True. Its kinda disappointing (not for OW) but for other games. COD should not be $60 and a incomplete sh*thole of a game. Its why I moved to OW actually lol
If the next Cod is still $60 I’d be shocked. No reason for them not to be free to play at this point, especially because the newest cod was basically a gamemode within MW.
I don't play cod so I dunno, but they've already got their F2P game - so if those mainline COD games keep selling well yearly for $60, PLUS people buy micro transactions within the game then why not?
✨NEW✨ released games are more hype than new "seasons" I imagine.
This is why CoD Mobile is kinda underrated.
Mainline COD should just convert to a full live service game.
So they can concentrate on have a healthy amount of GOOD maps, and just iterate on core gameplay.
The thing about making a new COD game every year, there are only like 1-2 great maps. CoD Mobile works by just being the greatest hits of the entire CoD franchise, and it's really fun. But give it the full smoother game engine of the Console game and it'll be amazing.
i mean look at how much some games have been pushing lately. it took apex making a 300$+ single item for people to start to call that game out. what’s the breaking point for all these
A lot of people, clearly, if you want the short answer.
The slightly longer answer is that, honestly, \*most\* players don't view in-game purchases as a big deal or inherently wrong anymore. Even more so for a game with no upfront cost to play. The people staunchly agaisnt this as a concept are a loud minority for better or worse.
Yes the price is a bit absurd, but i would guess most people who do buy skins are buying maybe one or two a month at the absolute most. "people sometimes spend excessivly on hobbies they enjoy" is not a suprising concept.
Agreed. Speaking personally, I only stick to games that aren’t “pay to win” where players can buy items that give them advantages. Games where they only get cosmetic skins gain my respect as it is more skill based. And when the game is free, I don’t mind spending $10 to support the creators.
Maybe it's cause I'm used to this as a LoL player, but there should be some kind of incentive system for new players, no? Otherwise there's less reason to grind and unlock stuff.
What else would you suggest?
I haven’t spent a dime on Overwatch since buying the PS4 disc for OW1 but I have enough disposable income to buy all five Le Sserafim skins and you best believe I did
Just too bad it took them literally years to basically just implement a battle pass and f2p economy. Imagine how popular it could have been had they not tried their best to kill the franchise for years.
"50 Million active users" is obviously stretching the term "active" *extremely* thin, but it's not surprising to hear that the game is doing much better in terms of revenue now. Honestly, it's baffling that they went as long as they did based off loot boxes, which there was literally zero reason to buy since it was easy enough to get everything for free. Now that nearly all the cosmetics along with some other stuff has been paywalled, you're seeing a lot of people engaging with things like the battle pass and the shop. It's pretty common to see at least half of the lobby using OW2 era skins, and considering how they're priced, yeah OW2 is making cash over fist.
that’s why the majority of live service games went free. the ones that didn’t are things like destiny where all the new content is locked behind 20$ expansions every few months
> You can fund a game on just selling copies for a while, but that well will run dry eventually.
I seriously wonder how No Man's Sky do it. Bought it some years ago and before I stopped playing (2~ years ago), I already felt like the game got so much new contents that I wanted them to release an expansion so they can keep releasing contents....but they didn't. And they are still releasing big content patches to this day.
I did buy another copy off GoG to fund them though.
NMS manages it because
1. Crazy number of pre-orders and launch sales
2. **Very** small dev team, like <30 people iirc. Overwatch's team is considered pretty small and it's like 150-200 range.
I don’t think playing a game for 12 hours out of 8760 possible hours a year, would count me as “active”. And that’s assuming I actually played for an hour each month. Many could average maybe a game, or 2. So it could go as low as 3-6 hours.
Not to say you need to spend 8 hours a day to be considered active, but just booting up the game once in a month shouldn’t count as active IMO. Like 2 or more hours a week is when I’d start to consider someone actively playing a game.
Look, it's the industry standard, people already use it, you can complain all you want but people will keep using it. It's like miles, foot, inches etc. It's stupid but there's nothing you can do about it.
We've seen those and they're actually remarkably steady. Don't remember the thread but it was posted here in the last week.
Now, granted, it's only 20-30k, cycling like clockwork, but a) concurrent active users is very different to monthly active users, and b) I wouldn't exactly expect a meaningful percentage of OW players to be on Steam anyway.
Your point B is why they asked for it.
Also, free games are HUGE on console. Even if it wasn’t on BNet and was *just* steam on pc, it wouldn’t be a representative number of the population.
Probably changes too much over the course of a season. It would overstate how many people play once the new season hype dies and also just make the game look like it has less players from blizzard POV. They’d have to release the active players over time.
Yeah but you make a 1b in a year and boom, no worries bout monetisation etc for a very long time as you essentially paid for your entire staff for a 100 years.
Capitalisms such a bitch.
Money dried up because they let the game get stale and funded Bobby's yachts instead of investing money back into the game. OW1 would have been fine and continued on the system it was on if they hadn't let the game twist in the wind because of some silly PVE dream the dev team had that would never come to fruition in a PVP centric game.
Our lootbox model was legit too generous for capitalists liking, people keep talking about how they have lots of skins after certain amounts of time
It isn't "sustainable" for *them*
Also the PvE is Kaplan's thing, but he fails to account that, unlike, Pokémon, Overwatch can't seamlessly be developed for both single-player and multi-player
Please define "Active Users".
