imagine the roller coaster jeff was on... titan crashed hard, he took the skeleton of that failure and made something truly unique and amazing, then some suit comes in and tears it all down for a few extra bucks. to have a dream destroyed twice in such a short period of time. gotta feel for those guys and gals
I'm so tired of this shit, been attentively watching and paying attention to the smallest details since 2017, by now i see that when Jeff said that you can trust a player to signal that there's a problem but you cannot let them tell you what the problem is cause they have no fucking clue. Same as the customer as a collective is always right, not the individual.. But cut the crap. These developers have made terrible mistakes and decisions unaffected by monetizaton and team size managements. Even when you are given a task, it's up to you how you approach and complete the task. Everytime there is something, it's always turns out to be all about the skins.. Who the actual hell is forcing ppl to buy them. Never bought one, never looked, never cared. Everytime i open the forums, it's endless posts about just the monetization and skins. Just stop looking at them, what are you doing with that shit, nothing. Have people stopped to connect the dots in regards to the actual game itself, end era OW1; people make arguments for 5v5 that 2 less players will mean less visual clutter, hooray > PVE trailer showcasing sandstorms on Anubis that was taken out, very cool > Oh we don't have PVE, Oh, the game requirements went from 2gb of Ram to 3-4GB, Oh, sojurns E is burning my eyes out like the sun. > No PVE.. > Still remains the PVE engine with the heavier requirements, flashier effects that nullifies our past positve arguments for ow2 and 5v5. Personally, the color palette looks worst, the only time i feel it was worth it is when the map is rainy or foggy, making it mood to play. At least the game is still as tight ? Right ? Well.. it's tight, as tight ? No.. That would've been a NO even before the hitbox changes, after the changes, holy fuck what was that ? Nobody. Not a single soul talked about it on the forums, it was all about skins still.. It wasn't bobby, it wasn't corpos, it was you, the players. The harsh reality is that people buy them, they probably are seeing it better then we do that the larger majority are in fact positive about the skins and that's all they care about meanwhile the people that could've done something about the downgrade of the actual game, equally.. all they fucking care about is free skins.. Bobby made this company thrive, you might not like him, but the money speaks, he came in and pulled rabbits out of hats. Rabbits are the players.. That fucking easy.. It's so pointless to talk about anything in detail about this game or was, technically, idealistically all that shit because peoples interest in discussing it stops at "Free or pay" and even those people are so small bobby just wipes his ass with them.
I don't feel bad because of how I felt as a consumer of the product they left in limbo while they went a completely different direction from what game 1. Made it to launch and 2. Was fun and entertaining. Instead they wanted to make a collection of fps WoW dungeons after making the successor to TF2. Everyone who enjoyed ow for what it was got shafted and were hastily presented 1 year of development as a full release of a second game.
@@gamerbeast3616 Without PVE its new Monetization, - 1 tank. Remember they said they are delaying PVE to service the current players, then proceed to can the PVE anyway. They've been cashing in GoodWill for Dollars for a while now.
It really annoys me that Jeff was by all accounts the good guy at Blizzard. He shielded his team from the rest of Blizzard's shitstorm. He looked out for the players instead of corporate interests. He always did good work and kept a strong moral compass. Then they pushed him out on stage to be the scapegoat for Overwatch 2 and take the brunt of the hate and controversy.
I think Kotick was the one who took the brunt of the hate and controversy... I've never heard anyone blame Jeff. In fact the only time I hear the name "Jeff" is when someone is asking "can we have him back?"
@@ubacow7109how can u still believe that after watching all this lmao. overwatch and overwatch 2 were in development hell since 2018 and it’s clearly not his fault.
Kaplan was so right to leave when he did. Isn't it funny that the two things specifically stated that they didn't want to become a soulless DLC content farm; CoD and Guitar Hero are both Activision properties. You don't even need to read between the lines here.. they've actively said it lol
ironic that the devs "didn't want overwatch to transform into a soulless machine like call of duty" and here we are as a soulless skin simulator today insane how that works
All the og devs are gone. You basically got career corpo devs working on the game, doing nothing but make skins and in game ads for companies like porche.
more like, the time required for that cooking was more than Activision was comfortable with especially in a post-Titan world. The same team that wasted 7 years on Titan was asking for another 7 years for Overwatch 2. Development starting in 2018 with a probable 2025 release date.
I knew it. I always knew Jeff wanted to give Tracer the short shorts big bakery skin, add jiggle physics to the models and make McCree oil up when he high noons. The devs just couldn’t see the vision 😔
i miss jeff, we all miss jeff. The game would still have a future worth playing for. There was a buildup you could feel, in all the external media, the short films, the comics, all pointing us towards a higher goal, an endgame while we pvp'd it up, And that was the pve, the story fully realized in game! and then the mmo after, that crawl, walk, run idea ya know? Now? its just skins. collabs, and skins and battle passes. Nothing deeper, nothin grander. its a crying shame, we lost the universe of OW for what exactly? 5v5 and endless skins... sounds like a deal with the devil :p
@@weebtrash3376 lol listen up idiot, it may be a surprise to you (somehow) but the original overwatch is one of the greatest success stories in gaming. It WAS great. Im tired of the overwatch 2 noobs or ignorant fools who've watched far too many "downfall of overwatch" videos thinkin the game, and OW1's pve was never good. Well sorry, but it WAS amazing. With the right direction and honest intentions OW2 was set to be just as special as the original. People WANTED pve, they wanted to play it! It doesnt take a genius to see the changes in leadership, see who is in charge now, and see why the game has fallen so far. You dont have to be a contrarian all the time bud.
youd be amazed how many people think the opposite, stating Kaplan as a problem when they clearly didnt know what was actually going on. They still play because they to have nothing left inside them. Now THATS the real shame.
@@Sleepycattz Just the way it is, buddy. What the hell do you want me to say, that "everything will be dandy and we'll get PVE and more story-focused content! 🌈"? Thanks for your helpful, insightful and non passive-aggressive reply. Make a change if you feel that strongly about it. I love this game and play it daily, but I'm not gonna act like Blizzard's focus will change with the way things are currently run.
So Jeff left because he knew that corporate would screw him over, so he took his passion and creativity somewhere else because there was no escape. And he was right. Now OW2 is just a battlepass/item shop simulator with the only real content being skins and cosmetics.. Wow.
It sounds like Jeff Kaplan had a really great vision for what Overwatch would become, and had to leave because he knew that it wasn't going to occur given the circumstances within the company. It's such a shame. I would argue the tight and fun gameplay that Overwatch offers is actually its secondary appeal, and the primary reason why it became so hugely popular at launch is because of the characters and the universe. People would see the art and the animated shorts, or hear about it through word of mouth and then install it and find the gameplay. Jeff was correct to believe a full pve story that advanced the story of the Overwatch universe was the next step. Instead the big revolution was skins modelled after kpop stars and Cassidy with Spike Spiegel's hair.
@@DreiSchwerterZorro yeah nobody talks like that. Recently watched the "dead internet theory" after reading some whole threads of what I realised were bots replying to each other (not the obvious butt profile ones that say "your video is endless inspiration" but ones that seem v convincing then you notice nobody has any personality, it's like seeing chat GPT arguing with itself.) Anyway I'm now convinced that 90%of comments on videos, especially the bigger creators, are just bots...so I guess I should stop reading RUclips comments or it will be completely nothing time. AI apocokoplyupee take meehhhhhhahhhhh
So, in a nutshell, Kotick was the parasite that ruined OW2, and truth be told, not really surprised. Especially with him trying to glamorized Overwatch League as a whole to boot. Now he's gone, Blizzard's failure still revolves around its Leaderships.
@@johnsonspark171 TF kind of braindead take is this? OW was "woke" from the very beginning. They were one of the only ones to do it right and that was one of the main draws to the game. lol
Missing Jeff is also missing Overwatch because what we have right now is not Overwatch without the story, the creativity and what it represented it doesn't exist
You are crazy if you think that there is any coming back from what they have done to overwatch. I stoped playing ever other game and only played overwatch for 6 years, and they finally drove me off around the beginning of this year. I was so saddened that I put my 1 year old Xbox away and haven’t played anything since. There is nothing that they could do to get me to come back and give them another chance. They are like an abusive ex, once you have got your life together without them you never go back, no matter how good they look on instagram.
