have more impact and released Moira (a character that was also easy with more impact than they should have had). Then he released Brigg (the Godzilla of easy characters with high impact). Around this time, both casuals and tryhards left the game because the experience they loved was no longer there. He had the data. He knew it happened. He was too stubborn to change because he was changing OW1 to make it easier to turn it into OW2 and OW3. To this day, the game is influenced by his choice to shift the balance philosophy in this way back in 2017. Jeff also watched as Brigg destroyed the game, as Goats took over pro scene for over a year, as double shield actually gained squatter's rights because it was around so long, and other things like moth meta. These were all core issues that he should have taken strong action on and implemented workable solutions. Brigg should have been removed from the game and reworked or simply never been reintroduced. The game is more important than one character. 2-2-2 should have came out years before it did. Orisa could have been redisigned or maybe the concept of Sigma examined as he supports non-mobile poke comps which are potentially detrimental to the OW experience. Imortality was an irresponsible ability to have added to the game and it should have been addressed in OW1, especially during double shield. An ability should not have more power than an ultimate because that means the ability is actually an ultimate on a short cd. Anyways, if you want to see true player agency, a sense of excitement and competitive drive in players, go back and look at footage of 2017 Overwatch. You see one player getting quick kills, even on tanks and having the potential to take over the game. The dps role was respected back then, and the excitement in OW was partly due to the potential of what a good player could do in a game and how awesome you could be if you really became good at the game. Player agency was taken away after 2017, and it wasn't fully given back in OW2. People arguing otherwise just don't remember early OW1 or never played it.
@jingiant for real! I miss that moment in time so much. People who didn't experience it wouldn't know what it felt like because, even with good writing, it's hard to capture the excitement in the air back then.
19:37 Three idiots, like the Bollywood film from like the late '00s to the early 2010s? Iirc it was 2009 but I haven't seen that movie in ages. That's childhood nostalgia right there.
Yep, looked it up on IMDb and that is a quote from that 3 idiots. Thank you for reminding me that this movie exists. I'm gonna go watch it now… right after finishing this video 😅
37:56 Jokes on you, I didn't even think the first game was *that* amazing and quit back in like early 2018 because it was getting patched to shit. Interesting to keep up with though.
There's a lot of nuance to this discussion- please give the video a watch, the book a read, and develop your own opinions!
Okay but what about your hair ? Whose fault is it ??
Why dedicate so much time to a dead IP ? There's better things to do in life. It's just a game to us it's not our brand, good luck Coach.
Spilo: Guys let's have a respectful, nuanced discussion in the comments.
The comments: H A I R
The most I got from this video is that it feels like *everybody* in the leadership roles suck.
It sounds like a... hairy situation. I'll see myself out now.
Guys be nice to spilo he is growing out his hair for his upcoming zarya cosplay
Agon pogontovnsti!
He is kind of short for zarya.
Oh okay i was wondering what was up with it lmfao. Jawn looks terrible.
i lol'd at this comment
The broccoli head phase is tough
as an artist for a small games company... stable leadership, CLEARLY communicated deadlines, and HUMAN project management/feedback is all we need to thrive 😭 why do we get treated as an afterthought in the industry over and over again?
Once studios get overtaken by publishers creativity and innovation takes a backseat to pure profits. That blizzard of all companies started outsourcing their games to indian graphic studios says loads.
because its not profitable to make people comfortable
they just can't understand what art is
I don't see how the artists aren't the more respected higher paid employees tbh. They draw/design the characters, environments, and other things. Without the artists they would only have a vision of what they want, not a visual interpretation of it. Whether it's character designers or graphic designers they bring the game to life, and it's one of the more important jobs.
@@error404webpagenotfound Capitalism...... Apparently we should never change that... EVER! - Bobby
That “not realizing the first step was the masterpiece” hit so hard
37:52 - 38:18
That's just wrong. Every step could have been its own masterpiece. The second step was a failure because they turned Overwatch into a cash cow that they could milk dry.
@@MattMama-w2vyour looking at it wrong. Originally Overwatch wasn't going to be a live service game, with the team going to start work on overwatch pvp. However the success meant that they had to continue to update it while at the same time wanting that expansion. In splitting resources between teams they let Overwatch 1 slowly die and Overwatch 2 made little progress. The solutions were to staff up, which Kotick wanted, or not make overwatch 2 at all. Kaplan didn't want to staff up while at the same time wanting that overwatch pvp. Him not being satisfied with overwatch 1 is the catalyst for all the issues we face. It's not so much as milking a cash cow as management.
@@gaelsarmiento4496 except they also milked the cash cow. Pretending they didn’t is just lying
In my opinion, the shortsightedness prevalent in modern business is heavily tied to the quarterly/yearly timescale any public company is held to. At best, year over year comparisons are the “long” time frame for these companies. Average turnover for CEOs means that prioritizing 5 years plans at the cost of 2 years of on paper results means they’re gonna be gone before the plan could ever succeed.
Yeahhhhh. We seen how they been operating for even the past 5 to 10 years now.
