Former Blizzard Employee Reveals Truth About Overwatch 2's Disastrous Steam Launch
We learned a little bit of information about the backstory of Overwatch 2's launch on Steam. It was a disastrous debut, which made Blizzard's shooter the worst-rated game on the service.
Recent years have seen many publishers return to Steam after not entirely successful experiments with their own clients. With the year coming to an end, Blizzard finally joined them, but it ended in disaster. Indeed, the team's first game to hit Steam was the shooter Overwatch 2, whose card was flooded with negative reviews from players so heavily that the title for a time became the worst-rated item on the entire service (even today there is only one other game with worse reviews). Now we have learned a little about the backstory of this failure.
- It turns out that the developers knew perfectly well that the game would become a target of review bombing. For months before the release of Overwatch 2 on Steam, the developers begged Activision executives for resources and information to minimize this disaster, but they were denied.
- They also failed to provide Blizzard with the additional staff needed to manage community relations on Steam.
- The source of this information is Andy Belford, who formerly worked at Blizzard. He has spoken out now, as the head of Activision Bobby Kotick has finally stopped and developers are not afraid of consequences for criticizing his presidency.
- It is worth recalling that this is not the first report of how badly Kotick has damaged Overwatch 2. Last year producer Tracy Kennedy (she worked at Blizzard before moving to Riot Games) revealed that Activision's CEO heavily meddled in the development of the series, imposing various projects on developers, which were later cancelled. According to her, such mistakes by Kotick resulted in months of work on various aspects of Overwatch 2 end up in the bin, as the CEO forced a change in the concept of certain elements.
Recall that Overwatch 2 made its debut on Steam on August 10, this year. Currently, only 15% of player reviews are positive, which is categorized as "overwhelmingly negative" reception. However, this does not prevent the game from getting good activity results - yesterday, at the hottest moment of the day on Steam, it was played by more than 32 thousand people simultaneously.