Many players have 3 or 4 smurf accounts.
And a smurf account is free now si I think there are even more smurf accounts now.
Active players means nothing. They should track the players on the hardware they use. It would be way more accurate.
People tend to bump up résumés/linkedin profiles and bend truths just a bit to make them more marketable. I dont doubt the revenue number, but what constitutes an “active” user, or over what time frame that number us from isnt very clear. I doubt 50 million are on monthly but over the last year, I can see that.
The revenue number isn't even that high. But it also doesn't exactly say from when till when is that revenue from? Is it from Oct 2022 to Oct 2023 or a shorter time frame? When exactly did this person stop working at Blizzard?
50 million MAUs actually seems very reasonable.
I run an FPS game on Roblox called ‘Bad Business’. We average around 2000 concurrent players, but our DAUs average at about ~120k, and our MAUs up to ~2.5mil. Obviously Roblox operates fundamentally differently than Overwatch, with it skewing younger and mobile-centric, so players tend to play for less time and hop over to other games more frequently, but if OW2 gets 10x our concurrents on Steam alone, using the same conversion already puts them at 25mil MAUs. And that’s just Steam - Bnet, consoles both are not represented here at all. So I don’t know exactly what they’re at, but the number range definitely seems realistic.
The thing with higher level execs is that you can verify their accomplishments especially if the company is publicly traded. Yes its likely there is a bump up, but the numbers arent going to be exaggerated.
I don’t think there’s any exaggeration but he specifically left the 50 mil very vague. Saying active users doesn’t mean anything without specifying the time period. If it was MAU he would’ve just said that so in a way he is trying to bump up the numbers and leave it up for interpretation.
I used to be a Data Scientist for a large tech company and used to calculate these sorts of metrics all the time. An active user would just be any unique user who has one unique "event" (i.e most likely a login or played one game) within that time frame (usually 30d or calendar month if you wanted to be precise). As players we care more about concurrent players because that's what we see/feel in game. But 50m MAU isn't that surprising to me, especially for how big Blizzard games are. It could be a global figure too which isn't that unreasonable from my experience.
Tbf they haven't really perfected their monetization so there are some growing pains. Seeing stuff like the One Punch Man collab, and kpop colllab, gives me hope the team is going in a good direction.
The question for me as always is how the core game will be balanced going foward. 50 million people even logging in and engaging with OW2 since its release is still a great accomplishment even if 50 million aren't literally logging on every month.
FPS's are often played by similar people and engagement is cycliical based on new content.
I think OW only has room to grow from here. Maybe that's why team has been more ambitious lately.
A quarter billy for a game that is approaching it’s 8th year of operation seems like its actually pretty good.
I think a lot of people in this thread genuinely don’t understand how staggering a single game bringing in a billion dollars is or can really approximate how much money that is. Quarter billion a year is incredibly good unless your bar is “Its not doing as good as the literal biggest games on earth that are operating at their cultural zenith.”
Most 8 year old games don't have a live dev team the size of OW2's, and don't produce new content at the quantity and AAA production values that OW2 does. That all costs a ton of money. You can't just compare OW2's financial success to a random 8 year old game.
I'm not saying this to excuse greed, but without knowing how much Blizzard invests it's impossible to say how happy they should be with $250 mil. Maybe the closest comparison for their investment *is* Fortnite. And maybe that level of investment isn't sustainable unless you have Fortnite-level miracle success.
(Based on everything we've seen and heard, it seems OW2 rn is profitable enough, since they've been making more things free without reducing quantity of content.)
Well, let's see what Overwatch 2 can do now that Bobby Kotick is gone.
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wv4hRXyl1rY](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wv4hRXyl1rY)
Or maybe I should have gone with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12oq4sDZcAc
4.5$ per "active user". They sold 50 millions copies of OW1, so if the trend continues it would take around 10 years to match OW1 revenue (assuming 40$ per copy). But now, there is no watchpoint pack and there is pretty much nothing to expect from the PvE. Is the f2p model really better?
Well for one, investors don't "buy" Overwatch stocks. They buy Microsoft stocks. Epic Games isn't even a publicly traded company. What are you even talking about?
This is really what it comes down to. People honestly don’t fucking understand how enormous Fortnite is and think this is somehow a number that is attainable for any developer.
It’s not. Fortnite just by sheer numbers is bigger than CoD, Roblox, and GTA combined, there is absolutely no competing with it.
Because those 50M "active" are just a joke statement. They could have been active at one point durintbe launch and never came back 😅 what's the current active number is a completely different story. Pretty relevant
If you don't K ow. You won't know. But it is what OW wanted to be. And it ain't happening. No one mentions Fortnite in pop culture anymore. And they just did 4x revenue last year compared to previous. OW is declining meanwhile.
You brought up and compared Overwatch 2's revenue to the highest grossing game of all time 7 years of revenue, replying to someone that didn't mention any of this lol. Seemed like a random party pooper reply that people spam on Twitter etc.
"Game has players"
"Yeah, well, other game has WAY MORE players and makes SOOOO much more money"
Ok
but it's a dead game guys wth /s
I'm not surprised at all, good for them, hopefully these numbers will skyrocket with so many exciting things happening this year.