Record-breaking profit for the quarter? Better do mass layoffs. Three of the four quarters for the company are showing strong financial performance? Clearly not according to stockholders as that last quarter they were weaker is some sign the company is failing. Whats that? You can't delay a game for one or more weeks, or even a month because you need to cash in on that christmas time for that quarter? Better crunch harder even if it means your employees are going to perform worse later. Want to push up the sales for the coming quarter? Better have microtransactions, chop chop.
Meanwhile economists and stockholders and ceos and whatever else wonder "Wait, what do you mean the customers want to buy our games less? What are we doing wrong?"
Netflix is not the only place they could've shopped the show idea. It's clear that they just abandoned it.
It is tho. Every other streaming platform is just shit or doesnt have enough users to justify making a show, And the exec sniping netflix pulled off is in 2018 so amazon prime the only decent competitor to netflix didnt even exist.
@@kkcydthere was also Hulu,and wether or not they were shit is irrelevant. They still had options, and what happened with PvE, it is clear that they did it bc they thought it wasn’t going to make them enough money or they were spending too much on it.
@@CesarCaballero-ui8tp did you even watch the video
Something I think Samito said really strikes too true. The Overwatch leadership just deletes stuff rather then fix it, Or did. 2cp? Remove it. Double shield, remove 2nd tank. Netflix show didnt work out, abandon it. Cant deliver the pve story, just abandon it. There is a bunch of dev stories that follow this.
I think its gotten alot better now, but they really were just in this mindset of "delete all that doesnt work now instead of fixing it" and its really annoying to hear about what could have been
They’re still making the show, they’re just having to make their own platform so they can charge people more to watch the same episode, but with the heroes using different skins.
I hope all this publicity brings Jeff out of hiding so we can hear his side of the story. Something tells me he has an NDA and is unable to say things in the ways that his ex-colleagues are and I find that sketchy.
whats there to say he was too stubborn to see making a destiny/borderlands version of overwatch within overwartch using all the characters instead of making custom characters that use the already existing characters abilities to save dev time and resources was the way to go his unwillingness to see his error costed peoples jobs you can have good intentions and still screw people over
Keep in mind several of these devs are faceless because of the NDAs, there's not much reason for them to lie, maybe bias but not lie.
Activision Blizzard employees are on NDA for life. Theres an "impossible" zombies easter egg on BO3 which came out in 2015 and a youtuber interviewed the devs recently and they all got in trouble for talking about the game
@@Kishiiknight this mentality is the problem? Does Jeff’s side not matter? Even if I am wrong it’s better to hear his side than to take it all in “good faith.” I don’t believe in it.
@@luiegiii It's only "sketchy" if you're someone who puts Jeff Kaplan up on a pedestal. I bet you never called anything anyone said about Bobby Kotick "sketchy".
The book mentions that Jeff refused to let a different team handle OW2, and honestly this is something I agree with. Jeff and his team were passionate about OW and OW2, and he didn't want some suits and shills to completely deface OW. I don't think Jeff should get flack for trying to keep the team with passion on the project.
I think two things can be true. I agree that Jeff shouldn’t get flack for wanting to keep a passionate team together. However, I also agree with criticism that his refusal to expand the team is what led to OW dying on the vine while players waited for OW2, a vision that was ultimately unable to be executed.
I dont give him flack for that. I do think OW2 was too ambitious for its own good on Jeff's part. That craving for a fully pve story expansion within the game of overwatch itself vs just letting an entirely different company make that kind of game will always puzzle me. There was no way this was going to work and actually come out good. The pve events they had done before the announcement werent even that great so to me no amount of skill trees would be enough to make that interesting.
I say for me it looked like Jeff wanted to make Borderlands customization and PVE within OW. Doomed to fail from the start and expecting his team to be able to handle it all was shortsighted as fuck.
edit: Ironic that the game is now defaced by suits and shills.
@@aerostrafe1075 It's interesting you say that because that was always my view too, although I feel that view was very much the minority.
@@PaulStargasm Its strange. I wanted an Overwatch game but I wanted like a game separate from the pvp game entirely. A nice focused game on the founding of OW during the omnic crisis with the founding members as the playable characters. Make that somewhat borderlands esque or make it a looter shooter with skill threes then you might have something cool.
I know I was in the minority on it since everyone would be hellbent on playing their hero so reducing the cast for a game to like 6 even as a separate game would just rub people wrong. PVE to me was just a mistake to take on from the jump in the form they wanted.
@@aerostrafe1075i really dont think ow2 was all that ambitious. They didn't touch pvp for like 3 years. They could have spent that whole time working on what they originally set out to make with ow2 and people would have been happy. Instead they used that time to give us something nobody asked for.
As dev on titan and overwatch, I can assure you that the live service aspect of overwatch was planned ahead of time and intentional. E.g. We were crunching on ana before the game launched.
It was frustrating to hear all the community complaints about crowd control, and then we released brig. I remember watching TimTheTatman quit after being stunned for like 8 seconds on rein. Big sad.