@@badfoody Its finally failed for me. I really liked ow. Played it for 6 years. Its supposed to be a competitive shooter. Kind of a mixed bag when you can get an entirely different rank playing on a new account. I don't think they have any clue what they are doing. Not saying its not a valuable game at all but I do think it is inflated. Give it another year. Eventually the numbers will catch up. They always do.
@@johnsonspark171 Having more players doesn't mean anything. McDonalds is the most popular restaurant in the world but is it better than food from a michelin star restaurant?
Honestly I believe Jeff would have tried to slowly add members to the team because the team could have focused on the stress of not being able to keep up with the vision they wanted. But instead they resisted adding members because they were focused more on the stress of Activision higher ups constantly interfering with them making the game. Quite a profound thing to learn from the outside.
Blizzard and Steam are great, polar opposite examples of why game studios should never go public. Blizzard failed because of forced monetization implanted into their games, while Steam keeps on winning without lifting a finger.
Crazy how many people on Reddit are shitting on Jeff for an apparently “easy fix” of just accepting more hires to the team. I think Jeff made some poor decisions, but I really respect him for not giving up on his vision.
@@adventuroushermit2590 yeah man, its Bobby's fault he wanted the guy who didnt get the job done to have more people available to get the job done. Jeff wanted to leave Overwatch PvP in the past and move to PvE. That what you wanted too?
The only difference now in ow2 compared to ow1 is that all the rewards and motivation to play has been stripped, the only "reward" is winning in comp but thats still worse than 1. I miss loading up new events and looking at the new skins to see what i could get, i havent got a new skin since ow2 cuz their all 20$ each and half are just recolors of OW1 skins i already have. Leveling up and opening a lootbox everytime while seeing my border become cooler used to feel so great and now its all gone, i dont even care about new events anymore cuz half are still recycled from ow1
It is heartbreaking what Kotick did to Blizzard and the fans. Glad to hear Jeff left because of differences in direction and nothing darker. What is Jeff doing now?
This is a bad take. Blizzard was already a shambles. Bobby didn't have a great influence - but he's not a total villain. Blizzard needed to monetize Overwatch better, and a bigger team would have helped the team survive and the game to thrive.
@@Giggitygootwo I agree. A larger team would have helped to handle the workload and allow them to do more. They could have had people working on skins and on pvp or pve. They should have made a shift away from loot boxes sooner. I think that would have helped to be more profitable with buying skins or bundles like other games.
There is a book called the mythical man month that my prof had us read in our software project management class. It explores the concept that adding more people to a software project can often make it take longer, due to many of the issues the team cited here. Very good read, highly recommend.
Capitalism is a fickle thing. A company needs to make money to survive but if they focus on the money instead of the product, they will eventually fail. It happens so often. When executives come in and try to dictate the creative process they only take the soul out of the creators and the people who were once passionate will feel like their creation was tainted. It's a sad state of affairs to realize that the game was ruined by people who micromanaged the creatives who made them the money in the first place. Greed is awful.
But on the other hand, games wouldn’t exist NEARLY to this extent without capitalism because then nobody would have the drive to make something at a complete loss. Greed is the issue, not capitalism. Capitalism just materializes the effects of greed
Main thing that bothers, or rather saddens me, is that Jeff didn't pop up somewhere else doing something new. There are enough old blizzard fans that would be very interested in what ex blizzard people create.
Quality of matches in low elo competitive is a huge problem. On top of the random nature of online "team" games there's now the tank diff = 100% loss issue + so many bots and derankers that you'll have about 4-5 bad experiences for a single good one. IMO this will starve the game if it continues and should be tackled first. The game needs to be fun again and fun more often again.
They say "vote with your wallet" but in FTP world you have to vote with your time. They will only make the drastic changes needed if people stop supporting the game with their time. Whales will leave too if there's no one to "show off" to.
the tank diff is an issue all the way up. I'm in high diamond low masters typically and every game there is still determined by the better tank in almost every case
@@razrv3lc This is More of a way to blame others for your own mistakes. Good DPS can solo win the game. Support can make most of the tanks better, even if they are worse than the opponent's tank. But people just want to pick mercy, hold left click for 3 minutes, and win, and if they don't, they cry about tanks. Then do not wonder nobody wants to play tank, and you wait 8 minutes for the match.
OWL was such a slow-motion trainwreck, it was obvious almost immediately, but certainly by the second season that the viewership and path to profitability wasn't there. I would just play it on mute in the background to farm owl tokens, and I'm sure I wasn't alone in that - you have to wonder how many of the tiny viewerbase actually cared about the very expensive product being produced..
I was super into OWL buying jerseys, and other merch. Even buying the trading cards. All the way up to the point they went to online only events and the quality of production dropped drastically. It’s sad because I really think it could have been a huge phenomenon if only OW was treated better.
I remember always looking forward to seeing Jeff, but never have I been excited to see Aaron 😂 whenever Aaron starts talking I'm like "OMG WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO RUIN NOW??"
Is that why pharah is a annoying butch lesbian now and mercy got retconned to be around her age so the relationship wouldnt seem predatory? (She was a literal child when overwatch was around and mercy was an adult)
Didn't Jeff leave way before Michael? Either way, what little soul the game had left definitely died out when Chu left. The timeline doesn't even make sense anymore with the recent revisions.
Not that the Gency shipping from Chu was any less insufferable... but I could live with that because opinions differ and I had the impression he knew what he was doing with the lore writing. It has fallen off a lot since.
@@123Suffering456 the lore has especially fallen off not too long after both the As You Are short story comic and the mid-tier Invasion mode was launched. As a former Pharah main, this was inexcusable and frankly the final straw after the PvE was scrapped. 6 years for all this to end with a whimper? This is pathetic.
As a developer I can only say.. scaling never worked. It's like the saying for manager, hire 9 women and the child is there in a month, it doesnt work that way. Often more people means more overhead, more management work that interfers with the vision... all that stuff.
To this day, the animated short "Dragons" was the greatest short in my opinion. Nothing has come close to what that short was. Overwatch or Overwatch 2 (Money-Grab-Edition), isn't doing anything much to rekindle that flaming passion I had for the game I once had a great time with. 😮💨
For myself, it seemed pretty obvious why Jeff left. Having watched the developer updates and hearing what Jeff was trying to achieve and the following crashout after his leaving. It's pretty apparent that Activision made a hostile work environment(at least creatively) and what Activision has done with the game since(actively removing as much of Jeff's vision as possible) just hammered that home. Kind of amazing that the game has continued as long as it has, but let's be serious. Jeff was the anchor being to the game, this game is just going to xerox itself to death moving forward. It's just a matter of time
What I don't understand is, why the old team couldn't focus on working on the PVE side of things and have the new recruits just maintain the PVP side of things and keep it ticking over. That way you still keep your small team working together on the new project while also expanding and slowly integrating new people.
The reason why indie projects get done rather quickly is because to them they aren't working they are having fun and the more Blizzard higher ups got involved the more it felt less like they were putting effort into something fun and more like a job It's crazy to think that this is the life cycle of a popular creative project 1. Creative project is creative 2. The creativity is popular 3. Interest from rich people 4. More money put into creativity 5. Makes rich person more rich 6. Rich person wants to be more rich 7. Creativity is reduced
It’s amazing how they were exactly able to call what would happen. Also, many will criticize Jeff for not wanting a larger team, but a larger team does not always mean a better game. Look at call of duty, each game has 11 teams working on it and they are the same stuff every year and always release incomplete, even with 3-4 year dev cycles.
I agree. Also as a CoD person I see how it would be better if each team (the main 3) did its own game or stuff, but I feel they are forced to follow a certain "path/cycle/formula" together and now more than ever the "need" to beeing attatched to each other team's game due to Warzone and its live service
@@naskouz1295 yup.. My favorite mode (zombies) is just a shell of its former self due to them pushing warzone and greed into EVERY mode, its what they want with overwatch too, and its working...
The team size has nothing to do with COD being lazy. Thats a stupid comparison. Thats like saying water kills you because everyone who has died drank water
@@devlintaylor9520 It does. Larger teams means more expensive communication and logistical solutions. Expensive here meaning either time-consuming or costing money in the long run. You also can't just hire anyone if those people won't synergize with the current team.