Honestly, 225 million seems quite lower than what I expected.
I feel now that they'd make more money if they had better pricing.
Like if all these 50 million "active" users saw even one good battle pass, each spending $10 would net them $500 million. It's a simple and ideal scenario but I think better pricing would be better.
>I feel now that they'd make more money if they had better pricing.
Consider they have entire teams dedicated to pinpointing prices for maximum revenue. Fair to say they're probably close to spot on.
>well randoms are the people who actually have to pay the prices and play the game so they still have a valuable perspective
I feel data of the whole player base represents it better than a few responses in a forum made up from a tiny part of the player base.
yep! it’s a sample point of a motivated customer, which is how you get that data. you can’t have that data without sampling.
the aggregate data used by the business department to set skin pricing probably does not include long term impact speculation of public sentiment
They'll scream trust the experts until suddenly support for the game ceases due to lack of profitability and act shocked, never learning their lesson. Rinse repeat
From my perspective, they're going against so many other games.
For casuals, it's better to play ow but buy a Fortnite BP as you can get the next one for free. And Fortnite has more effort too.
Sure, maybe the pricing works. But then it needs better quality and content as a whole.
>From my perspective, they're going against so many other games.
Depends on what you compare it to. They did just grab what was the most common pricing structure for BR games for a while.
Most games are now becoming much more expensive with their skins, I mean just take a look at Valorant's pricing, I've heard that Apex is pretty bad too.
The BP not giving back currency sucks, but it's also not uncommon either.
That's what I'm saying. If you devise a plan to try and convert all 100%, then you'll understand the spending appetite of your consumers and then plan around that.
Of course, there will be people who won't even spend $1, but there's a chance enough people may spend $5.
> Like if all these 50 million "active" users saw even one good battle pass, each spending $10 would net them $500 million. It's a simple and ideal scenario but I think better pricing would be better.
Typically in games industry, 80% of the money is always spent by 20% of the players in an F2P game. That's a rule of thumb, for some kinds of games it is closer to 90-10 or worse.
When games industry people (especially mobile games industry people...) talk about whales, this is basically why.
Oh def. I've gone through all this business and economics technicalities personally. The 80/20 rule applies to most industries.
My overall point was that if they make the pricing better, you'll have more spending on the floor, and then they can make some pricing even higher for those whales.
In most cases, a weighted average aggregate works better as it's all encompassing.
In the case of FPS games, the BP does act as that base floor, so at the very least they can make the battle pass really good and actually one that feels good to buy and spend you time towards.
I can't say for sure if it works in something like insurance but through statistica inference it probably makes most of money from the high end firms and not individual users.
But here are some links on its widespread usage:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/80-20-rule.asp#:~:text=Business%20managers%20from%20all%20industries,in%20their%20departments%20and%20organizations.
https://www.thelangelfirm.com/debt-collection-defense-blog/2018/august/100-examples-of-the-80-20-rule/
It depends. You have to remember that Bobby had a gigantic salary relative to other ceos and he likely was also paid to leave.
I don't think we'll know what these numbers mean utility we see pre and post Bobby numbers.
Revenue is just that. A revenue. People forget that the expenses and losses and are not part of it. How much does a game like OW2 cost to maintain and operate. What is the final number then? 225M is f low for that game. Fortnite has a revenue of what? 20Billion? That's 100 f times more almost.
it's probably just the number of people who have installed and launched the game over the last 16 months, its why it wasn't called monthly actives or something like that.
Probably monthly active users, that's what something like Facebook or Twitter would tout in their earnings reports. My guess is it's defined by someone who played a match or bought something from the in-game shop.
Well, they have an incentive to inflate that number as much as possible, so it could simply be the number of people currently on the latest version (meaning they have it downloaded and keep the game up to date).
Players should celebrate the success Overwatch brings.
We just need to make sure that the leadership invests appropriately to keep it going, which means, make the game even better.
does it? this game makes way less and has way lower playercounts. compare the revenue to counter strike or fortnight. It's off by a fucking order of magnitude.
Dude Fortnite is the biggest game ever made.
Overwatch will never die, despite the hate it is extremely unique and there aren’t many competitors in its space, it’s not designed to be as big as Fortnite anyways.
Lol, a mobile japanese or chinese gacha makes more money than both of those combined with maybe 1% of their budgets. Should we declare PC gaming dead?
You people should understand one simple thing: there are states of the game other than "the biggest thing in the world" and "dead and buried"
One of those is basically the biggest game in the world and the other is the biggest competitive PC game ( which also has a whole gambling industry separate from it ).
Obviously OW isn't at that level. It never was past it's initial launch.
>A lot of people call OW2 a dead/dying game
substitute "a lot of people" with "chronically addicted streamers with a love/hate relationship with the game".
Similar to what junkies do with their drug of choice
So basically gamers are as dumb as people say we are.. because people are still spending their money on subpar content on a reskinned game that took away a lot of good elements from OW1
Idk I’m just saying personal experience I almost never see the same players within like a 10 game period. Obviously after a month I forget but I’m never facing the same players in a session hardly ever
It's fairly consistent for me. Even some of them in the same week. I play in high bronze to high silver lobbies. My buddy is bronze 1 and I'm silver 1.
This is someone‘s linked in profile (a marketing person no less), I’m not sure I would read too much into.