Thanks for the insight. And helping make the Game that defined my teenage years 👍
this is a really cool aspect
release maximillian as a summoner support, you wont
i've said it before and say it again, kapplen stumbled on gold, but got angry it wasn't silver.
NGL, all this time having people screaming "Papa Jeff left, that's why the game became shit" pissed me off so much, especially already knowing some of the things that were going on behind the scenes.
Jeff was just the face that we all knew. Him representing the idea that "the old Blizzard guard" left and that's why things went downhill, I believe is still a reasonable take to have. Sure it's simplifying the issues, but the philosophy and culture that was nurtured at Blizzard came from that old guard. A shame they couldn't evolve into something more sustainable.
@@oDiiJei Jeff probably could have made it work provided they didn't try make the Superbowl of ESports, sustaining a live game and PVE with one team.
This needed 2-3 teams of devs Could have had Aaron lead one and Jeff the other.
Say what you want about Jeff but alot of players wanted to see his vision for OW2 PVE.
@@kellywilson137 I'm on the side that pve wouldnt've worked ever with jeff's leadership after this books release, and i'm starting to see the problems that arose with making characters designed for pvp to pve. Like with widow mentioned in this book, how the ult is practically useless in a pve horde mode and how they had to come up with solutions i.e the weakpoint thing in the mirrorverse mode.
Jeff also gatekept the dev team wanting it to stay small and focused. Even the big bad bobby k wanted the team to expand.
@@kellywilson137 A lot of players wanted to see his vision but that vision was ridiculously impossible to achieve. Think about it. 30+ unique heroes, with more heroes being released every quarter. Each one with unique talent trees and development. Each hero with a dedicated fanbase that shares a fantaticism about "game balance". How many other games are out there like that? The answer is zero, for good reason. It was always an untenable dream. Most PVE games with talent trees have like 3-8 classes, tops. The OW roster was always just too big for it.
@@jasonreid9267 The fanatism about game balance comes from the fact that it's a competitive game, PvP aspect in this game. PvE should have been used little to zero precision balancing knowing that it's not supposed to be competitive (no world firsts and such; some characters are OP but as long as everyone viable it's okay). Borderlands and similar games don't really balance things out too much, some builds/specs are garbage but it doesn't matter since fun is prime factor.
Helldivers 2 recently went thru the same rhethoric; and devs gave up doing precision balancing to make every weapon matter and such (while most players were calling it bullshit and playerbase dwindling). "You want this popular weapon to hit hard - it's gonna hit hard then." - for coop shooters it seems to be healthy approach. It also heavily reduces the workload.
And apparently Overwatch had started adding some balance changes applied to PvE specifically (on OW2 release no less; without said PvE but with balance changes for it)... but it's probably when they gave up the whole idea completely, thinking about how much shit they need to constantly balance out. Point is they gave up before trying, and it was the second time (Titan).
(Not expanding team is still bad, but as I got it the talk was more about casually hiring random people and let them do the thing without experience. Or doing it the Activision way and having 30 separate studios popping Overwatches... yeah, Call of Duty had ~30 different developers over history. Overall it doesn't sound very promising but Jeff's or somebody else's point is probably required to judge better.)
Whatever comes to light 2 things are clear: there is no one person to blame and Bobby Kotic is still a bad game company owner (and person seemingly).
If I wanted to throw in a 3rd I would say overwatch 2 seemed a bit ambitious.
Bobby took a trip to the island. Wouldn't trust him ever.
Whats on your head
I think that's a kitten
+1
A dead racoon 😂
Let him be bruh 😂
hair, skin, bones(the skull) and a brain obviously you moron
I think your approach is indeed pretty nuanced and I appreciate that. A lot of the discussion seems to be “Kaplan versus Kotick” but my position is that both of their ideologies were flawed. The key difference was that Kaplan’s decisions are much easier to be sympathize for or empathize with (even if I ultimately can see now he was misguided-and trust me, I wanted for nothing more than his PvE vision to work). Whereas I think Kotick should be hunted for sport. Dude’s unambiguously awful, even if he was correct once or twice.
But the approaches of both men (and Blizzard and Activision) resulted in devs on the front lines being hurt. Early Blizzard made many good games, but no game is worth human suffering or careening careers built from successful projects like Overwatch off a cliff. It’s really changed my perspective on the “golden years.” Activision management and Blizzard management failed their workers, and their workers have every right to retaliate in the form of unions, strikes, walkouts, or destruction of company property.
I was overjoyed to learn about the WoW union. While unions are imperfect, the only other option seems to be continued human suffering, and games (good or bad) just aren’t worth it.
“Destruction of company property?”😅😂 Alright, Comrade.
The system is messed up. I don’t know if everybody knows this but CEOs can get sued by shareholders if they aren’t prioritizing profits. That’s why the suits are so focused on short term profits over everything else. Something needs to change.
Like this isn't just a video games thing. The vast majority of cash, time, and effort in the world is being allocated according to concerns of 3 months to 2 years. Capitalism will kill us all.
Yup, that's why I hate when people blame businesses when it's the Government laws requiring them to be as profitable as possible.