Idk I feel like they should have made another team. They obviously couldn’t deal with everything they had. Sure it takes time to teach juniors but this just feels elitist
Yeah, they were right to be afraid of activision interference, but they were ego tripping if they thought they had the ability to develop two games at once. One can only imagine what would have happened if they split the old ow1 team in two to train up and lead two new teams
What an incredible ending of the video. HUGE! Even though the topic of the video is sad and ... yeah, we miss Jeff. Hope Blizzard could change and get him back on board.
Jeff left because they wouldn't green light rocket cat with abilities "Knock sh** off the table", "Check out my b***hole", "knead on the upholstery", and ult "3 am zoomies"
I live Overwatch. The game I played the most in my life. It was Jeff's Overwatch, and Arnold's, Michael's and Geoff's. We have now a moving shell of what it used to be. It is still (almost) the same game. But the magic it had is impossible to replicate. It is like they replaced all the members from your favorite band and expect them to be the thing, but is actually just a cover.
The thing about developer team size of 1 is that, if they're any good, it takes a team of 5 to outperform them. The 1 may feel overworked and want help, but adding 1 to the team creates more overhead than anything. Particularly at the start. What always happens is that if you convince management to increase team size, productivity goes DOWN for a long, long time, and then management doesn't trust you any more.
Which is why they need to start investing more in actually training people for the job instead of just expecting new recruits to magically have 3-5 yrs of experience. Imagine yea, instead of learning nothing but theory in school, schools actually allowed aspiring devs to practice what would be necessary in their field of work.
Say what you want about Jeff but he at least did care about the overwatch community. Yeah he might’ve had some bad decisions, but you can say that overwatch two is not perfect either.
This is such a better video than you just reading an article! Please more of these kind of videos when articles come out. Love your take on it - and you dont need to read it word for word! Just give us a summarize version and the good bits
imo, and this may just be me being bitter, but OW2 has always looked to me like a scam. I bought OW1 and enjoyed getting the free loot boxes and getting random items from those and the currency they dropped. They basically just changed the name, changed the model to f2p and now that stuff is ridiculously expensive. Even stuff that was released during OW1 that I could've gotten for free if I grinded enough. I stopped playing then. Even Fortnite did this better. When they ended paid access to the campaign mode, people who already had it could continue to earn the in-game currency for skins and other cosmetics. At the very least Blizzard could've kept the boxes you earned and the free one or two for events and just not sold extra boxes. Still have the new monetization.
From day one I've maintained OWL was a mistake because it took away from what made Overwatch what it was. As much as was gained in viewership and content and advertising, OWL ultimately cost more than it brought. If they spent time instead focusing on content and mechanics the average player benefited from, the game may not have atrophied like it did.
Wild to learn the lore. I'm happy I got to be part of overwatch in it's glory days, and I'm very thankfull for what it's given me. An overwatch reboot would be very cool, but I don't see that happening with Activision Blizzard at the wheel.
Bobby wanting to expand team 4 was the one and only thing I’ll ever agree with him on and be absolutely stunned how against team 4 leads were Like you were trying to maintain a game while updating the engine for the sequel, make the sequel, make a massive PVE in-depth experience you needed more people far more than I think they have ever had to be able to do this but it seemed like the flaw issue was wasn’t that they were scared of this culture issue the issue was that culture to begin with it limited the scale they wanted to achieve so much so that after release it eventually was made clear pve was dead So many promises and not enough hands to fulfill them
I reckon reboot overwatch 1 with this current team and then bring back Jeff so he can work on the PVE with his old team and just let him cook. But of course, we can only dream...
every day i miss overwatch. that game shaped my teenage years (probably for the worst.) i will forever yearn for those overwatch 1 days again :( i miss u jeff. i miss u overwatch :(
To be honest: Thats all what crossed my mind when jeff left....a captain never leaves a sinking ship, unless there are only dirty, greedy rats left on board... ...and the crew is already dead.
This was very informative of the what the "no updates" era was about, I can't really excuse the back to back bad decision but that "true magic" the book talks about really makes me sad, the game really started off in the best way possible
Whatever Jeff is up to these days I hope he's enjoying life and is proud of the work he did on Overwatch. Not all stories end well, but that doesn't mean the journey isn't worth remembering.
Man, I miss the old Overwatch days with Jeff from the Overwatch team. That time period, as short as it was, was something alright. A unique and fun experience, and one hell of an experience it was. I doubt I'll ever see anything quite like it ever again. Feels like forever ago now. As for the "sequel"... Gonna be real, I played it for a week or two and hated it. Haven't touched it since. If it at least still had 6v6 I might still play it on and off. Maybe.
It's just sad to see passion projects turn into money milking machines. This also goes for ubisoft EA and activision in general. Whenever one of those big 3 published/developed a game for the ps2 you knew it was gonna be good, even during the ps3/xbox360 days all their games were straight fire.
He just left when OW2 got canceled. At first, I thought OW2 was just a way to « rework » what they messed up with OW1, but realizing it was his project for so long actually makes it very clear imo. Why would he stay in a company that now goes against his projects, it's not like it's going to be better
No esports game was first made to be an esport, this is something that grows out of the love of the community, but its hard to love a game that keeps changing to adapt a minority of the player base that only ever play meta
Brooks's law. You don't add to the team late in the game or your shits gunna be way later than it already would have beem. Next point in the queue please!
I attend 3D modelling workshops and one of the artists is an Overwatch dev. People think game dev is numbers and code and strings and animating, but they pay people good money to just design characters and then model them, character artists. Look at the Concord characters and then look at the Overwatch characters. Enough said.
They should go back the loot boxes n keep selling collabs and mythic weapons for money. Then sell the gold variant mythics for higher price. Then splash in purchasing etc color palettes for money and maybe squeezing out more money by selling certain theme weapon and weapon charms. But offering the original loot boxes so ppl can still get skins every normal event. Ppl would still buy loot boxes and do openings especially if they made the collab skins 0.02% chance drop meaning u could get it free after like 250 loot boxes from the specific event
I'm telling you Sty, and I might just end up commenting on all your videos on this book 🙂It's never been about business minded people versus creative people. I understand that's always how it feels, but especially in the games industry in the technology industry, it's short term minded people versus long-term minded people. If you look at the companies that make the most money overtime, they produce the most value. Of course they work very hard on capturing that value, they think a lot about margins and deadlines and all these things that hold tension with creativity and experimentation. But the winners in the long run are always the one who look to enable the experimentation and creativity within the context of making money. Bobby K is not a great businessman. He's a hard-working short-term grifter that is excellent at cultivating an image. There's a lot like him. But at the end of the day, he does not understand the market. He thinks he does because he helped build call of duty -- which makes him the equivalent of someone that built McDonald's thinking they can build any kind of restaurant. There's nothing wrong with McDonald's, there's nothing right about it either. It's just food. That's extremely cheap and can be sold at a great margin. That's a decent business plan. That does not mean I can go and build any other type of restaurant I want to - if I try to get a Michelin star, or even if I just try to build a nice chain of family restaurants, I'm producing a different product. Name an industry, and you can find analogous examples. So I really feel it's not about business versus creative, it's about short-term versus long-term.
True. Extremely good point. People think business they think of using numbers to make decisions. Numbers are clumsy though. Value is what you are after. A good business man is going to make decisions on numbers and try to understand the value of what they are supporting. Which bobby clearly has some intuition that this is what is expected of him but really has no idea. Ingenuine, short term.
That second sentence is crazy to say, lol when you built that type of stuff bobby did and saying he is not a businessman is crazy lmao. Even ppl who hates him (i don't like him at all) recognize that he is a great businessman, he took Activision when it was at the lowest point and managed to put them in the top 5 of the gaming companies and managed to sold that to Microsoft even during this mess. He played the quarterly strategies like most of the top SP500, and it worked out since it's the long lasting meta rn so no i totally disagree with that 2nd sentence when he proved that he is a good businessman, a $hitty person but a good businessman. The best exemple and easiest would have been the CEO of Embracer Group that is a prime exemple of bad exemple of businessman. Finally that short-term vs long term argument can be counter easily, especially for the game industry rn, Triple A games takes a long times now and some of them instead of going for short to mid term, they go long and it crash (Concord, $uicide squad, Duke Nukem Forever, System Shock 2...) and some short term games like Lawbreakers fails too yes but the short term vs long term is not a problem is it always come back to creative vs business, especially when devs also said that and to go further there is another field who have that same problem of creative vs business: Hospital. Some of them are managed by business ppl and some by doctor themselves and it has caused some problem too. Finally the 2 long term game to look at that might or might not be a total failure are The Perfect Dark (aka Quadruple A according to Microsoft) and Star Citizen.