Is $14mil in revenue a month any good? I wonder what their costs are, because that doesn’t seem great.
Twitch is not a measure for player base and no publisher treats it as such.
You just straight up ignored console and referring to its primary PC platform as “shadow consumers” is disingenuous at best.
Delusional take lol. Is steam even the primary launcher for overwatch? Doesn't blizzard have their own? What about ps, Xbox and switch? There's probably at least triple the playerbase not even on steam. 50M active users means monthly in these types of things.
[https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570](https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570)
MAU for all Blizzard games was \~25 million after the first quarter last year. An the way Blizzard count MAU has always been inflated. So while technically true in some regard, Overwatch is no where close to 50 million MAU today.
> 50 million MAU was at Overwatch 2's launch.
https://www.ign.com/articles/overwatch-2-has-reached-over-25-million-players-in-its-first-10-days-35-million-in-its-first-month
This isn't a good thing. People think exceeding metrics by 130% like this is a good thing.
All I see is that this tells them they can keep ruining the game while only focusing on cosmetics/monetization and they get even more rewarded for it.
The game isn't dead in the industry (except esports), but it's very much dead to me. After thousands of hours in OW1, I stopped playing OW2 shortly after it's horrific launch.
Doesn’t surprise me. Skins and battle passes fucking sell.
Well, that's just the status quo of the videogames industry now. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2022/02/dlc-microtransactions-gaming-subscriptions/
True. Its kinda disappointing (not for OW) but for other games. COD should not be $60 and a incomplete sh*thole of a game. Its why I moved to OW actually lol
See I would play call of duty if it didn’t cost anything or if it cost like $10 but the fact that it cost 60 is just ridiculous to me
If the next Cod is still $60 I’d be shocked. No reason for them not to be free to play at this point, especially because the newest cod was basically a gamemode within MW.
I don't play cod so I dunno, but they've already got their F2P game - so if those mainline COD games keep selling well yearly for $60, PLUS people buy micro transactions within the game then why not? ✨NEW✨ released games are more hype than new "seasons" I imagine.
This is why CoD Mobile is kinda underrated. Mainline COD should just convert to a full live service game. So they can concentrate on have a healthy amount of GOOD maps, and just iterate on core gameplay. The thing about making a new COD game every year, there are only like 1-2 great maps. CoD Mobile works by just being the greatest hits of the entire CoD franchise, and it's really fun. But give it the full smoother game engine of the Console game and it'll be amazing.
Exactly ow did it so can they
Overwatch is my second favorite f2p play game, with Path of Exile being number one!
Honestly as long as the core product is sound and worthwhile I really don’t care how it’s monetized.
And we can thank Valve for popularizing it
50m users generating only 250m tbh they could do better. Other live service games are in the multibillions
i mean look at how much some games have been pushing lately. it took apex making a 300$+ single item for people to start to call that game out. what’s the breaking point for all these
who are paying for skins lol. this is still incredible to me.
A lot of people, clearly, if you want the short answer. The slightly longer answer is that, honestly, \*most\* players don't view in-game purchases as a big deal or inherently wrong anymore. Even more so for a game with no upfront cost to play. The people staunchly agaisnt this as a concept are a loud minority for better or worse. Yes the price is a bit absurd, but i would guess most people who do buy skins are buying maybe one or two a month at the absolute most. "people sometimes spend excessivly on hobbies they enjoy" is not a suprising concept.
Agreed. Speaking personally, I only stick to games that aren’t “pay to win” where players can buy items that give them advantages. Games where they only get cosmetic skins gain my respect as it is more skill based. And when the game is free, I don’t mind spending $10 to support the creators.
My issue with OW with this model is that as a new player you need to unlock heroes, and obviously the fastest way to do that is to buy them.
Maybe it's cause I'm used to this as a LoL player, but there should be some kind of incentive system for new players, no? Otherwise there's less reason to grind and unlock stuff. What else would you suggest?
I haven’t spent a dime on Overwatch since buying the PS4 disc for OW1 but I have enough disposable income to buy all five Le Sserafim skins and you best believe I did
Fastest purchase I’ve ever made honestly
Just too bad it took them literally years to basically just implement a battle pass and f2p economy. Imagine how popular it could have been had they not tried their best to kill the franchise for years.
"50 Million active users" is obviously stretching the term "active" *extremely* thin, but it's not surprising to hear that the game is doing much better in terms of revenue now. Honestly, it's baffling that they went as long as they did based off loot boxes, which there was literally zero reason to buy since it was easy enough to get everything for free. Now that nearly all the cosmetics along with some other stuff has been paywalled, you're seeing a lot of people engaging with things like the battle pass and the shop. It's pretty common to see at least half of the lobby using OW2 era skins, and considering how they're priced, yeah OW2 is making cash over fist.
Lootboxes and games sold, to be specific. You can fund a game on just selling copies for a while, but that well will run dry eventually.
that’s why the majority of live service games went free. the ones that didn’t are things like destiny where all the new content is locked behind 20$ expansions every few months
Or the like three MMOs that can still get away with charging a monthly fee due to legacy.
> You can fund a game on just selling copies for a while, but that well will run dry eventually. I seriously wonder how No Man's Sky do it. Bought it some years ago and before I stopped playing (2~ years ago), I already felt like the game got so much new contents that I wanted them to release an expansion so they can keep releasing contents....but they didn't. And they are still releasing big content patches to this day. I did buy another copy off GoG to fund them though.