@Apistevist well, who wrote those laws? All these "shareholders" are primarily other rich people and the financial instruments that serve them. The entire system is built to be self-sustaining by people who benefit from it sustaining itself.
Whether they're in business or government, anyone prioritizing profit over human life is the enemy.
@@amiablereaper There's only 1 monopoly left in the U.S. and it's the monopoly the Government has regarding violence.
Guess we have to shift our anger from the CEOs to the share holders.
I bought the audiobook and finished it in 2 days. It’s very interesting and shines a light on a lot of background events that most people don’t know about. It also shows the mess that happens when leaders who don’t understand video games try to decide how they should be made
Once a game developers become publicly traded companies it’s all down hill from there.
To much red tape and politics. It’s not even about making good games anymore.
'PvE may have been a failure even if he had the development time'. Bro! He had 12 years and didn't make squat!! This is not in question anymore. Jeff specialised in failing to make the game he envisioned. 12 YEARS! He accidentally made a master piece and then made sure it got destroyed. Very sad.
ive been saying this and people get heated because they like jeff so much but he took the main team for ow and wasted years recording gun sounds, making up abilities for the skill trees, articulating the rigs for characters and making collision and physics tech for the ow engine which is barely noticeable and only had four incomplete missions after years of work with very uninspired skill trees for like 12 characters it’s insane
I am still playing, and still having fun, I have also been hearing that overwatch is dying or falling since 2018, yet here we still are, overwatch is not destroyed, and as far as I can tell these next 2 6v6 and 5v5 modes are going to be my ideal style of play. Anyway when exactly is this destruction supposed to happen again?
@@vodkastudios4170 I've been playing OW since 2016 and while I've consistently liked the game the series had some massive low points. The hero/map drought from 2019 - late 2022 was insane and a lot of earlier OW2 seasons had major monetization or balance problems, a lot of good will and momentum the franchise had was just completely put on pause for 3 years while other live service games were thriving due to Covid lockdowns. I think Overwatch is actually finally on an upswing again with the consistent hero and map releases alongside interesting game modes every season and I hope they can keep this momentum.
@vodkastudios4170 the reputation is torched... the strategy of ow2 was doomed. They didn't even have an engine to run 6v6 but they were gonna run PvE? There's no PvE, no campaign, nothing. And all they do now is repair what they broke. The league also is completely dead. They didn't pivot in the right directions at the right times. There's mountains of work that theyve done that will never see the light of day. All wasted
@MattTheHuman9 yes, its possible they can repair. They're trying. I'm here hoping that 6v6 solves everything, but it needs to be well received
The Seagull quote somewhere around 12:00 😭😭Poop on ideas and fly away ahahahha
LOL
Jeff kaplan leaves ow to dry for nearly 3 years and a lot of people in this dumb community still talk about him like he would fix every problem ow2 has when this current dev team is making updates frequently. Maybe it's not as easy as just adding one person to the dev team to fix this game after all.
every single of those updates are shit and are not big changes anyway, just small changes to the values on the code, they are doing nothing
@@verguco6051OW2 has had like 6 or 7 hero reworks with more new characters than OW1 had in its life
@@verguco6051You can talk when you meet even a twentieth of the double shield era's additions to OW1 (not including OW2's development hell) *without* the harassment of a clique of higher ups sexually harassing you and your fellow coworkers and stealing work lunches (among other things) from the company fridge that you and the others brought in from home.
Our complaints are that they have made OW2 objectively worse than OW1 at the time of its shutdown, merely for the pursuit of profit.
People have to think Jeff K. literally blew 13 years between project Titan and OW “2” failing at both… he got paid good money by the way to do that. I think we simply at the is point need to drop the name “Overwatch 2” and go to just “Overwatch”.
I think that we should keep the "Overwatch 2" name because the dev team and the way the game evolves is completely different
frankly, if I understand you correctly, this is a blatantly incorrect take.
to state he just "blew 13 years between titan and ow 2" while completely ignoring the massive success of overwatch (which was what he was up to during that time) seems very silly.
@ No, you’re take here is incorrect. OW the PVP game was NOT Jeff’s idea, it was a salvage effort green lit by Kotick. Between Titan and OW “2l, Jeff blew 13 years. To your point, OW was a massive success and Jeff utterly resented and mishandled it, the salvage development of OW wax maybe a year heavily using assets including character designs from Titan. Your statement shows a lack of understanding how all this progressed.
@fractalelf7760
you seem very vehement to see something so nuanced as simply black and white.
I'm glad you can have such conviction in villains you create
@ I’m just telling you what is clear history. As for “Black and white”, I also said Kotick was no angel in all this but too many backed Jeff not knowing what was going on and his poor management just liking his style. Reality was, he never liked the PVP game and starved it. He just smiled and double-talked fooling many for a long time.
I never really comment on videos but just wanted to say that the gaming space specifically needs more of this analysis. These topics are complex and often require a more in-depth discussion as opposed to the typical reactionary content that is popular in the gaming space and UA-cam as a whole. You really are doing great work. As a side not I think you should really consider getting a new webcam/camera and lighting. The lower production value effects the way people might perceive the content (eg. less authoritative).