@@Justin-vq9co exactly. Numbers be like: The CoD Franchise has sold 425 million copies. The Mario franchise has sold more than 900 million units worldwide, and has spawned a series of other revenue streams (b/millions in merch, brand power, movies, etc). CoD is much easier to pitch to the Bobbys of the world: it barely made the pitch within Nintendo at the time. Value is the key thing!
@@xNemesis_ neither of us have been in the room with Bobby while he makes these decisions, although maybe you have? 🙂 But based on his performance of blizzard, I think it's a fair assumption that his involvement with the true success of the games, he built might've been quite limited. People follow up these ranks, all the time based on their association with others. I don't doubt that Bobby is a pretty strong marketer, especially when working with an established IP. What he isn't is a value builder. (Concord, $uicide squad, Duke Nukem Forever, System Shock 2.) Believe it, or not, I would consider some of these games rushed. For the ones that truly were not, I should restate my argument - thinking in the long term is not in and of itself a good strategy. You have to think in the long term and then build a good strategy: this includes rapid iteration, listening to the market, gaining quick feedback on experiments, things like that. These are things of the teams behind the games listed failed to do. I'm surprised you brought a hospitals as an example of why short term business thinking can work - medical systems that treat symptoms rather than diseases often end up overloaded and losing out in the long-term over cost. ER recidivism alone costs billions of dollars each year. Help me understand your argument here, are you saying that ER recidivism is mostly occurring because of the decisions doctors make? or "business folk"?
It's a dark realization that Jeff was both keeping Overwatch's soul alive _and_ strangling it in the crib. His utter apathy towards nurturing the PvP side of the game meant that it only took a handful of unpopular, hastily-thrown together balance patches for the lightning to escape the bottle. As much as I despise OWL for "taking over" the game's balance, it's now apparent that the Jeff and his team would've happily ditched OW1 soon after it's release to go work on PvE..... if not for the League twisting their arms and screaming in their ears to keep supporting PvP with balance updates. And even then, Kaplan's team is still not free from blame. It's clear now that their disinterest in PvP was the reason why they tended to passively go along with whatever the OWL's loudest pro players asked for.... even when those changes tended to be massively unpopular with non-pros & were purely motivated by financial incentives (aka it's easier to maximize your chance of winning tournaments if you can convince the devs that your fave heroes should be forever meta and/or they should nerf anything that gets in your way).
Lot of people give Jeff crap for overwatch's rough period and what we eventually got to, and to be fair a part of that is true with halting overwatch 1 development to focus on overwatch 2, but I really wonder what we would have gotten had Jeff been given full control on Overwatch 2 without the business side interfering. Would it have lived up to the expectations then? I think people would've came back to overwatch after the content drought, i mean we already know that a lot did at the launch of overwatch 2, and we still wouldve kept everything from overwatch. Another part of me wonders if they had just not fought the idea of growing the team to produce content more quickly, how that may have resulted.
I really, really miss Overwatch. I remember when everyone on the Internet was excited for it, now saying that you like Overwatch gets you nasty looks. They killed it way too soon.
imagine the roller coaster jeff was on... titan crashed hard, he took the skeleton of that failure and made something truly unique and amazing, then some suit comes in and tears it all down for a few extra bucks. to have a dream destroyed twice in such a short period of time. gotta feel for those guys and gals
There should be a rule, unless you’re a gamer you cannot be a suit involved in a gaming company… if only 🙄
I'm so tired of this shit, been attentively watching and paying attention to the smallest details since 2017, by now i see that when Jeff said that you can trust a player to signal that there's a problem but you cannot let them tell you what the problem is cause they have no fucking clue. Same as the customer as a collective is always right, not the individual..
But cut the crap. These developers have made terrible mistakes and decisions unaffected by monetizaton and team size managements. Even when you are given a task, it's up to you how you approach and complete the task. Everytime there is something, it's always turns out to be all about the skins.. Who the actual hell is forcing ppl to buy them. Never bought one, never looked, never cared. Everytime i open the forums, it's endless posts about just the monetization and skins. Just stop looking at them, what are you doing with that shit, nothing.
Have people stopped to connect the dots in regards to the actual game itself, end era OW1; people make arguments for 5v5 that 2 less players will mean less visual clutter, hooray > PVE trailer showcasing sandstorms on Anubis that was taken out, very cool > Oh we don't have PVE, Oh, the game requirements went from 2gb of Ram to 3-4GB, Oh, sojurns E is burning my eyes out like the sun. > No PVE.. > Still remains the PVE engine with the heavier requirements, flashier effects that nullifies our past positve arguments for ow2 and 5v5.
Personally, the color palette looks worst, the only time i feel it was worth it is when the map is rainy or foggy, making it mood to play.
At least the game is still as tight ? Right ? Well.. it's tight, as tight ? No.. That would've been a NO even before the hitbox changes, after the changes, holy fuck what was that ?
Nobody. Not a single soul talked about it on the forums, it was all about skins still.. It wasn't bobby, it wasn't corpos, it was you, the players.
The harsh reality is that people buy them, they probably are seeing it better then we do that the larger majority are in fact positive about the skins and that's all they care about meanwhile the people that could've done something about the downgrade of the actual game, equally.. all they fucking care about is free skins.. Bobby made this company thrive, you might not like him, but the money speaks, he came in and pulled rabbits out of hats. Rabbits are the players.. That fucking easy.. It's so pointless to talk about anything in detail about this game or was, technically, idealistically all that shit because peoples interest in discussing it stops at "Free or pay" and even those people are so small bobby just wipes his ass with them.
when producers were nerds, good times
@@chelseycurry8960 there is a company that has that rule, Valve.
I don't feel bad because of how I felt as a consumer of the product they left in limbo while they went a completely different direction from what game 1. Made it to launch and 2. Was fun and entertaining. Instead they wanted to make a collection of fps WoW dungeons after making the successor to TF2. Everyone who enjoyed ow for what it was got shafted and were hastily presented 1 year of development as a full release of a second game.
>Didn't want it to be a shitty cash garbage.
>Becomes a shitty cashgrab.
Overwatch 2 is not a cash grab
@@gamerbeast3616 yes it is
@gamerbeat3616 correct. Its a shitty cash grab.
@@gamerbeast3616 Without PVE its new Monetization, - 1 tank.
Remember they said they are delaying PVE to service the current players, then proceed to can the PVE anyway.
They've been cashing in GoodWill for Dollars for a while now.
@@perseus1054 it is quit crying and cope harder
u may defend the game but tbh u will always be wrong about it
It really annoys me that Jeff was by all accounts the good guy at Blizzard. He shielded his team from the rest of Blizzard's shitstorm. He looked out for the players instead of corporate interests. He always did good work and kept a strong moral compass. Then they pushed him out on stage to be the scapegoat for Overwatch 2 and take the brunt of the hate and controversy.
I think Kotick was the one who took the brunt of the hate and controversy... I've never heard anyone blame Jeff. In fact the only time I hear the name "Jeff" is when someone is asking "can we have him back?"
Nah, that award belongs to Aaron Keller. He's the one who received all the brunt of the shit barrage from the fans after Jeff left.
I mean he's the reason for goats and 6v6 staying so long, he didn't have game sense
@@ubacow7109how can u still believe that after watching all this lmao. overwatch and overwatch 2 were in development hell since 2018 and it’s clearly not his fault.
@@0rnery0verwatchi wouldnt say its popular but it has grown a bit over time where some people to blame Jeff.
Seeing Jeff sitting next to a fire place during x mas 🎄 time
top tier feeling
What about it?
@@h2woah127 good days of overwatch
@@boxingtherapy87then add that 😆
I watched the first time he did that from start to finish
Kaplan was so right to leave when he did. Isn't it funny that the two things specifically stated that they didn't want to become a soulless DLC content farm; CoD and Guitar Hero are both Activision properties. You don't even need to read between the lines here.. they've actively said it lol
They wrestled with Jeff, but were unprepared for death. Classic mistake.