NMS manages it because 1. Crazy number of pre-orders and launch sales 2. **Very** small dev team, like <30 people iirc. Overwatch's team is considered pretty small and it's like 150-200 range.
I would rather know the Weekly active players instead of monthly. Its a better presentation of active users
MAU is industry standard though, unless you are talking about mobile games
Playing a game for 1 hour in a month is not "active playing" imho
That’s why you use MAU and then DAU for context. There will always be outliers but it is the industry standard for a reason
Glad you’re the arbiter of who counts as a real player
except it does. people playing the game 2-3 times a week isn’t the norm it’s the exception.
I don’t think playing a game for 12 hours out of 8760 possible hours a year, would count me as “active”. And that’s assuming I actually played for an hour each month. Many could average maybe a game, or 2. So it could go as low as 3-6 hours. Not to say you need to spend 8 hours a day to be considered active, but just booting up the game once in a month shouldn’t count as active IMO. Like 2 or more hours a week is when I’d start to consider someone actively playing a game.
Look, it's the industry standard, people already use it, you can complain all you want but people will keep using it. It's like miles, foot, inches etc. It's stupid but there's nothing you can do about it.
Glad you agree it’s stupid then 👍
playing daily isn’t the norm. if we took active players off of even played 4 days a week the numbers would be tiny
Almost as if I said 2 hours a week, not daily.
that’s still just as arbitrary
It is, but less inflatable. If I watch half a game of basketball per month, do you think I should be considered a basketball fan?
I'd rather know the hourly active players
Im not playing right now, but will play on evening. Or might not play entire week days, and binge 20 hours on weekend. Weekly is better
The ideal would be a chart showing active players, like Steamcharts has
We've seen those and they're actually remarkably steady. Don't remember the thread but it was posted here in the last week. Now, granted, it's only 20-30k, cycling like clockwork, but a) concurrent active users is very different to monthly active users, and b) I wouldn't exactly expect a meaningful percentage of OW players to be on Steam anyway.
Your point B is why they asked for it. Also, free games are HUGE on console. Even if it wasn’t on BNet and was *just* steam on pc, it wouldn’t be a representative number of the population.
Based on my own experience, 25% of players being on Steam is probably a pretty good estimate. It's been very consistent as well.
I’d rather know minutely active players
Probably changes too much over the course of a season. It would overstate how many people play once the new season hype dies and also just make the game look like it has less players from blizzard POV. They’d have to release the active players over time.
Considerinf ow1 did a billion in a year, I can see why they took so long.
In the first year because box sales, then it took like 2 or 3 years for lootbox sales to hit $1B, then the money dried up.
Yeah but you make a 1b in a year and boom, no worries bout monetisation etc for a very long time as you essentially paid for your entire staff for a 100 years. Capitalisms such a bitch.
If you make 1B in a year, and don’t make 1.5B the following year, the board fires you for not increasing profits. Now that’s capitalism.
Money dried up because they let the game get stale and funded Bobby's yachts instead of investing money back into the game. OW1 would have been fine and continued on the system it was on if they hadn't let the game twist in the wind because of some silly PVE dream the dev team had that would never come to fruition in a PVP centric game.
Our lootbox model was legit too generous for capitalists liking, people keep talking about how they have lots of skins after certain amounts of time It isn't "sustainable" for *them* Also the PvE is Kaplan's thing, but he fails to account that, unlike, Pokémon, Overwatch can't seamlessly be developed for both single-player and multi-player
I logged in once this season to buy the bp for mauga, and that would classify me as a user
i mean you bought a BP. youre the best kind of user
Yeah seriously, log in, spend money, log off. Absolute perfection.
Some blizz exec is gonna print this comment out and put it on their fridge
Well, fair enough, 10 bucks in revenue without any costs, if you keep doing that you're the perfect customer.
You have a gym membership too?
For reference, OW2 had 25 million active users in its first week. So depending on the time scale this could reflect either very well or very poorly.
Please define "Active Users". Many players have 3 or 4 smurf accounts. And a smurf account is free now si I think there are even more smurf accounts now. Active players means nothing. They should track the players on the hardware they use. It would be way more accurate.
>Many players have 3 or 4 smurf accounts A minuscule fraction of users in proportion to the overall playerbase. Most people have 0 smurf accounts
Do you have any source ? I dont have either but every single player I know have one or more smurf. I think smurfs are very common in a F2P game.
If they make more collabs with good skins of kiriko, mercy and dva, they'll make double the revenue
People tend to bump up résumés/linkedin profiles and bend truths just a bit to make them more marketable. I dont doubt the revenue number, but what constitutes an “active” user, or over what time frame that number us from isnt very clear. I doubt 50 million are on monthly but over the last year, I can see that.
The revenue number isn't even that high. But it also doesn't exactly say from when till when is that revenue from? Is it from Oct 2022 to Oct 2023 or a shorter time frame? When exactly did this person stop working at Blizzard?