I feel compelled to comment on the Diablo Immortal story. There hadn't been a peep about a followup to Diablo 3 leading up to that Blizzcon. They explicitly hyped what turned out to be Immortal as the next big thing in Diablo. As far as anyone knew Immortal either was Diablo 4 or that there was no Diablo 4 in development. Nobody deserves to be threatened over it, but of course they'd get clowned on after that announcement.
The main problem, if people consider it a problem, is the audience. I don't support any of these practices financially. I don't buy skins or do anything at the cash shop. They don't get one cent from me period. If everyone does this, then they will have to change their tactics, but these scummy practices work. And why? Because people keep buying their crap. If Overwatch 2 fails because of this, so be it, something better will come along. Look at youtube for an example, some of the biggest channels are the scummiest of all, but it makes money! The audience doesn't care, they say they do, but they keep shoveling the crap into their mouths and call it Ambrosia. We can complain all day long, but it is not the fault of the company if they keep making record profits on something like Diablo Immoral. Who is handing them that money? The audience. I have a bunch of free games I enjoy playing thanks to these whales, but if I want to play a well done game, I will play something made over 10 years ago.
ah that's an interesting point. I've seen defences of in-game transactions as a way to let everyone enjoy the game for free and there have been a few (mostly multiplayer shooters) that I casually enjoyed in recent years but all the solid, complete experiences on day 1 I've had were with older games or indie/smaller scale products without these monetization practices. I still play Nuclear Throne to this day, man
@@poymannyng1845 My channel is still mostly old genesis, nintendo etc... games and my most enjoyable experiences are single player games. I am starved though for something new though that is like those old MMOs, but sadly, things have changed. Enjoy Nuclear Throne man.
you speak of this "audience" as if the majority of players were pouring money into the game. Every game's monetization gets carried by a miniscule minority of whales. it's not a democratic process.
Art needs money to grow bigger, but when big money comes in every art turns into sht.
Thats an everlasting life-death cycle of game industry.
ngl i’ve been staring at your cat for 11 minutes and hearing words
Thank you for the book report and video. Very interesting stuff!
Thank you for the textbook line and comment.
Sincerely.
Austin.
The Cosby room is related to his crimes. Maybe the carpet was part of the “bit” But Cosby’s crimes were a well known and open secret for people involved in the entertainment industry even gaming . Especially for well off California people like them. They knew. Just like with Harvey their crimes were public jokes until someone looked at things criminally. I’m very interested in your perspective when it comes to OWL stuff and your interpretation of the Some of books points too. Cool video Overall maybe add more visuals related to what your talking about.
honestly a large part of my opinion on Blizzard and all of the controversy falls to this: I blame them extensively for staying silent and not creating a narrative or owning narratives surrounding some of the biggest franchises in the entire gaming industry. How they failed to effectively highlight that diablo immortal was a separate dev team, how little they communicated about anything OW2 for YEARS... if you keep your audience and your players completely in the dark, they will always get bitter, and the most negative voices will be elevated above all else.
People caring so much about their games is a privilege that they earned by releasing amazing games in the first place. That loyalty and trust was taken advantage of by profit seeking executives and a complete lack of communication and transparency from the company as a whole.
Haircut? Looks nice bro 👍🏽
dont lie to that man
@@mustanggox💀 let it relax a bit it will look less goofy (probably)
@@WockMonkey
Hhhhhhhhhhhh
Like well done broccoli
@@mustanggoxbut it does look nice
43:28 _Everyone said "You worked on this for 6 years?" said the person, "No we worked for one year on this, we spent those other years on all the PVE stuff"_
Yeah, feels about right
The diablo immortal went over poorly because they primed the community for diablo 4 to be up, just for that to get pushed back in silence. blizzcon 2018 was also pretty bad too overall, not much was announced and I remember it being a pretty big nothing burger outside of wow classic.
The thing that's painfully silly to me is that a balance team feels like it could be a clearly separated team of mostly new hires
Blizzard, was gentrified for its IP. Similar way Wizards of the Coast have. It’s business gentrification… there’s nothing to do with quality, it’s about making large quantities of shiny spam.
The part about the kid dying in The Lost Vikings hits home for me. I am now 43 years old and I still use my dresser from my childhood in my hobby room and it has a dent in it from a Sega Genesis controller due to The Lost Vikings. LMAO
Ok, so like did I like Overwatch 1? It was alright, a lot of my friends would ultimately bounce off as the new car smell went away and we were actually starting to take the game more seriously because there was nothing else left to do. When I was alone I realized that I too didn't care for the game that much and I left right before role-queue was introduced. PvE was the last possible way to make me interested in the game because I don't really care for the gameplay loop but Dragons and Hero live fucking rent free in my head. I suspect one of the reasons OW2 is so hated is because it represents a universe a lot of people really love that Blizzard will clearly never really do anything with.
The only reason I'm making this comment is because Spilo said the reason people stuck around was because they love the PvP, and to be fair the reason I have stuck around is I enjoy the passionate community around the game. However I feel like there is probably a massive number of people who have kind of kept an attachment to OW is because they think the universe is cool and hope that someday something interesting will happen to the IP.
