Overwatch and the Misery of Mismanagement

You don’t need an insider knowledge to know Overwatch has been mismanaged. It’s still nice to know it for definite.

Jason Schreier’s new book on Blizzard goes into some detail on the inner workings of Overwatch. He shared a shorter version on Reddit.

The further abridged version is that the team behind making Overwatch such a success were cautious in hiring new people in case it changed their company culture. They tried to feed the original Overwatch and make an ambitious Overwatch 2, and it obviously proved too big a task.

Which is why we ended up with a sequel that was anything but. I used to write about this franchise a lot. Now I don’t, and it’s because I, like a lot of people, can’t bring myself to play it. The sequel made it harder to unlock costumes, it got rid of maps. It was a free-to-play repackage, and it was a less product as a result. Worse, those of us that bought the first game new lost access.

Former Activision chief Bobby Kotick wanting to grow the team to grow Overwatch was surprising, especially when conventional wisdom would say otherwise. That says a lot about conventional wisdom in the gaming community. But more interesting to me is the general feeling of hubris behind these decisions.

In fairness, this was before live service games had really become a thing. The all-consuming nature of them wasn’t as understood as it is today. The original Overwatch wasn’t supposed to use that model because the model wasn’t as well established. And yet these are decisions that publishers and developers get wrong every single day.

We’re seeing a rise of failures in the industry. Games release, they sell less than expected, everybody moves on without really thinking about it.

Decision Making and Overwatch

Star Wars Outlaws, the Star Wars games everybody seemed desperate for, came and went without as much as a fanfare. Ubisoft admitted it wasn’t doing the numbers they expected.

Final Fantasy XVI and VII Rebirth didn’t do the numbers Square expected. Concord didn’t even come close to the numbers Sony expected. Barely a month is going by without something underwhelming.

Overwatch isn’t like those games, and yet the hubris is the same. Maybe it’s investing a bit too much in something, and making it a bit too big. Perhaps it’s going all in on service games, despite service games rarely succeeding. Or it could be committing to a big IP and watching as it disappears from the charts regardless.

It’s easy with hindsight to say these things. But the Overwatch reveal is interesting because it almost pinpoints a moment, even a specific conversation where things began to go off the tracks. It’s a rare reminder that the people making these games aren’t infallible. They don’t do things just because it’s the right thing to do. Over a five or six year development period, these moments happen time and time again, and games are a success despite them.

To err is human, to release Overwatch 2? Oh dear.