On August 10, 2023, Blizzard released their Free2Play game Overwatch 2 on Steam: It was a fiasco. Even today, the game has terrible reviews with only 15% positive ratings and is considered one of the worst releases of a major studio on Steam. An employee now says: The fiasco was the fault of then-CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick.
How bad was the release of Overwatch 2? It was very bad:
- On one hand, Blizzard was still struggling with the image damage from the sexism scandal, which significantly lowered the morale.
- On the other hand, Overwatch 2 was released without the promised PvE mode and even announced in May 2023 that these big PvE plans would never come. They had bitten off more than they could chew.
- After May 2023, the mood in the community was permanently damaged – also due to tricky monetization strategies. At the release in August 2023 on Steam, the expected disaster occurred: Overwatch, once a fan favorite with characters that were adored, was showered with hate and ridicule on Steam.
Launch without support was solely Bobby Kotick’s decision
This is what an employee from Blizzard says: On December 29, Andy Belford, a former Senior Manager at Blizzard in community development, spoke out on Twitter. Belford left Blizzard in September 2023 and is currently looking for a new job.
He says his team had warned the management months before that Overwatch would face review bombing:
“We begged for more information, more details, and more resources to help with all the expected backlash – everything was flatly denied.”
The community team was supposed to handle all the backlash on Steam, which Belford did not want to subject his employees to.
When he asked who had made the decision to release Overwatch 2 on Steam without providing more support to the community team, the answer was: “Bobby Kotick.”
Shit flows down, landing on poorly paid employees
Belford says: Kotick established a terrible culture at Activision Blizzard. Shit flowed from the top down and landed on the lowest-paid employees who were the most overworked. Management was too busy dealing with the wild directives from above that constantly changed direction and made no sense:
In the end, the management didn’t care about the players’ experience. It was only about the next earnings call with investors and shareholders.
What’s behind it: Some of these reports have now come out after Kotick’s departure, hinting that “Kotick is a ruthless businessman and has no love for games or his employees.”
To be fair: Blizzard brought the shitstorm upon themselves with the decision to release Overwatch 2 because of the PvE and then scrap the PvE.
Even if Kotick had listened to Belford and had assigned more people to moderation, the shitstorm at the Steam release would have happened; they just could have handled it somewhat better: Overwatch 2 is on Steam and is directly one of the worst games of all time – 86% negative