So sad how far Blizzard and Activision moved away from their roots over the years.
So many things revealed thats definitely makes so much sense in hindsight. The Netflix beef was something I never imagined but definitely makes sense given the popularity of OW at the time and they still chose to go with a League of Legends product.
It actually goes to show how good Overwatch is that despite the best efforts of incompetent people the game has still survived today.
19:58
This is incorrect. It’s more profitable to inject massive amounts of mtx/subscription based revenue, cut costs anywhere you can where the only reward is long term reward/brand loyalty (the “player sentiment”) dump the company at a higher valuation after a few years and then do the same thing with another company.
It’s horrible for product quality, but giving people the opportunity to spend more money works well for profits of an investor that doesn’t need to concern itself with things like “making a good product”.
They make the worst product most people will still buy, and charge as much as possible for it.
This is such a good video! The book is super interesting. Might have to pick it up myself. You're super eloquent in this video and made things simple and direct to understand. Good shit, bro.
between the community, fake news and content creators and everyone that does drama and want to take advantage of that by making videos for views, people got a terrible sense of what was actually happening mixing the good and the bad things and everything was taken out of proportion so fast... tbh content creators also have their share of guilt, we can still see some of those videos to this day spreading misinformation.
Outstanding video with lots of problems properly explained in simple words. The creative market is indeed not a cookie cutter bussiness that can be measured in a simple factory blueprints and it's not a numbers bussiness either. I'll def look more into that book
I've gotta finish the book before I watch this. I'm on the part before WoW launch and it's honestly a great read if anyone's on the fence about picking it up even if they're only invested in Overwatch stuff like myself.
Encouraging people to not take risks isn't good for business and, clearly it's bad for games because that's what killed OW1.
video ends at 54:50
I think that what should have happened in hindsight is someone like Aaron Keller should have stayed on OW1 and done what they are doing now, churning out content, maps, etc to keep it going, and Jeff should have moved onto the second phase with whichever devs wanted to move onto the new team. Then OW1 wouldn't have lost so many players, and if OW2 failed then it could have been cancelled and we wouldn't have had the drought.
I'm someone who would have kept playing OW1 until the PVE came out and then would have switched to a Looter shooter style OW2. If the PVE still failed then it would have been sad but Jeff could have left as he did and we would still be in a better place as a game.
I need something to listen to while I do work in the background so this is nice
Spilo bro. You are my favorite Overwatch creator and every video you make seems to solidify that opinion.
It’s crazy how I haven’t had that amazing feeling from a newly released character since wrecking ball. Since I’ve watched your Venture videos it’s unlocked my ability to play that character and have some genuine fun in this game again. Thank you kind sir.
43:20 did you mean "unfinished"?
The opinion I’ve developed:
Fish 🐟
20:50
this is why everyone has been complaining about getting banned and silenced for 'no reason'. the customer service is gone and all player behavior is handled by a bot. it used to be outsourced to india but they dont even want to pay for that anymore.
Nice Miguel O' Hara cosplay Spilo
@47:00 I'm sorry but that's 100% BS. In that panel meeting there was a literal question on whether they had plans for another PC diablo or whether Diablo Immoral was going to be released on PC and they said no.... They gave a literal "no" to the question on whether there were plans for a diablo on PC.... That's the whole reason why that guy asked whether it was an out of season april foolsjoke... they did an interview with the guy who asked that very question and why he was motivated to ask that so Jason saying it was to seperate Diablo immoral from D4 or to alleviate worries of it taking resources away from the D4 team is either plain BS or really incompetent and having seen how blizzard has been operating for the last couple of years I would say either answer would be just as bad.
I knew I wasn't tripping 😂 I was like did bro not see the other interviews?
Well Kaplan did come out saying that he never wanted OW2 to be a sequel. Just an overhaul of the original
I think there’s a missing angle there 37:07
Blizzard set itself apart as the game dev that did all of that other stuff. i.e. worrying less about direct profit, trying to hype up games, make what they enjoy, etc. As soon as that stuff went away, it lost the trust of its customers.
Damn, I haven't heard anyone reference three idiots before, loved that film.
During the time this was all going down I knew it wasn't anything to do with the 'ftonline' developers, it was all coming from upper management. It's the same in a lot ofindustries/companies, there are people who genuinely want to make a thing or provide a service they really care about. But as soon as you have upper management restricting you or prodding you in directions that maximise profit you get bad results. I've never blamed the Overwatch devs themselves, they've really been through some stuff.
OK, yes, the response to immortal was unacceptable, but did blizzard actually make it clear at all that it was a separate project that wasn't affecting 4's development? I feel like people wouldn't have had nearly as bad a widespread reaction if that was made clear. If it was, then I guess that's just a show of how bad a narrative can get distorted.
I like this yapping content. Low-key, I think just a little bit more production would add a lot of value to the video. Doesn't have to be fully edited b-roll type of stuff, but maybe some text/quotes on screen, some minecraft gameplay, something other than only sitting in front of a web cam.
appreciate the feedback!
