No Bonus for Overwatch 2 Devs from Blizzard Due to Game Criticism and Company Policy

Things aren't going well at Blizzard, as confirmed by Jason Schreier's recent reports in Bloomberg. Reportedly, the company didn't give bonuses to developers in charge of the development of Overwatch 2 because of the poor performance of the shooter.

1. The studio gives bonuses to its employees twice a year, in August and March, as we found out from Schreier's text. This means that bonuses should have been paid to the devs of Overwatch 2 this month, but this didn't happen.
2. It's all due to the change in the rules at Activision Blizzard. In the summer of 2023, a rule was introduced that bonuses will be awarded based on the results achieved by a given brand, and not the entire company.
3. Thanks to this, teams working on series such as Diablo or World of Warcraft received additional compensation. These brands have achieved greater success in recent months than Overwatch 2.
4. It should be noted that the change in corporate policy was driven by pressure from Activision's management, which believed that rewarding the devs of hit productions is the best approach. Blizzard's leadership had a different opinion - they believed that this move would lead developers to only want to work on the biggest titles, rather than engaging in new projects.
5. Since the beginning of this year, Blizzard has had a new CEO, Johanna Faries. She is to look into the rules for distributing profit-sharing bonuses to employees.

We recently reported that starting from the 10th season of Overwatch 2, the devs have decided to automatically unlock new heroes. Maybe this will draw in disappointed fans of the first game.

The numbers on SteamDB indicate that there are actually quite a few of them. Currently, the game has over 250,000 reviews from Valve platform users, but only 17% of them commented positively on the game. So, if the current profit-sharing rules at Blizzard are upheld, it doesn't bode well for Overwatch 2 developers to receive bonuses in the near future.

1. Overwatch 2 - game guide

Overwatch 2

October 4, 2022

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• Overview
• Guide

• free-to-play
• Blizzard
• gamedev behind-the-scenes
• Overwatch (franchise)
• online shooters