@@LordDragox412i miss dinoflask and jeff
Abandoning OW1 and Jeff leaving was basically the end of OW - he was really the face of the game.
Abandoning OW1 and Jeff leaving was basically the end of OW - he was really the face of the game.
@@TheRealOG157 Abandoning OW1 and Jeff leaving was basically the end of OW - he was really the face of the game.
@@curtisgoldthorpe6656 Abandoning OW1 and Jeff leaving was basically the end of OW - he was really the face of the game.
Jeff leaving was my final straw. He was my only saving grace because the dude didnt bullshit us and was the best community manager ive ever seen.
@@birb7828 Abandoning OW1 and Jeff leaving was basically the end of OW - he was really the face of the game.
ironic that the devs "didn't want overwatch to transform into a soulless machine like call of duty" and here we are as a soulless skin simulator today
insane how that works
the og devs...so none of the devs working on it now
It wasn't what the devs wanted, it was forced upon them by the suits
@@niklas2933 Mostly new people now but there are 10 year veterans (people who worked on Titan) who are still on the team. Keller is one of them.
The og devs and players didn't want it, and where are they now?
All the og devs are gone. You basically got career corpo devs working on the game, doing nothing but make skins and in game ads for companies like porche.
You let Blizzard cook, the games always brought money. Just wasn't enough money for Activision, it never is.
They were insanely greedy. A billion dollar franchise made from a team that small. Why do they push that hard for more?!
people told me i was delusional when i said Activision was the downfall of blizzard but here we are
more like, the time required for that cooking was more than Activision was comfortable with especially in a post-Titan world. The same team that wasted 7 years on Titan was asking for another 7 years for Overwatch 2. Development starting in 2018 with a probable 2025 release date.
They couldn't even let Hearthstone, a literal money printer, alone. Think about that.
They didn't seem to respect the creative process.
I can imagine it's hard to cooperate with people who see everything as a numbers game.
jeff never left overwatch, overwatch left jeff 😔
Well said
Felt that
pin this shit rn
I knew it.
I always knew Jeff wanted to give Tracer the short shorts big bakery skin, add jiggle physics to the models and make McCree oil up when he high noons.
The devs just couldn’t see the vision 😔
They're saving the oiled up themed battle pass for season 14 (trust me)
Well they had the Widow Easter egg til the internet sjw's attacked
Always been mcree @@Swatmat
@Swatmat they want to rewrite history. Change his name to run away from his past.
@@xEvilRaptorxWidow easter egg? What was that?
i miss jeff, we all miss jeff. The game would still have a future worth playing for.
There was a buildup you could feel, in all the external media, the short films, the comics, all pointing us towards a higher goal, an endgame while we pvp'd it up,
And that was the pve, the story fully realized in game! and then the mmo after, that crawl, walk, run idea ya know?
Now? its just skins. collabs, and skins and battle passes. Nothing deeper, nothin grander.
its a crying shame, we lost the universe of OW for what exactly? 5v5 and endless skins...
sounds like a deal with the devil :p
No it wouldn’t lmao
@@weebtrash3376 lol listen up idiot,
it may be a surprise to you (somehow) but the original overwatch is one of the greatest success stories in gaming. It WAS great.
Im tired of the overwatch 2 noobs or ignorant fools who've watched far too many "downfall of overwatch" videos thinkin the game, and OW1's pve was never good.
Well sorry, but it WAS amazing.
With the right direction and honest intentions OW2 was set to be just as special as the original. People WANTED pve, they wanted to play it!
It doesnt take a genius to see the changes in leadership, see who is in charge now, and see why the game has fallen so far.
You dont have to be a contrarian all the time bud.
i miss jeff, we all miss jeff. The game would still have a future worth playing for
youd be amazed how many people think the opposite, stating Kaplan as a problem when they clearly didnt know what was actually going on. They still play because they to have nothing left inside them. Now THATS the real shame.
@@TheChaosTheorydefinition of soulless
I miss overwatch so much, I hate that we will never know the rest of the story.
Get used to it.
@@_V.Va_what a helpful and mature, thoughtful response
@@Sleepycattz Just the way it is, buddy. What the hell do you want me to say, that "everything will be dandy and we'll get PVE and more story-focused content! 🌈"?
Thanks for your helpful, insightful and non passive-aggressive reply.
Make a change if you feel that strongly about it.
I love this game and play it daily, but I'm not gonna act like Blizzard's focus will change with the way things are currently run.
@@_V.Va_ Who pissed in your Cheerios? Chill out, goofball.
@@Sharkwellington You dweebs clearly can't handle simple conversations. Run along.
_"Never accept the world as it appears to be. Always dare to see it for what it could be. I hope you do the same."_
Jeff Kaplan.
Isn't that what Winston says?
@@bigfudge2031 Actually you might be right too here
It is what a scientist told Winston when he was still young in space, and also how Jeff signed his departure from Blizzard
@@yarxene Yeah the scientist name is Dr. Winston, the caretaker of Winston (the tank) back in Horizon Lunar Colony
@@SessesSniper oh yeah yeah right, he took his name afterwards
So Jeff left because he knew that corporate would screw him over, so he took his passion and creativity somewhere else because there was no escape.
And he was right. Now OW2 is just a battlepass/item shop simulator with the only real content being skins and cosmetics.. Wow.
Imagine if overwatch was an indi project made by Jeff and a team. Imagine if Jeff had free creative reigns over his ip
I like the game but just to send a message I give them not one penny.
Blizzard found out personally, “Wrestle with Jeff, prepare for death.”
It sounds like Jeff Kaplan had a really great vision for what Overwatch would become, and had to leave because he knew that it wasn't going to occur given the circumstances within the company. It's such a shame. I would argue the tight and fun gameplay that Overwatch offers is actually its secondary appeal, and the primary reason why it became so hugely popular at launch is because of the characters and the universe. People would see the art and the animated shorts, or hear about it through word of mouth and then install it and find the gameplay. Jeff was correct to believe a full pve story that advanced the story of the Overwatch universe was the next step. Instead the big revolution was skins modelled after kpop stars and Cassidy with Spike Spiegel's hair.
Bot?
@@ShockCombo At first I liked the comment, but you are right. Sounds definitely like AI
@@DreiSchwerterZorro yeah nobody talks like that. Recently watched the "dead internet theory" after reading some whole threads of what I realised were bots replying to each other (not the obvious butt profile ones that say "your video is endless inspiration" but ones that seem v convincing then you notice nobody has any personality, it's like seeing chat GPT arguing with itself.) Anyway I'm now convinced that 90%of comments on videos, especially the bigger creators, are just bots...so I guess I should stop reading RUclips comments or it will be completely nothing time. AI apocokoplyupee take meehhhhhhahhhhh
@@DreiSchwerterZorrodoesnt read like ai to me
@@DreiSchwerterZorroare you all like 13 or something cause it sounds like a regular sentence.
So, in a nutshell, Kotick was the parasite that ruined OW2, and truth be told, not really surprised. Especially with him trying to glamorized Overwatch League as a whole to boot. Now he's gone, Blizzard's failure still revolves around its Leaderships.
And the fact Microsoft cares about Cod and not Overwatch
you cant blame bobby, its really not his fault. greed and corruption is just in his blood
One thing that will always be clear.
You can never let an accountant run a creatives company
as an accountant I completely disagree. OW got what it deserved for going woke
@@johnsonspark171 TF kind of braindead take is this? OW was "woke" from the very beginning. They were one of the only ones to do it right and that was one of the main draws to the game. lol
@@johnsonspark171Stick to counting numbers lmao.
@@johnsonspark171You're no accountant with this smooth ass brain.
@@_V.Va_ Nah his brain is pretty on-point. Brain only good at number. Brain no understand concept like buzzword and propaganda.
Missing Jeff is also missing Overwatch because what we have right now is not Overwatch without the story, the creativity and what it represented it doesn't exist
I miss Jeff
he doesn't miss us
No, you're miss bean.