Dawg you got TikTok brain please put down your phone for a couple weeks
Tik tok brain rot
@@CoachSpilo Please don't man, please don't.
Zoomers when the content of focus is the guy talking and not random garbage on the screen that’s not relevant
I think the hardest pill to swallow here is that Bobby Kotick made Overwatch
One lesson here is, maybe curb your MMO hires, but especially those who admonish "care bears" to excuse broken game mechanics, and are demonstrably averse to offering a fun user experience. Or you're gonna have a bad time.
Spilled
it's rare to see someone talking about this stuff while actually knowing what they are talking about
i did hear what samito said regarding the book and its a big shame but i do agree that it was a mix of the change of times of a person whos been there for 16+ years and how they fought to try to stop ow from becoming something like call of duty if they decided to bring anyone over since the activision blizzard divide in culture is very different
Maybe overwatch was just a snowballing mess of unfortunate events that we slowly are recovering from 🤷♂️
Wayy too late for recovery now imo. I never got to experience Overwatch 1. I joined in season 1 of Overwatch 2, so from the very beginning all that game has done is disappoint me. I got sick of seeing this game which had so much potential get slaughtered over and over again by its greedy scum developers due to their insatiable greed for our hard earned cash and their laziness to deliver on promises. Never seen such a sad excuse of developers in any other game I’ve played. I moved over to BO6 recently and I’m having a blast🔥
so well spoken for an hour straight uncut, and fast. intelligent mf
People spend more around the holidays. Its tradition, they have extra time off, they have extra money. Company wants to make more money on the holidays, bring in more labor, take away all time off during holidays, cuts holiday bonues.... Holidays don't do as well as they used to
I really appreciate you making this type of content. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing with anything specific, but it's nice to see content creators show a mostly neutral opinion on these subjects.
It's always refreshing to see someone saying facts and talking politely about it, instead of either screaming their lungs on "how everyone but them are stupid for believing in anything" or about how "they talked to these people once in an event so they are my friends, so they're the only ones who know the truth".
I don't agree with the idea that we should have stuck with the pvp we had with OW1. I did love it, I do think it should have been supported of course, but I do think the full plan was good and I would have liked to see it be successful. Obviously, they would have needed two teams to work on them both at the same time. Blizz did the same thing with Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft which were developed simultaneously.
Might want to fix Jason's last name in your description.
nice physic bro, keep it up 💪
Just ask for his number already bro..
@@Magi_K_Abend over habibi
ive been telling people for years. video games are trash now and it is a labor issue. this is a worker issue. nothing would get done in any industry ever if managers had the power they have in the video game industry.
Dude, what you dont know is OWL itself was stolen (from me.) i had a developers liscense with them in which they approved the project but then sued me for it 6mos later. i was heartbroken
Very informative. Thank you Spilo❤
Great video thank you!
Nail on head, very good analysis.
The Heroes of the Storm take is just wrong. The got good again when the esports scene died and it was allowed to be silly. It should have never been so hard pushed to be an esports title. It was just supposed to be a fun map for SC2 and the execs tried to turn it into a cash cow and something to push towards esports.
18:14 preach, Spilo
Yo nice tumbleweed hat
😭
i understand if people were hyped but from the moment they announced overwatch 2 i knew it would fail, dont get me wrong blizzard is known for their pve i just didnt trust a team that had been doing such a lackluster job at the final stages of their game, even before slowing down (even more) the updates to focus on the sequel. You just cant turn around your managment nightmare overnight.
Overwatch is the most wasted potential I've ever seen
The voiceline: "Such potential.... wasted" is actually a 4th wall break by Doomfist in reference to Overwat
Nahhh not even close, hots is way worse
I think the PvE was going to be a huge step forward. And ultimately it was poor management that slowed it, and greed that halted it. The Hero Missions, leveling up my heroes to make them absolute gods, was the number one thing I most looked forward to. Using the heroes I love, and the few that I don't, in an environment where I get to power them up and make them stupid op to mow down baddies. As someone that likes Vermintide 2 and LOVES DRG; I was super looking forward to it. The thing is, whatever many may call bland and boring, there is an audience for this kind of repetitive gameplay. This was largely about broadening its audience and catering to a certain kind of gameplay loop. Not everyone was down for it. But many try speaking for all, stating that no one liked what we saw and no one asked for PvE in the first place. This is disingenuous and tries to not only cope with Blizzard's failures, but to discredit further dissenters. Same as when Flats states that it's not fair to complain about the things we didn't get for Overwatch 2. No, it's absolutely fair. They fucked up, they didn't give us the promised product really in any form, and now it's a skin shop with a game attached. We've every right to dig up those wounds and state what a pathetic fucking failure Overwatch's rebrand as a sequel has been. I at least continue to call it Overwatch, because that is what this is. This is not a sequel. It's a cash shop update that went to a worse monetization scheme. And I, among others, will continue to state the game would have been better off with the promised additions than without. As well as "Blizzard quality experience" being a nebulous dodging of personal responsibility while holding no weight. (On account of Blizzard quality becoming steadily more and more Hi-Rez quality.)