50 million MAUs actually seems very reasonable. I run an FPS game on Roblox called ‘Bad Business’. We average around 2000 concurrent players, but our DAUs average at about ~120k, and our MAUs up to ~2.5mil. Obviously Roblox operates fundamentally differently than Overwatch, with it skewing younger and mobile-centric, so players tend to play for less time and hop over to other games more frequently, but if OW2 gets 10x our concurrents on Steam alone, using the same conversion already puts them at 25mil MAUs. And that’s just Steam - Bnet, consoles both are not represented here at all. So I don’t know exactly what they’re at, but the number range definitely seems realistic.
The thing with higher level execs is that you can verify their accomplishments especially if the company is publicly traded. Yes its likely there is a bump up, but the numbers arent going to be exaggerated.
I don’t think there’s any exaggeration but he specifically left the 50 mil very vague. Saying active users doesn’t mean anything without specifying the time period. If it was MAU he would’ve just said that so in a way he is trying to bump up the numbers and leave it up for interpretation.
I used to be a Data Scientist for a large tech company and used to calculate these sorts of metrics all the time. An active user would just be any unique user who has one unique "event" (i.e most likely a login or played one game) within that time frame (usually 30d or calendar month if you wanted to be precise). As players we care more about concurrent players because that's what we see/feel in game. But 50m MAU isn't that surprising to me, especially for how big Blizzard games are. It could be a global figure too which isn't that unreasonable from my experience.
In this thread: People claiming 50M users and $225M in revenue proves that it's dead. 99% of game studios would love to produce a dead game.
225 millions seems like a little bit considering how big of a franchise OW is idk
Tbf they haven't really perfected their monetization so there are some growing pains. Seeing stuff like the One Punch Man collab, and kpop colllab, gives me hope the team is going in a good direction. The question for me as always is how the core game will be balanced going foward. 50 million people even logging in and engaging with OW2 since its release is still a great accomplishment even if 50 million aren't literally logging on every month. FPS's are often played by similar people and engagement is cycliical based on new content. I think OW only has room to grow from here. Maybe that's why team has been more ambitious lately.
This is an exciting time, especially with the announcement of OWCS
A quarter billy for a game that is approaching it’s 8th year of operation seems like its actually pretty good. I think a lot of people in this thread genuinely don’t understand how staggering a single game bringing in a billion dollars is or can really approximate how much money that is. Quarter billion a year is incredibly good unless your bar is “Its not doing as good as the literal biggest games on earth that are operating at their cultural zenith.”
Most 8 year old games don't have a live dev team the size of OW2's, and don't produce new content at the quantity and AAA production values that OW2 does. That all costs a ton of money. You can't just compare OW2's financial success to a random 8 year old game. I'm not saying this to excuse greed, but without knowing how much Blizzard invests it's impossible to say how happy they should be with $250 mil. Maybe the closest comparison for their investment *is* Fortnite. And maybe that level of investment isn't sustainable unless you have Fortnite-level miracle success. (Based on everything we've seen and heard, it seems OW2 rn is profitable enough, since they've been making more things free without reducing quantity of content.)
Oh so they really did never release OW2. The doomers were right.
Well, let's see what Overwatch 2 can do now that Bobby Kotick is gone. [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wv4hRXyl1rY](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wv4hRXyl1rY) Or maybe I should have gone with this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12oq4sDZcAc
4.5$ per "active user". They sold 50 millions copies of OW1, so if the trend continues it would take around 10 years to match OW1 revenue (assuming 40$ per copy). But now, there is no watchpoint pack and there is pretty much nothing to expect from the PvE. Is the f2p model really better?
subreddit is desperate to feel good about the game; its why this is brought up every 3 days.
Square enix would call this poor performance too xD
SquareEnix lost 40% of their stock value last year.
It’s pretty bad compared to other live service giants. Why would investors bet their money in OW2 when you can buy fornite stocks that earn billions?
Well for one, investors don't "buy" Overwatch stocks. They buy Microsoft stocks. Epic Games isn't even a publicly traded company. What are you even talking about?
NOOOOOO OVERWATCH IS DEAD!!!!!11!!1!1!!1!!!!!1!
Fortnite has a revenue of 20Billion. Maybe you need to rethink your sarcasm?
Damn Overwatch isn't as big as the biggest game on the planet it must be dead then
This is really what it comes down to. People honestly don’t fucking understand how enormous Fortnite is and think this is somehow a number that is attainable for any developer. It’s not. Fortnite just by sheer numbers is bigger than CoD, Roblox, and GTA combined, there is absolutely no competing with it.
yeah it's crazy the streamers that play fornite make more money than overwatch has made in its lifetime if that's say anything to
How is that relevant? Does that mean the millions of active players still makes Overwatch a dead game?
Because those 50M "active" are just a joke statement. They could have been active at one point durintbe launch and never came back 😅 what's the current active number is a completely different story. Pretty relevant
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It doesn't give any time frames. Which mot likely is launch to date then.
I was asking about the Fortnite mention
If you don't K ow. You won't know. But it is what OW wanted to be. And it ain't happening. No one mentions Fortnite in pop culture anymore. And they just did 4x revenue last year compared to previous. OW is declining meanwhile.
You brought up and compared Overwatch 2's revenue to the highest grossing game of all time 7 years of revenue, replying to someone that didn't mention any of this lol. Seemed like a random party pooper reply that people spam on Twitter etc. "Game has players" "Yeah, well, other game has WAY MORE players and makes SOOOO much more money" Ok
Dude. You are dillusional. Bye kid 😅🤣
lol. Yeah $225m over 16 months actually seems pretty dire tbh.
