With all the fuss about Star Wars: The Old Republic and the subscription requirement for the bonus story chapter, I almost lost sight of another topic. Quietly, Blizzard’s shooter Overwatch has sneaked into a “beta pause” to “evaluate the valuable feedback” and make important changes. To me, this all sounds a bit flimsy, and thus the title “Mecker Mittwoch” is not quite right – perhaps more of a conspiracy Wednesday?
Christmas Without Overwatch
For most fans, it came as quite a surprise that Overwatch will end the beta in a few days. I am also quite sure now that this was not the original plan. Currently, almost all Blizzard games seem to be at a standstill. Starcraft 2 is finished, WoW is still a long way off, the Hearthstone add-on is also ending next week and the meta will slowly start to fade away. So, what could have been nicer than letting fans play the new shooter in beta over Christmas to sweeten the holidays a bit? But nothing of the sort.
The reason for this is – at least for me, the paranoid demon – quite obvious. Overwatch has lost a lot of interest in recent weeks. While it skyrocketed in the Twitch streams in the first days, interest has almost fallen as quickly as it did for the WildStar free-to-play version (and that’s “Ferrari” quick). At the time of writing, it is sitting somewhere in the 50s, ahead of FIFA 16 and behind “Gaming Talk Shows”.
Therefore, I come to my thesis that the Overwatch beta has fallen significantly short of expectations in terms of attention. “Overwatch” is thus a bit “underwatched”. To ensure this interest doesn’t completely fade away before launch, they are now simply tightening it up to host an open beta in January or February – I am sure of that – in which they will just invite everyone.
Maybe I was just misinformed all along. Perhaps it was planned from the start to run the beta in several phases. Maybe I’m just a bit annoyed because I wasn’t allowed in the beta. Well. They don’t know what incredibly valuable feedback they are missing out on!
What do you think? Could the dwindling interest in Overwatch be a reason for the “pause” of the beta?
