The slow and painful death of Overwatch 2.

 I hardly got to play thee. Literally, I never even downloaded the thing.    

Overwatch is a lightning rod franchise that touches every sector of the mainstream. A must-have 'installed' game that every self respecting gamer has on their quick-play bar. A bastion of inclusive representation that slowly recruits more faces from more corners of the gaming globe to bring all the world together under a shared union of a single competitive clarion call experience. Or at least that was what Overwatch was. What it strived to be and what it felt inevitable to become. Overwatch was that last dream from proper Blizzard, before 'The Gamer's Developer' become blotted out under the weight of corporate mandates and shareholder expectation that turned them into what they are today- a scrambling mutant wearing the torn-off friendly face of the old company, struggling to fit half-forgotten mannerisms in a puppetry of the Blizzard that was, whilst all too often succumb to those base desires to lie, underdeliver and manipulate.

Overwatch 1 felt like something special when it first landed. A true 'event game'. And it was, for a time. Everyone who was anyone played Overwatch to some degree, even if they weren't the biggest fans of it's style or gameplay or arguably repetitive mission-to-mission experience- there was always another part of the package to love. The characters felt designed to a higher standard over it's competitors, the wider world narrative felt fertile and begging to be tilled slowly as it blossomed into a brilliant flower: and the hero-based shooter genre finally felt approachable. Of course, 'approachable' in the casual servers- no sense going into competitive unless you knew what was up. Everyone was playiug Overwatch and everyone wanted to be Overwatch. It didn't matter that it was a priced box game, it didn't matter that it suited a specific PVP audience- like Red Dead or GTA or any of the other 'obviously I'll play that' games- it was a genre buster of a title.

But here we are today, with an Overwatch 2 that fails to break the interest barriers of the top 10 most streamed games on Twitch. Doesn't touch sales charts, (on account of it being a free-to-play microtransaction begging simulator now) doesn't break front-page industry news with it's machinations. Modern animated Youtube shorts barely cross 2 million views now, whereas the old one's would hit tens of millions within a month. Overwatch is not dying in a spectacular manner of an Icarus analogy, but in the slow unremarkable raspy manor of a decrepit and dying pensioner. The Overwatch game is no longer an icon, the E-Sports scene is on it's way to collapse and those outside of the core player base see absolutely nothing worth coming to the game for in the near or distant future. It is a ship adrift just waiting to get stuck in the Suez Canal. Except this franchise don't be 'evergiving'... Am I stretching on this analogy?

I know it didn't all start with the announcement that the single player hero stories were dead, or even the revelation that they had been unofficially dead since launch but the cowards in the team refused to voice that less it hurt their performance. The cracks actually started to show with the announcement of Overwatch 2 in the first place, which no one could seem to genuinely justify the exsistence of. All these years later it feels like Overwatch 2 was just an excuse to make the lootbox system worse and grab a tighter control on the release of Season Activities- which at this point only really appeals to medium-core players, because Hardcore players never put the game down and Casual haven't touched the game in years and forgot it even existed. I never thought I would see the day when Overwatch became a fading ghost of history.

Now the latest tragedy to befall Overwatch is really a compounding issue they and the entire gaming industry have been kicking down the road for years until recently. ESports is a huge advertising arm for plenty of these high-skill ceiling multiplayer games, with the running of a successful E-Sport tournament being considered something of a stamp of authenticity on the popularity of the game. Enough that Evole was, infamously, marketed directly to an Esports consuming public before the game was even out, sparking a whole generation of cringe we'll never truly wash ourselves clean of. But the Esports movement was like the late 20th century Japanese economy, in that it was an ever inflating bubble just waiting to burst like it has done recently, as all the investing world realises that Esports isn't as easy to monetise as tradtional sports.

Overwatch was big into using it's Esports arm to make itself a player in the space, with the OWL showing up as a mainstay every game awards and it's players even getting their official colours as reskins for ingame characters. And then that status quo was shaken when Overwatch 2 was announced with one less team spot, essentially forcing all Esports teams to size up a member to kick out. Then the game lost it's PVE dedicated content, which hurt the watchability of the game, and therefore of players of the game, from a public who were looking forward to that and staying abreast just for those updates. And then the money started draining out of the Esports movement altogether. Once upon a time Overwatch managed to demand a twenty million dollar buy in to all Esports teams who wanted a spot in the league, bitterly holding onto some allure of broken exclusiveness.

Today we've seen Overwatch introduce actual payouts for teams to leave the OWL. Six Million per contract ripped up, totally over a hundred million if everyone takes the offer to leave. And at this point- who's going to say no? Esports is on a downturn, venture capitalists are pulling our left, right and centre. Sure it sucks getting a consolation goody bag on the way of less than half the buy-in racket, but that's the most you can expect to make out of Overwatch 2 in the near future. For a game that took the leap to 2 in order to expand it's horizons, it's shocking to see Overwatch 2 losing more and more of what made the original franchise a special moment in history, instead becoming just another hero shooter, which was never what Overwatch was.

Overwatch was a prestigious achievement of art. A landmark definition of the hero shooter genre that demanded everyone else follow it's league. It commanded legions of fans, sparked countless hundreds of thousands of fan art material, changed a generation of Comic Con attendees, rewrote the book on how to be popular in a cross platform movement. Overwatch 2 was everything we didn't want from the game going forward. A shrinking of ambition, sacrifice for anti-consumerism, scaling back in scope and features... it was the death of Overwatch. Right now the only hope is the abstract concept of some mythical third Overwatch game that no one is possibly working on right now and which will enter the pipeline far too late to fix anything. Take a good long gander at the silhouette Overwatch cut into the skyline, and hold close the memory of what those unforgettable shapes meant- for that impression is all that will remain of them come the next generation along.