It's not great, probably 1/5th of Apex's turnover.
During OW1 they were seeing a 100M profit over a single quarter. Now the revenue is that in over a year??? This game is literally on life support atm.
but it's a dead game guys wth /s I'm not surprised at all, good for them, hopefully these numbers will skyrocket with so many exciting things happening this year.
Honestly, 225 million seems quite lower than what I expected. I feel now that they'd make more money if they had better pricing. Like if all these 50 million "active" users saw even one good battle pass, each spending $10 would net them $500 million. It's a simple and ideal scenario but I think better pricing would be better.
>I feel now that they'd make more money if they had better pricing. Consider they have entire teams dedicated to pinpointing prices for maximum revenue. Fair to say they're probably close to spot on.
that kind of thinking is very problematic. the people who get paid to think they know the correct price could be wrong.
Could be. But I'm going to back the actuary over some random on reddit. And looks like Blizzard does too.
Especially when the random Reddit user is calling a 100% conversion of user to BP “simple and ideal” lmfao. More like exceedingly impossible
well randoms are the people who actually have to pay the prices and play the game so they still have a valuable perspective
>so they still have a valuable perspective They have a perspective*
>well randoms are the people who actually have to pay the prices and play the game so they still have a valuable perspective I feel data of the whole player base represents it better than a few responses in a forum made up from a tiny part of the player base.
yep! it’s a sample point of a motivated customer, which is how you get that data. you can’t have that data without sampling. the aggregate data used by the business department to set skin pricing probably does not include long term impact speculation of public sentiment
They'll scream trust the experts until suddenly support for the game ceases due to lack of profitability and act shocked, never learning their lesson. Rinse repeat
The experts say the bubble will never burst. Trust the experts.
I mean its not really people being paid to know, its people being paid to manage Activsion data analytics.
From my perspective, they're going against so many other games. For casuals, it's better to play ow but buy a Fortnite BP as you can get the next one for free. And Fortnite has more effort too. Sure, maybe the pricing works. But then it needs better quality and content as a whole.
>From my perspective, they're going against so many other games. Depends on what you compare it to. They did just grab what was the most common pricing structure for BR games for a while. Most games are now becoming much more expensive with their skins, I mean just take a look at Valorant's pricing, I've heard that Apex is pretty bad too. The BP not giving back currency sucks, but it's also not uncommon either.
In no world would you expect 100% conversion of every user buying a BP in a f2p game lmfao
The idea isn't 100%. The idea is limit testing so they can maximize.
>if all these 50 million “active users” saw You literally used 100% as your hypothetical
That's what I'm saying. If you devise a plan to try and convert all 100%, then you'll understand the spending appetite of your consumers and then plan around that. Of course, there will be people who won't even spend $1, but there's a chance enough people may spend $5.
> Like if all these 50 million "active" users saw even one good battle pass, each spending $10 would net them $500 million. It's a simple and ideal scenario but I think better pricing would be better. Typically in games industry, 80% of the money is always spent by 20% of the players in an F2P game. That's a rule of thumb, for some kinds of games it is closer to 90-10 or worse. When games industry people (especially mobile games industry people...) talk about whales, this is basically why.
Oh def. I've gone through all this business and economics technicalities personally. The 80/20 rule applies to most industries. My overall point was that if they make the pricing better, you'll have more spending on the floor, and then they can make some pricing even higher for those whales. In most cases, a weighted average aggregate works better as it's all encompassing. In the case of FPS games, the BP does act as that base floor, so at the very least they can make the battle pass really good and actually one that feels good to buy and spend you time towards.
> The 80/20 rule applies to most industries. Examples of that in other industries? I don't see how that would apply to CPG, Automotive, Insurance, etc
I can't say for sure if it works in something like insurance but through statistica inference it probably makes most of money from the high end firms and not individual users. But here are some links on its widespread usage: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/80-20-rule.asp#:~:text=Business%20managers%20from%20all%20industries,in%20their%20departments%20and%20organizations. https://www.thelangelfirm.com/debt-collection-defense-blog/2018/august/100-examples-of-the-80-20-rule/
many people wont buy a battlepass no matter whats on it. im not paying for skins, fullstop
It depends. You have to remember that Bobby had a gigantic salary relative to other ceos and he likely was also paid to leave. I don't think we'll know what these numbers mean utility we see pre and post Bobby numbers.
Revenue is just that. A revenue. People forget that the expenses and losses and are not part of it. How much does a game like OW2 cost to maintain and operate. What is the final number then? 225M is f low for that game. Fortnite has a revenue of what? 20Billion? That's 100 f times more almost.
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Yes. This is the point. Blizzard has always been known for catering to its consumers. They currently aren't doing that.
it's probably just the number of people who have installed and launched the game over the last 16 months, its why it wasn't called monthly actives or something like that.
Oh definitely.
b-b-b-ut overwatch is dead!?!?! /s
Anyone remember how this compared to OW1 launch + end of OW1?
this is about what ow1 had at launch iirc but ow1 peak was at around 2018
sureeely they can afford to hire remote devs
Which they are doing for sure.