Same man
Daddy Jeff, please come back with the cigarettes it's been long enough.
never let profit replace passion
You are crazy if you think that there is any coming back from what they have done to overwatch. I stoped playing ever other game and only played overwatch for 6 years, and they finally drove me off around the beginning of this year. I was so saddened that I put my 1 year old Xbox away and haven’t played anything since. There is nothing that they could do to get me to come back and give them another chance. They are like an abusive ex, once you have got your life together without them you never go back, no matter how good they look on instagram.
You pretty much took the words right out of my brain. I feel violated, just like OW was.
@@Vandassar so true
Alright. It’s not THAT serious
@@RIP_ZYZZ1738fr the abusive ex example was wild 😂 i wonder what it's like to be this emotionally invested in pixels
Overwatch worked bcs it was a passion project, ow2 isfailing bcs its not. Ow has lost all of its magic with ow2
Sadly OW2 isnt failing because you have more than enough shallow people throwing money at it
@@badfoody Its finally failed for me. I really liked ow. Played it for 6 years. Its supposed to be a competitive shooter. Kind of a mixed bag when you can get an entirely different rank playing on a new account. I don't think they have any clue what they are doing. Not saying its not a valuable game at all but I do think it is inflated. Give it another year. Eventually the numbers will catch up. They always do.
OW2 has more players
@@Justin-vq9co all competitive games should require a phone #
@@johnsonspark171 Having more players doesn't mean anything. McDonalds is the most popular restaurant in the world but is it better than food from a michelin star restaurant?
Honestly I believe Jeff would have tried to slowly add members to the team because the team could have focused on the stress of not being able to keep up with the vision they wanted. But instead they resisted adding members because they were focused more on the stress of Activision higher ups constantly interfering with them making the game.
Quite a profound thing to learn from the outside.
Blizzard and Steam are great, polar opposite examples of why game studios should never go public. Blizzard failed because of forced monetization implanted into their games, while Steam keeps on winning without lifting a finger.
Wait, steam makes video games?
Crazy how many people on Reddit are shitting on Jeff for an apparently “easy fix” of just accepting more hires to the team. I think Jeff made some poor decisions, but I really respect him for not giving up on his vision.
I miss the dynoflask compilations of Jeff. RIP ow 2015-2018
moral of the story
*MARKETING PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE INVOVE IN GAMING!! AND STAY AT MARKTING THEM LIKE A THEY SHOULD BE*
Or "when your boss wants you to have more resources, you should consider it".
@willdriscoll7454 oh great, more leeches to ask " but why can't we milk our cows more"
@@adventuroushermit2590 yeah man, its Bobby's fault he wanted the guy who didnt get the job done to have more people available to get the job done. Jeff wanted to leave Overwatch PvP in the past and move to PvE. That what you wanted too?
The only difference now in ow2 compared to ow1 is that all the rewards and motivation to play has been stripped, the only "reward" is winning in comp but thats still worse than 1. I miss loading up new events and looking at the new skins to see what i could get, i havent got a new skin since ow2 cuz their all 20$ each and half are just recolors of OW1 skins i already have. Leveling up and opening a lootbox everytime while seeing my border become cooler used to feel so great and now its all gone, i dont even care about new events anymore cuz half are still recycled from ow1
Nono- you get event rewards every 150 games you play during the next 6 days! 😅
It is heartbreaking what Kotick did to Blizzard and the fans.
Glad to hear Jeff left because of differences in direction and nothing darker.
What is Jeff doing now?
This is a bad take. Blizzard was already a shambles. Bobby didn't have a great influence - but he's not a total villain. Blizzard needed to monetize Overwatch better, and a bigger team would have helped the team survive and the game to thrive.
@@Giggitygootwo from other things I have read and watched decisions were made at the top that wasted a lot of time and money.
@@grambo992 fair enough. But a larger team would have expanded capability to deal with things Bobby wanted. Give and take.
@@Giggitygootwo I agree. A larger team would have helped to handle the workload and allow them to do more. They could have had people working on skins and on pvp or pve. They should have made a shift away from loot boxes sooner. I think that would have helped to be more profitable with buying skins or bundles like other games.
@@Giggitygootwo Bro, Kotick destroyed every Blizzard IP. Stop defending the d-canoe
There is a book called the mythical man month that my prof had us read in our software project management class. It explores the concept that adding more people to a software project can often make it take longer, due to many of the issues the team cited here. Very good read, highly recommend.
Capitalism is a fickle thing. A company needs to make money to survive but if they focus on the money instead of the product, they will eventually fail. It happens so often. When executives come in and try to dictate the creative process they only take the soul out of the creators and the people who were once passionate will feel like their creation was tainted. It's a sad state of affairs to realize that the game was ruined by people who micromanaged the creatives who made them the money in the first place. Greed is awful.
But on the other hand, games wouldn’t exist NEARLY to this extent without capitalism because then nobody would have the drive to make something at a complete loss.
Greed is the issue, not capitalism. Capitalism just materializes the effects of greed
@@RIP_ZYZZ1738 Indie game studios: *Exist*
@@RIP_ZYZZ1738 blah u don't know jack squat. People have passion without money you soulless gibbering.
@@RIP_ZYZZ1738 Games can be simpler and still be fun. Nobody asked for games that cost hundreds of millions to create.
@@GaussianEntity And they’re fun. But guess what they take? MONEY
Main thing that bothers, or rather saddens me, is that Jeff didn't pop up somewhere else doing something new. There are enough old blizzard fans that would be very interested in what ex blizzard people create.
MAN idc what people say Jeff was an inspiring figure with a passion you very rarely see
Quality of matches in low elo competitive is a huge problem. On top of the random nature of online "team" games there's now the tank diff = 100% loss issue + so many bots and derankers that you'll have about 4-5 bad experiences for a single good one. IMO this will starve the game if it continues and should be tackled first. The game needs to be fun again and fun more often again.
They say "vote with your wallet" but in FTP world you have to vote with your time. They will only make the drastic changes needed if people stop supporting the game with their time. Whales will leave too if there's no one to "show off" to.
the tank diff is an issue all the way up. I'm in high diamond low masters typically and every game there is still determined by the better tank in almost every case
@@razrv3lc This is More of a way to blame others for your own mistakes. Good DPS can solo win the game. Support can make most of the tanks better, even if they are worse than the opponent's tank. But people just want to pick mercy, hold left click for 3 minutes, and win, and if they don't, they cry about tanks. Then do not wonder nobody wants to play tank, and you wait 8 minutes for the match.
@tracexcze5408 seeing a mercy player on the team is always disheartening in high ranks. How are there so many mercy solo players lmao
This is just so depressing man, i wonder what or how Jeff feels now.
OWL was such a slow-motion trainwreck, it was obvious almost immediately, but certainly by the second season that the viewership and path to profitability wasn't there. I would just play it on mute in the background to farm owl tokens, and I'm sure I wasn't alone in that - you have to wonder how many of the tiny viewerbase actually cared about the very expensive product being produced..
I was super into OWL buying jerseys, and other merch. Even buying the trading cards. All the way up to the point they went to online only events and the quality of production dropped drastically. It’s sad because I really think it could have been a huge phenomenon if only OW was treated better.
"Never accept the world for what it could be, monetize it to hell instead" - Papa Winton
I remember always looking forward to seeing Jeff, but never have I been excited to see Aaron 😂 whenever Aaron starts talking I'm like "OMG WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO RUIN NOW??"
He left coz he knew that Gavin PharMercy shipper would ruin the lore as lead narrative director when Michael Chu left.
Is that why pharah is a annoying butch lesbian now and mercy got retconned to be around her age so the relationship wouldnt seem predatory? (She was a literal child when overwatch was around and mercy was an adult)
Didn't Jeff leave way before Michael? Either way, what little soul the game had left definitely died out when Chu left. The timeline doesn't even make sense anymore with the recent revisions.
@@ozairchishti1264 I think it was Michael 1st, then it was Jeff.
Not that the Gency shipping from Chu was any less insufferable... but I could live with that because opinions differ and I had the impression he knew what he was doing with the lore writing. It has fallen off a lot since.
@@123Suffering456 the lore has especially fallen off not too long after both the As You Are short story comic and the mid-tier Invasion mode was launched. As a former Pharah main, this was inexcusable and frankly the final straw after the PvE was scrapped. 6 years for all this to end with a whimper? This is pathetic.
