Overwatch has a negative impact on gaming market?

[FakeSympathy]

There is no denying the impact that OW brought to the gaming market. This game can be argued to be THE hero shooter game successor to TF2. While the game itself has a lot of shortcomings, it's bright and colorful visuals, fleshed out characters, and Blizzard's continued support can't be argued.

But what about other hero-based games that were released? The most famous case was Battleborn, which is in no way similar to OW, but because it was released around the same time AND because it had heroes, it quickly became forgotten in history. This is the same case for almost all hero shooter games.

Paladins? Forgotten
Paragon? Who has even heard of this?
TF2? Does anyone even play this?
And last but not least, Lawbreakers, which again, failed.

These aren't bad games by no means. In fact, TF2 was my first steam game, battleborn was enjoyable, and Lawbreaker is quite frantic once you get enough people. However, because OW has dominated hero shooter market, there is no room for these games to shine.

The Upcoming game Quake Champions seriously need to bring its A-game. Otherwise, it's gonna meet the same fate as Lawbreakers did.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Unpopular opinion time; Yes.

But not for the reasons brought up. I believe OW has shown to a lot of other publishers that you can throw gambling encouraging mini-buys like Lootboxes into whatever you want and pretty much get away with it if it has any sort of fanbase to make excuses for them while maintaining high popularity. They have paved the way for a much more greed-ridden 'AAA' gaming economy as these publishers begin to realise just how much cheek they can get away with.

 

[DefunctTheory]

But not for the reasons brought up. I believe OW has shown to a lot of other publishers that you can throw gambling encouraging mini-buys like Lootboxes into whatever you want and pretty much get away with it if it has any sort of fanbase to make excuses for them while maintaining high popularity. They have paved the way for a much more greed-ridden 'AAA' gaming economy as these publishers begin to realise just how much cheek they can get away with.

This. Overwatch was kind of the last straw, the last proof of concept that, yes, you CAN double, triple, or even quadruple dip your playerbase for cash. They weren't the first, but their the ones that have absolutely proven it's possible outside of Valve's weird little economy.

As for OP... well, it's unfair to 'blame' Overwatch for being more popular than other games. Especially games like Battleborn, which isn't exactly a gem of a game to begin with.

The Upcoming game Quake Champions seriously need to bring its A-game. Otherwise, it's gonna meet the same fate as Lawbreakers did.

Quake will be ok. Probably not the monster that is Overwatch, but it will be ok.

 

[Aerosteam]

It's unfortunate to see a single game dominate quite a broad genre but I can't say I blame anyone that things are this way - Blizzard played their cards right.

 

[CritialGaming]

Overwatch showed the world how much money you can make from loot boxes and started a shitty trend in the industry that I hope burns out fast. As for the games that failed in OW's shadow? Well they couldn't be very good games now could they?

If those games were good, they would have done fine. At very worst, they might have had to adjust their buisness model, but nothing more. The biggest problem is when publishers try to be king of the mountain.

We saw it over and over again with World of Warcraft clones. How many WoW clones popped up only to immediately fail due to being unable to touch Wow's power. It was only the games that were willing to adapt that survived. Swtor, FF14, those adapted and remade themselves to retain an audience. But where is Lord of the Rings online, or Rift? (I know those games are still "online" but come on they are shadows of what they wanted to be).

 

[McElroy]

Does anyone know anyone who buys those loot boxes?

 

[Xprimentyl]

But not for the reasons brought up. I believe OW has shown to a lot of other publishers that you can throw gambling encouraging mini-buys like Lootboxes into whatever you want and pretty much get away with it if it has any sort of fanbase to make excuses for them while maintaining high popularity. They have paved the way for a much more greed-ridden 'AAA' gaming economy as these publishers begin to realise just how much cheek they can get away with.

This.

^^This too. I think a consensus of 3 officially makes it "popular" opinion.

 

[meiam]

Meh honestly the loot box stuff doesn't bother me, but that's because I'm someone who would never even begin to think about buying one, not to mention that I don't care at all about cosmetic. So, from my point of view, loot box is just blizzard way of getting people with too much money to subsidize the game so that they don't have to start selling gameplay altering stuff (look at old world of tank or tribes) while also justifying developing new character/map and keeping server running.

I played wow for about 4 year, if blizzard started talking about removing the monthly fee and in exchange introduce some purely cosmetic loot box store while producing the same amount of content, I'd be pretty cool with that.

As for the game killing other property, maybe they should just step up there game? Blizzard didn't do anything malicious, they just made a good game and polished it a ton and realize that people like when there game have personality to them. Just compare lawbreaker to OW, which game ooze personality?

 

[sXeth]

Does anyone know anyone who buys those loot boxes?

Like personally? No. Plenty of Youtubers/Streamers though. I unsubbed any of them that do at this point.

To the OPs point/list.

AFAIK, TF2 is still rolling along, relatively well for a 12 year old game at this point.
Battleborn failed marketing hard, which was how it got confused anyways, on top of Gearbox's fairly public series of fumbles in recent times.
Paragon's still in Beta, and a MOBA anyways.
My general experience with Paladins is that it was not particularly great at its core FPS play, then so much of it was blatant knockoffs of Overwatch heroes, buried under a trash F2P system. You can't even get into the real game mode without buying heroes because there aren't enough free ones to fulfill the requirements.
Lawbreakers just never had much going for it beyond CliffyB's name attachment. Its basically had zero marketing.

Other hero shooter things
Rainbow Six Siege seems to be chugging along quite well enough. It has some obvious benefits in that its visually and gameplay distinct from Overwatch, and backed by a company that can actually hold its own in AAA marketing.
Evolve did its spectacular nosedive into oblivion well before Overwatch ever came out. Then the publisher or whoever ran the money side pulled the plug out when they tried to reboot it.

There's been a few other indie type ones (Gigantic? I think was one). But you can't really throw up a budget games success against a game that is consistently saturation bombed by the ActiBlizzard marketing budget.

 

[CaitSeith]

You want an example of a game that had an actual negative impact on the market? Three words: Call of Duty. After its huge success, pretty much every shooter tried to imitate it; almost all of them ended up less successful than any of the ones on your list. What's happening with Overwatch isn't that bad, because there is still place for M-rated shooters to shine.

 

[Hawki]

I don't buy the idea of a good product ruining the market by 'forcing' other products to mimic it. If they falter, it's on them, not the original. It isn't even a phenomenon confined to games either - movies tried to ape the MCU, the YA market tried to ape The Hunger Games, etc.

That said, per the examples given, they're on some shakey ground. TF2 was released in 2007, it's of course going to have faded into the background (comparatively) by now. Battleborn was more of a MOBA than a hero shooter - it suffered by trying to compete with Overwatch, sure, but while they're both shooters, they play differently. Paladins and Paragon are both in beta, are both still getting heroes, and while Paladins is in the same genre as Overwatch, Paragon is more of a MOBA. LawBreakers is a bit too early to say - I've seen the word "dead game" be thrown around so often that it's lost all meaning. And Quake Champions is still an arena shooter first and foremost - the hero shooter elements are just that - elements, not the core of the gameplay.

Granted, this is from someone who plays and enjoys Paladins, at least in part because my PC can't run Overwatch.