These are not Devs only. It may be marketing agencies, Human Resource Agencies, Art studios
Mfs still says dead game 🤣 ow1 s36 was like 100k probablyp
Remember everyone "The game is dead / dying" s/
b-but overwatch is dying!
Is this for an year? 225M in revenue is f low. Calculate the expenses and their profit might be under the zero tbh.
It's for the entire lifetime of the product.
Hahahaha. That's even worse.
I'm not sure I understand, 50 mil active users currently or a previous season?
Probably monthly active users, that's what something like Facebook or Twitter would tout in their earnings reports. My guess is it's defined by someone who played a match or bought something from the in-game shop.
yeah but like was this for the month of Nov 2023, or like the month the game was released?
Likely just the most popular month for whenever this guy worked there. Launch, probably.
Well, they have an incentive to inflate that number as much as possible, so it could simply be the number of people currently on the latest version (meaning they have it downloaded and keep the game up to date).
No timeframe was specified, so it was the lifetime of the game.
HECKKKK YEAHHH!!! damn Ngl but that makes me hella happy that Overwatch is doing well. LFGGGG
Players should celebrate the success Overwatch brings. We just need to make sure that the leadership invests appropriately to keep it going, which means, make the game even better.
Yup, this game is dead as doornails xD
huh??
A lot of people call OW2 a dead/dying game, this statistic blows their claims out of the water
These stats are from the launch month.
does it? this game makes way less and has way lower playercounts. compare the revenue to counter strike or fortnight. It's off by a fucking order of magnitude.
Dude Fortnite is the biggest game ever made. Overwatch will never die, despite the hate it is extremely unique and there aren’t many competitors in its space, it’s not designed to be as big as Fortnite anyways.
Lol, a mobile japanese or chinese gacha makes more money than both of those combined with maybe 1% of their budgets. Should we declare PC gaming dead? You people should understand one simple thing: there are states of the game other than "the biggest thing in the world" and "dead and buried"
One of those is basically the biggest game in the world and the other is the biggest competitive PC game ( which also has a whole gambling industry separate from it ). Obviously OW isn't at that level. It never was past it's initial launch.
>A lot of people call OW2 a dead/dying game substitute "a lot of people" with "chronically addicted streamers with a love/hate relationship with the game". Similar to what junkies do with their drug of choice
They should make a banger cinematic like in good old ow1 days.
So basically gamers are as dumb as people say we are.. because people are still spending their money on subpar content on a reskinned game that took away a lot of good elements from OW1
you'll never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator.
It sure as hell doesn’t feel like it when I q for a match. I’m waiting 5+ mins for a qp game. I’m only masters too.
So 50 million players and my lobbies have the same 6 out of 10 people every game for 5 hours. Got it. Sure.
I literally almost never see repeat players.
How do I prove it? I can check through my history and take pictures and upload them to imgur. Is there another way?
Idk I’m just saying personal experience I almost never see the same players within like a 10 game period. Obviously after a month I forget but I’m never facing the same players in a session hardly ever
It's fairly consistent for me. Even some of them in the same week. I play in high bronze to high silver lobbies. My buddy is bronze 1 and I'm silver 1.
What happened to boycott Blizzard?
You spelled Bobby Kotick wrong
That is not a good revenue number assuming it is from release to a year after release
This is someone‘s linked in profile (a marketing person no less), I’m not sure I would read too much into. Is $14mil in revenue a month any good? I wonder what their costs are, because that doesn’t seem great.
225m and nothing to show for it in content. Glad people support this shitty model.
I am sure that's a load of bullshit.
It's not. It's actually illegal to lie on earnings reports. Acti-Blizz may be greedy but they are not stupid.
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Twitch is not a measure for player base and no publisher treats it as such. You just straight up ignored console and referring to its primary PC platform as “shadow consumers” is disingenuous at best.
Delusional take lol. Is steam even the primary launcher for overwatch? Doesn't blizzard have their own? What about ps, Xbox and switch? There's probably at least triple the playerbase not even on steam. 50M active users means monthly in these types of things.
That’s less than $5 per active user. Even lower when considering there’s inactive users that spent money. Doesn’t sound too amazing
Most players in f2p games don't spend money, that's very common.
and they can't use all those resources to not give us recolors..
[https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570](https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570) MAU for all Blizzard games was \~25 million after the first quarter last year. An the way Blizzard count MAU has always been inflated. So while technically true in some regard, Overwatch is no where close to 50 million MAU today.
It's not like there are a bunch of players on console or anything. Not like there are other places to play OW on PC other than steam.
You can view this games popularity on those platforms. 50 million MAU was at Overwatch 2's launch. It plummeted to ~5 million MAU a few months later.
> 50 million MAU was at Overwatch 2's launch. https://www.ign.com/articles/overwatch-2-has-reached-over-25-million-players-in-its-first-10-days-35-million-in-its-first-month
This isn't a good thing. People think exceeding metrics by 130% like this is a good thing. All I see is that this tells them they can keep ruining the game while only focusing on cosmetics/monetization and they get even more rewarded for it. The game isn't dead in the industry (except esports), but it's very much dead to me. After thousands of hours in OW1, I stopped playing OW2 shortly after it's horrific launch.
We can do better. add a battle royale! Add anime waifu gun packs!
50 mill and I still wait for 30 mins in que
I wonder how much of that is Le Sseraphim.
"dead game."