Overwatch 2's director thinks running a shooter that isn't free-to-play would be "very, very difficult" in this era, but the business model is also changing how developers design games.
"There were free to play games before Overwatch launched," game director Aaron Keller recalls in an interview with 12DOVE, "but that is a much bigger part of the market right now." He then says "to run a big shooter it'd be very, very difficult without making it free to play" as a full price tag is now a "huge barrier to entry for players." He's not entirely wrong, either. Convincing friends to team up and drop $60-70 on a game they've never played before, when there are countless ones available to try at no cost, is tough nowadays, and that's been proven by Concord's recent failure. Successes like Helldivers 2 or Lethal Company are seem few and far between and usually rely on some level of virality to give them a boost.
But when Overwatch went free-to-play and became Overwatch 2, it wasn't just a rebrand. Keller acknowledges that the business model "starts defining the way that you start building the game," which is doubly true since "the audience has changed a little bit."
"We had a lot of design philosophies on the original Overwatch, and I think a lot of them are still good or great, but some we've started to see could use some updating," Keller explains. "So one of those was, we wanted Overwatch heroes to always be very simple. We even had this thing where it's like, 'Hey, when it feels like you're adding that one extra button, you should just separate that into two heroes'. On [cancelled Blizzard project] Project Titan, what we did is we took one class, and we turned it into Genji and Hanzo. We split it in two and made two different Overwatch heroes with it, and that's the way that we ought to operate."
When Overwatch 2 now introduces a new hero, it takes almost no time at all for "people to master it" and for the meta to "shift around" the newcomer. So, the Overwatch 2 team is keeping old heroes fresh with some massive upcoming changes. Namely, upgradeable perks that'll be dished out throughout matches to hopefully add "a little bit of extra depth and extra complexity that our players can pick up very quickly." We'll see how it shakes out when Overwatch 2 Season 15 launches on February 18.
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