Blizzard Entertainment has announced that Overwatch 2 will be coming to Steam on August 10th. This is the first time that a Blizzard game will be available on Steam, and it is a significant move for the company. Blizzard has traditionally relied on its own Battle.net platform for game distribution, but this move suggests that they are open to expanding their reach to new audiences.
Overwatch was a free-to-play, team-based shooter that was first released in 2016. The game has been a huge success, with over 60 million players worldwide but sadly that was simply not the case for Overwatch 2. Although the upcoming release on Steam is expected to give the game a major boost in popularity, Blizzard needs to take a few more steps to get the game back to its glorious days.
In addition to Overwatch 2, Blizzard has also said that they plan to bring other games to Steam in the future. This is a welcome development for gamers, as it gives them more choices in where they buy and play their games.
Why is Overwatch 2 moving to Steam?
Steam is the most popular PC gaming platform in the world, with over 130 million active users. By releasing Overwatch 2 on Steam, Blizzard will be able to reach a much larger audience and it is almost mandatory for them at this point.
Blizzard, which excites every game fan with the promise of a new game, unfortunately, presented us with Overwatch 1.5 instead of Overwatch 2. The developer has made many promises since the release of the game, but its similarity to the first game caused a serious decline in the player base.
Because of the added microtransactions, the Battle Pass system, and the canceled PvE system that was described in the initial marketing of the game, Overwatch 2 fell far short of expectations in the team-based FPS category.
According to Active Player, there are approximately 318,000 people actively playing Overwatch 2 in the last 1 hour, while the Steam Charts page of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the most popular game of the same genre on Steam, shows 1.1 million users at the time of writing, and it is obvious that the issue is a developer error rather than the platform on which the game is published.
The way of Apex Legends
Let’s take another popular game into account that is also available on Steam and in its own launcher, Apex Legends. The Battle Royale game, which decided to release the game for Steam with a similar decision on November 4th of 2020, is a game that successfully used this to its advantage. Although it has been looking for its old days recently, especially due to character and weapon balancing errors, it managed to show an increasing popularity curve until the last quarter of 2022.
The formula here was quite simple. Bring in new content often and showcase their game’s competitiveness at the e-sports level. Yes, it was a new game and it was the first time to try the fluency that many Battle Royale games could not offer, rather than starting with an expectation of the player base, but still, the reason for its success was the transition to Steam and the correct management of this process by Apex Legends team.
Is Overwatch 2 hopeless at this point?
Overwatch’s entry into a massive platform like Steam will surely increase the number of instant players, but that alone won’t be enough to save Blizzard.
If they support the increasing number of players with the right decisions and patches, Overwatch 2 can reach the popularity of its ancestor Overwatch.
So what should Blizzard do? Even though Counter-Strike has a legacy and deserves the title of the greatest FPS game of all time, it has done a lot of right things to keep up with modern times and Blizzard does not need to come up with a different formula.
- Tournaments that will attract a worldwide audience
- Optional microtransactions
- Releasing PvE mode
- Constantly balancing the game with small patches
- Battle Passes that offer new game modes rather than a few skins
- Using the Steam community marketplace wisely
- An actual change in in-game models other than minimal makeovers
- Developing a system with more interaction with Map
- Agreements with popular streamers like Shroud, Ninja, or ex-Overwatch pro xQc
If Blizzard does all this, Overwatch will make a spectacular comeback in the gaming world with its unique gameplay.
But we should not forget that the time to do all this is also very important. If Blizzard makes all these changes simultaneously with Counter-Strike 2‘s release and enters the popularity race, Blizzard will leave this war with a big defeat.
We always love competition in gaming, and Overwatch has almost everything it needs for that. Let’s hope that we may see Blizzard taking the right steps for Overwatch 2 this time.
Featured image credit: Blizzard Entertainment.
