A new report from Jason Schreier at Bloomberg claims that Overwatch 2’s PvE content is already cancelled.
Quoting Schreier directly, here’s what sources told him about the situation:
“Last year, Overwatch 2 received a paid pack of three PvE story missions that sold poorly, according to people familiar with the business, which was a major reason for the cratering bonuses. In January, as part of a company-wide reduction in its work force, the majority of the team behind Overwatch 2’s PvE was laid off.
Overwatch 2 developers were informed that the company does not plan to finish any of the remaining planned PvE content and will instead double down on competitive player vs. player gameplay, according to the people familiar.”
Blizzard has yet to officially confirm this claim, but it certainly lines up with everything that we know. The Overwatch dev team sold fans on Overwatch 2 with the promise of this PvE. While Blizzard had become brilliant at developing Overwatch with a fun team multiplayer shooter, the franchise had always suffered from a lack of lore.
Blizzard made big claims about the amount of PvE Overwatchcontent, and for a while it looked like it genuinely made sense. Overwatch players would have a reason to keep coming back to the game for new single player story content, and that would also make it more likely for those players to keep playing the PvP component as well.
But this seemed to be a poisoned chalice, as reports from several sources, including Schreier, referred to many issues behind the scenes. Ironically, the claims were that the higher pressure to produce better content, led to standards that were too high to meet, and this content stalled as a result.
Schreier also reported on how the Overwatch team did not receive bonus pay for the first time since they started, because bonuses started getting tied to market performance. This was a major issue for this studio, and is one of many contributory factors to the studios’ ongoing woes.
It’s pretty obvious that Blizzard’s management should be taking a lot of the blame here, but based on Schreier’s account, they haven’t been accountable for their mistakes at all. We do have to hold a healthy skepticism on these accounts, as we can’t cross check this with any official response from Blizzard, or other reports that corroborate or dispute Schreier’s sources.
But if this is all true, one can’t help but feel bad for the Overwatch dev team, who now has to keep going as if nothing wrong happened.