As a developer I can only say.. scaling never worked. It's like the saying for manager, hire 9 women and the child is there in a month, it doesnt work that way. Often more people means more overhead, more management work that interfers with the vision... all that stuff.
To this day, the animated short "Dragons" was the greatest short in my opinion. Nothing has come close to what that short was. Overwatch or Overwatch 2 (Money-Grab-Edition), isn't doing anything much to rekindle that flaming passion I had for the game I once had a great time with. 😮💨
For myself, it seemed pretty obvious why Jeff left. Having watched the developer updates and hearing what Jeff was trying to achieve and the following crashout after his leaving. It's pretty apparent that Activision made a hostile work environment(at least creatively) and what Activision has done with the game since(actively removing as much of Jeff's vision as possible) just hammered that home. Kind of amazing that the game has continued as long as it has, but let's be serious. Jeff was the anchor being to the game, this game is just going to xerox itself to death moving forward. It's just a matter of time
Didnt we know most of this already? Anyways yeah upper management screwed everything up
you glued to your computer screen buddy? not everybody is on Blizzard's d
@@JackAdams0you got a stick up your ass, buddy? fans of Blizzard games already knew this
@@JackAdams0 this news has been out for over 2 years, buddy..
@@runningunclesinc854 my point still stands. go touch some grass buddy
I didnt know this happened
this is the third time we have finally got to know, wonder what S4 of the Jeffpass will unveil.
There is no future without 6v6
What I don't understand is, why the old team couldn't focus on working on the PVE side of things and have the new recruits just maintain the PVP side of things and keep it ticking over.
That way you still keep your small team working together on the new project while also expanding and slowly integrating new people.
The reason why indie projects get done rather quickly is because to them they aren't working they are having fun and the more Blizzard higher ups got involved the more it felt less like they were putting effort into something fun and more like a job
It's crazy to think that this is the life cycle of a popular creative project
1. Creative project is creative
2. The creativity is popular
3. Interest from rich people
4. More money put into creativity
5. Makes rich person more rich
6. Rich person wants to be more rich
7. Creativity is reduced
It’s amazing how they were exactly able to call what would happen. Also, many will criticize Jeff for not wanting a larger team, but a larger team does not always mean a better game. Look at call of duty, each game has 11 teams working on it and they are the same stuff every year and always release incomplete, even with 3-4 year dev cycles.
I agree. Also as a CoD person I see how it would be better if each team (the main 3) did its own game or stuff, but I feel they are forced to follow a certain "path/cycle/formula" together and now more than ever the "need" to beeing attatched to each other team's game due to Warzone and its live service
@@naskouz1295 yup.. My favorite mode (zombies) is just a shell of its former self due to them pushing warzone and greed into EVERY mode, its what they want with overwatch too, and its working...
The team size has nothing to do with COD being lazy. Thats a stupid comparison. Thats like saying water kills you because everyone who has died drank water
@@devlintaylor9520 It does. Larger teams means more expensive communication and logistical solutions. Expensive here meaning either time-consuming or costing money in the long run. You also can't just hire anyone if those people won't synergize with the current team.
Idk I feel like they should have made another team. They obviously couldn’t deal with everything they had. Sure it takes time to teach juniors but this just feels elitist
Yeah, they were right to be afraid of activision interference, but they were ego tripping if they thought they had the ability to develop two games at once. One can only imagine what would have happened if they split the old ow1 team in two to train up and lead two new teams
What an incredible ending of the video. HUGE!
Even though the topic of the video is sad and ... yeah, we miss Jeff. Hope Blizzard could change and get him back on board.
Jeff left because they wouldn't green light rocket cat with abilities "Knock sh** off the table", "Check out my b***hole", "knead on the upholstery", and ult "3 am zoomies"
what a shame
Awww I still want jetpack cat.
Who knew that the removal of lootboxes would bring in something much worse
Chris Metzen came back. I really hope Jeff comes back too! :(
having Jeff back wouldnt unf*ck the game though. There is no undoing the damage that's been done.
@@micro522 Sadly, you're probably right. It's on life support and there isn't much left to do...
I live Overwatch. The game I played the most in my life. It was Jeff's Overwatch, and Arnold's, Michael's and Geoff's. We have now a moving shell of what it used to be. It is still (almost) the same game. But the magic it had is impossible to replicate.
It is like they replaced all the members from your favorite band and expect them to be the thing, but is actually just a cover.
Really glad Jason is putting this out. Too bad we couldn't fix it sooner as a community, I guess.
The thing about developer team size of 1 is that, if they're any good, it takes a team of 5 to outperform them. The 1 may feel overworked and want help, but adding 1 to the team creates more overhead than anything. Particularly at the start. What always happens is that if you convince management to increase team size, productivity goes DOWN for a long, long time, and then management doesn't trust you any more.
spot on. spot on.
Which is why they need to start investing more in actually training people for the job instead of just expecting new recruits to magically have 3-5 yrs of experience. Imagine yea, instead of learning nothing but theory in school, schools actually allowed aspiring devs to practice what would be necessary in their field of work.
Say what you want about Jeff but he at least did care about the overwatch community. Yeah he might’ve had some bad decisions, but you can say that overwatch two is not perfect either.
Listening to this is just depressing because you know what could have been.
This is such a better video than you just reading an article! Please more of these kind of videos when articles come out. Love your take on it - and you dont need to read it word for word! Just give us a summarize version and the good bits
imo, and this may just be me being bitter, but OW2 has always looked to me like a scam. I bought OW1 and enjoyed getting the free loot boxes and getting random items from those and the currency they dropped. They basically just changed the name, changed the model to f2p and now that stuff is ridiculously expensive. Even stuff that was released during OW1 that I could've gotten for free if I grinded enough. I stopped playing then. Even Fortnite did this better. When they ended paid access to the campaign mode, people who already had it could continue to earn the in-game currency for skins and other cosmetics. At the very least Blizzard could've kept the boxes you earned and the free one or two for events and just not sold extra boxes. Still have the new monetization.
From day one I've maintained OWL was a mistake because it took away from what made Overwatch what it was. As much as was gained in viewership and content and advertising, OWL ultimately cost more than it brought. If they spent time instead focusing on content and mechanics the average player benefited from, the game may not have atrophied like it did.
Those words from Bowie at the end are incredibly poignant. It makes what happened to OW that much sadder 😔
i really liked that david bowie clip, never seen it before
I hope Jeff is doing well. I won't talk about what he did to our game, but I'll say I'm thankful be made the game.
Wild to learn the lore. I'm happy I got to be part of overwatch in it's glory days, and I'm very thankfull for what it's given me. An overwatch reboot would be very cool, but I don't see that happening with Activision Blizzard at the wheel.
Bobby wanting to expand team 4 was the one and only thing I’ll ever agree with him on and be absolutely stunned how against team 4 leads were
Like you were trying to maintain a game while updating the engine for the sequel, make the sequel, make a massive PVE in-depth experience you needed more people far more than I think they have ever had to be able to do this but it seemed like the flaw issue was wasn’t that they were scared of this culture issue the issue was that culture to begin with it limited the scale they wanted to achieve so much so that after release it eventually was made clear pve was dead
So many promises and not enough hands to fulfill them
They were going to ruin the game. Both choices were poison but one of them at least felt like the devs had some control.
Host: "Let's break it down."
Dances to an unheard beat
I super appreciate the indie-bookstore shout out
I miss Jeff. I'll never trust Blizzard again without Jeff at the helm and I know he's never coming back.
I reckon reboot overwatch 1 with this current team and then bring back Jeff so he can work on the PVE with his old team and just let him cook. But of course, we can only dream...
every day i miss overwatch. that game shaped my teenage years (probably for the worst.) i will forever yearn for those overwatch 1 days again :( i miss u jeff. i miss u overwatch :(
To be honest: Thats all what crossed my mind when jeff left....a captain never leaves a sinking ship, unless there are only dirty, greedy rats left on board...
...and the crew is already dead.
This was very informative of the what the "no updates" era was about, I can't really excuse the back to back bad decision but that "true magic" the book talks about really makes me sad, the game really started off in the best way possible
I just clicked on the video and slowly realized this is the unit lost guy great british gaming from the good old days!!!
