What's going on with Overwatch 2?

     To begin overwatch 2 is 5v5, PvP type game with different game modes that are fun and competitive. Overwatch 2 is created by a company called blizzard, who has been iffy in the past about fixing problems when it comes to the game. They love to listen to the overwatch community but rarely follow up and fix the issues that we all say and want fixed to make the game better. In the real life companies can't do everything that everyone wants so they try and find a common middle ground which is rarely hard to do. This game is mainly streamed on twitch, and they also do have there own pro esports program with different teams competing from around the globe 

    Blizzards Value proposition is as stated "Commit to Quality", which is exactly what they have done as a company. Blizzard has created many games from overwatch 1 and 2, the diablo series, and World of warcraft. Blizzard is most known for Overwatch and World of warcraft. 

    Overwatch has had a lot of bad things to it's name but the company has since changed and are starting to listen to the community and what they say. The first thing the company changed was the removal of map pools in the season that just started. Streamers have complained about map pools since October 4th 2022. For example this twitch streamer called Jay3 said in this post that he was happy that map pool got removed. This is a good and bad thing for blizzard because they listened to the community but it took so long for them to fix the issue. 

    A  little back story to this specific action blizzard has done is something called mystery heroes. Mystery Heroes is pretty much as it says, you spawn as a random character and then every time you die you get another character that is random. Famous Twitch streams started something called Mystery Heroes Tuesday and it grew popularity over time and everyone has started to catch on and blizzard has seen the amount of players increase on Tuesdays specifically. So they decided to start a new game mode called completive mystery heroes, which is like normal mystery heroes but it is competitive which wasn't anything special on its own but it brought a fun aspect to the game where everyone was just having fun and not really caring. 

   

    The last thing blizzard tried to do was hero bans. Hero bans were pretty much heroes locked in the competitive scene that couldn't be played for that week and then it would switch to totally different heroes. This was talked about for maybe a day or two but it instantly got shut down due to how the community was reacting to hero bans. This is an example of blizzard actually listening to the community and what they want with the game.

    The marketing aspect that blizzard is using is social media. They currently have there own twitter, Instagram, youtube, and twitch to announce new things. Blizzard has created there own accounts for there own games so that every announcement isn't just scrambled. They mainly don't respond to everyone's tweets but they do host something monthly where they sit with twitch streamers and the streams can ask question's about the upcoming seasons and or just general questions on what they plan to bring to the game and receive feedback. The marketing problem that blizzard is facing, is that are just listening to the big streamers and not just everyone in the community.

    If I was the brand manager I would use the same social media like twitter etc. but I would also post polls on twitter to see what the community wants to see next or gets fixed. For example when they do the monthly streams with the famous streamers, instead I would do twitch polls to answer questions and just to see what everyone wants and what is most popular. I would also make polls to see a custom skin that was made by a fan be put into the game for cheap and the person that made the art gets to keep some of the profits. This way it would create some creativity for the game so that the skins aren't just the same every season. 

    I learned that being a brand name company that produces many games, that it is hard to do marketing for every game and keep everyone happy at the same time. Listening to the community about what to fix is a great way to keep up with everything that is going on, but the community can be millions of people and it's hard to keep everyone happy at the same time. Advertising also has many ways showing up from ads, to twitter to just simple google searches.