Ok so this is jam-packed with genuine real world wisdom and feels like I'm listening to a true crime podcast 👌👌
Going for the Robert smith look. Nice 👌
52:00 When was blizzard ever known for its response to community feedback?
Lets see: They didn’t do updates frequentely (Ana was release and she didn’t get nerfed for months, boring ass strats didnt get nerfed for months also)
shield were a problem and they never fixed
forced competitive (real competitive games need to evolve naturally to have a long longevity like all Valve games)
devs too afraid to make the game less casual
blizzard sick ass employees
In the end overwatch was always mid.
This is like Xbox pinning the blame on Phil Spencer or whoever did the Xbox One unveil panel, how the fuck is a whole company going to blame one person? And if it really was his fault why didn't the company give him more time to cook? Like make it make sense PLEASE
50 minute video on ow and over half the comments are just lighting up his hair😂
You say that the fact that we are watching the video is proof that the PvP element, or phase 1, is the golden goose of OW, but I have to disagree. Speaking only for myself and those I played OW1 with, nearly every time we hopped on, from the release of Brig all the way up until OW2, at least one of us would say "ugh, I can't wait for this game to have real PvE." The PvP has always been full of toxic people with loser mindsets, and all we ever wanted was phase 2. Look at the success of games like Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2, and a slew of others like them, and I bet you'll find more than a couple disappointed OW fans who just wanted more cinematics and the PvE game they were promised. The PvP was always a holdover, and treating it as the main course was bound to turn it into a slightly better version of Paladins, like it is now.
Why no DPS Doomfist?!?!?!
Spilo what is this “ MrBeast career is OVER “ ahh thumbnail 😭
Looool true
Jeff Kaplan was a pretend nice guy, anyone who knew him since SCII days all knew the type of individual he truly was…
What part of the video (time stamp) talks about these wrongdoings of Jeff?
I literally don’t have enough time to watch an hour long video about this, but I’m interested to hear the part about Jeff.
You expect me to watch all this without subway surfers on in the background?
A shitshow on a lot of fronts. These "businessmen" need to appreciate and respect that the design process, a quality one at least, involves lots of unpredictability, investment, and is a labor of love. Internet is shitty and reactive as always.
The main reason that OW1 failed was because Jeff did not recognize what was important and take action to change high priority problems. He had some vision of OW2 and OW3 and had no concern for OW1 (the game that everyone loved and was playing). The main reason that OW is not as good as it was in 2017 and hasn't been so since is that Jeff changed the balance of the game entirely, changing the experience of the game entirely.
He buffed and reworked easy characters so they could have more impact and released Moira (a character that was also easy with more impact than they should have had). Then he released Brigg (the Godzilla of easy characters with high impact). Around this time, both casuals and tryhards left the game because the experience they loved was no longer there. He had the data. He knew it happened. He was too stubborn to change because he was changing OW1 to make it easier to turn it into OW2 and OW3. To this day, the game is influenced by his choice to shift the balance philosophy in this way back in 2017. Jeff also watched as Brigg destroyed the game, as Goats took over pro scene for over a year, as double shield actually gained squatter's rights because it was around so long, and other things like moth meta. These were all core issues that he should have taken strong action on and implemented workable solutions. Brigg should have been removed from the game and reworked or simply never been reintroduced. The game is more important than one character. 2-2-2 should have came out years before it did. Orisa could have been redisigned or maybe the concept of Sigma examined as he supports non-mobile poke comps which are potentially detrimental to the OW experience. Imortality was an irresponsible ability to have added to the game and it should have been addressed in OW1, especially during double shield. An ability should not have more power than an ultimate because that means the ability is actually an ultimate on a short cd.
Anyways, if you want to see true player agency, a sense of excitement and competitive drive in players, go back and look at footage of 2017 Overwatch. You see one player getting quick kills, even on tanks and having the potential to take over the game. The dps role was respected back then, and the excitement in OW was partly due to the potential of what a good player could do in a game and how awesome you could be if you really became good at the game. Player agency was taken away after 2017, and it wasn't fully given back in OW2. People arguing otherwise just don't remember early OW1 or never played it.
im glad someone feels the same way, i really wish we had gotten the overwatch we deserved, it was so much fun
@jingiant for real! I miss that moment in time so much. People who didn't experience it wouldn't know what it felt like because, even with good writing, it's hard to capture the excitement in the air back then.
Spilo with the 2024 fall season meta thumbnail
19:37 Three idiots, like the Bollywood film from like the late '00s to the early 2010s? Iirc it was 2009 but I haven't seen that movie in ages. That's childhood nostalgia right there.
Yep, looked it up on IMDb and that is a quote from that 3 idiots. Thank you for reminding me that this movie exists. I'm gonna go watch it now… right after finishing this video 😅
The reality is far more interesting than the fiction presented online. Good video.
Bro I think your camera is kinda smudged lul
37:56 Jokes on you, I didn't even think the first game was *that* amazing and quit back in like early 2018 because it was getting patched to shit. Interesting to keep up with though.