Subbed so i dont lose you again
After all these years
Nah we need 6v6 back
Whatever Jeff is up to these days I hope he's enjoying life and is proud of the work he did on Overwatch. Not all stories end well, but that doesn't mean the journey isn't worth remembering.
Man, I miss the old Overwatch days with Jeff from the Overwatch team. That time period, as short as it was, was something alright. A unique and fun experience, and one hell of an experience it was. I doubt I'll ever see anything quite like it ever again. Feels like forever ago now.
As for the "sequel"... Gonna be real, I played it for a week or two and hated it. Haven't touched it since. If it at least still had 6v6 I might still play it on and off. Maybe.
Jeff wasn't good at actually running the division and making game sense and corporate decisions outside of creative ones.
It's just sad to see passion projects turn into money milking machines. This also goes for ubisoft EA and activision in general. Whenever one of those big 3 published/developed a game for the ps2 you knew it was gonna be good, even during the ps3/xbox360 days all their games were straight fire.
He just left when OW2 got canceled. At first, I thought OW2 was just a way to « rework » what they messed up with OW1, but realizing it was his project for so long actually makes it very clear imo. Why would he stay in a company that now goes against his projects, it's not like it's going to be better
No esports game was first made to be an esport, this is something that grows out of the love of the community, but its hard to love a game that keeps changing to adapt a minority of the player base that only ever play meta
The soul of OW left with Jeff.
Brooks's law. You don't add to the team late in the game or your shits gunna be way later than it already would have beem. Next point in the queue please!
That david bowie quote hits hard!
Jeff is a hero. He protected women from harassment, wanted to make a fun game, and trued to encourage/build his team up. Way to go jeff.
love ya sty, keep the videos coming brother 😘
I attend 3D modelling workshops and one of the artists is an Overwatch dev. People think game dev is numbers and code and strings and animating, but they pay people good money to just design characters and then model them, character artists.
Look at the Concord characters and then look at the Overwatch characters. Enough said.
remember Kaplan's holidays by the fire video ??? was sooo great ! XD
They should go back the loot boxes n keep selling collabs and mythic weapons for money. Then sell the gold variant mythics for higher price. Then splash in purchasing etc color palettes for money and maybe squeezing out more money by selling certain theme weapon and weapon charms. But offering the original loot boxes so ppl can still get skins every normal event. Ppl would still buy loot boxes and do openings especially if they made the collab skins 0.02% chance drop meaning u could get it free after like 250 loot boxes from the specific event
I'm telling you Sty, and I might just end up commenting on all your videos on this book 🙂It's never been about business minded people versus creative people. I understand that's always how it feels, but especially in the games industry in the technology industry, it's short term minded people versus long-term minded people. If you look at the companies that make the most money overtime, they produce the most value. Of course they work very hard on capturing that value, they think a lot about margins and deadlines and all these things that hold tension with creativity and experimentation. But the winners in the long run are always the one who look to enable the experimentation and creativity within the context of making money.
Bobby K is not a great businessman. He's a hard-working short-term grifter that is excellent at cultivating an image. There's a lot like him. But at the end of the day, he does not understand the market. He thinks he does because he helped build call of duty -- which makes him the equivalent of someone that built McDonald's thinking they can build any kind of restaurant. There's nothing wrong with McDonald's, there's nothing right about it either. It's just food. That's extremely cheap and can be sold at a great margin. That's a decent business plan. That does not mean I can go and build any other type of restaurant I want to - if I try to get a Michelin star, or even if I just try to build a nice chain of family restaurants, I'm producing a different product. Name an industry, and you can find analogous examples.
So I really feel it's not about business versus creative, it's about short-term versus long-term.
True. Extremely good point. People think business they think of using numbers to make decisions. Numbers are clumsy though. Value is what you are after. A good business man is going to make decisions on numbers and try to understand the value of what they are supporting. Which bobby clearly has some intuition that this is what is expected of him but really has no idea. Ingenuine, short term.
That second sentence is crazy to say, lol when you built that type of stuff bobby did and saying he is not a businessman is crazy lmao. Even ppl who hates him (i don't like him at all) recognize that he is a great businessman, he took Activision when it was at the lowest point and managed to put them in the top 5 of the gaming companies and managed to sold that to Microsoft even during this mess. He played the quarterly strategies like most of the top SP500, and it worked out since it's the long lasting meta rn so no i totally disagree with that 2nd sentence when he proved that he is a good businessman, a $hitty person but a good businessman. The best exemple and easiest would have been the CEO of Embracer Group that is a prime exemple of bad exemple of businessman.
Finally that short-term vs long term argument can be counter easily, especially for the game industry rn, Triple A games takes a long times now and some of them instead of going for short to mid term, they go long and it crash (Concord, $uicide squad, Duke Nukem Forever, System Shock 2...) and some short term games like Lawbreakers fails too yes but the short term vs long term is not a problem is it always come back to creative vs business, especially when devs also said that and to go further there is another field who have that same problem of creative vs business: Hospital. Some of them are managed by business ppl and some by doctor themselves and it has caused some problem too.
Finally the 2 long term game to look at that might or might not be a total failure are The Perfect Dark (aka Quadruple A according to Microsoft) and Star Citizen.
@@Justin-vq9co exactly.
Numbers be like:
The CoD Franchise has sold 425 million copies. The Mario franchise has sold more than 900 million units worldwide, and has spawned a series of other revenue streams (b/millions in merch, brand power, movies, etc).
CoD is much easier to pitch to the Bobbys of the world: it barely made the pitch within Nintendo at the time.
Value is the key thing!
@@xNemesis_ neither of us have been in the room with Bobby while he makes these decisions, although maybe you have? 🙂 But based on his performance of blizzard, I think it's a fair assumption that his involvement with the true success of the games, he built might've been quite limited. People follow up these ranks, all the time based on their association with others. I don't doubt that Bobby is a pretty strong marketer, especially when working with an established IP. What he isn't is a value builder.
(Concord, $uicide squad, Duke Nukem Forever, System Shock 2.) Believe it, or not, I would consider some of these games rushed. For the ones that truly were not, I should restate my argument - thinking in the long term is not in and of itself a good strategy. You have to think in the long term and then build a good strategy: this includes rapid iteration, listening to the market, gaining quick feedback on experiments, things like that. These are things of the teams behind the games listed failed to do.
I'm surprised you brought a hospitals as an example of why short term business thinking can work - medical systems that treat symptoms rather than diseases often end up overloaded and losing out in the long-term over cost. ER recidivism alone costs billions of dollars each year. Help me understand your argument here, are you saying that ER recidivism is mostly occurring because of the decisions doctors make? or "business folk"?
We love and miss you Jeff
It's a dark realization that Jeff was both keeping Overwatch's soul alive _and_ strangling it in the crib. His utter apathy towards nurturing the PvP side of the game meant that it only took a handful of unpopular, hastily-thrown together balance patches for the lightning to escape the bottle.
As much as I despise OWL for "taking over" the game's balance, it's now apparent that the Jeff and his team would've happily ditched OW1 soon after it's release to go work on PvE..... if not for the League twisting their arms and screaming in their ears to keep supporting PvP with balance updates.
And even then, Kaplan's team is still not free from blame. It's clear now that their disinterest in PvP was the reason why they tended to passively go along with whatever the OWL's loudest pro players asked for.... even when those changes tended to be massively unpopular with non-pros & were purely motivated by financial incentives (aka it's easier to maximize your chance of winning tournaments if you can convince the devs that your fave heroes should be forever meta and/or they should nerf anything that gets in your way).
why the shades highlosa?
Lot of people give Jeff crap for overwatch's rough period and what we eventually got to, and to be fair a part of that is true with halting overwatch 1 development to focus on overwatch 2, but I really wonder what we would have gotten had Jeff been given full control on Overwatch 2 without the business side interfering. Would it have lived up to the expectations then? I think people would've came back to overwatch after the content drought, i mean we already know that a lot did at the launch of overwatch 2, and we still wouldve kept everything from overwatch.
Another part of me wonders if they had just not fought the idea of growing the team to produce content more quickly, how that may have resulted.
I really, really miss Overwatch. I remember when everyone on the Internet was excited for it, now saying that you like Overwatch gets you nasty looks. They killed it way too soon.
I would honestly just follow Jeff to his next big game
Final boss stylosa with the shades dahn