RESPONSE: I’m very grateful for this comment because it means we achieved what I originally set out to achieve. I think when it comes to discussing Overwatch these days, it’s easy to get swept up in nostalgia for when the game was “good,” or to get stuck in resentment towards the game for all its perceived failings. Just like in most cases, the truth lies somewhere between those two poles.

I think Overwatch has always been a good game, and it continues to be today, but as outlined in the video, various circumstances around its creation and development hindered it from continuing to grow in the direction that other games were growing in. At the same time, the company culture and creative direction at Blizzard doesn’t represent the viewpoints of the many, many developers who’ve worked on the game over the years. That doesn’t mean they never made any bad decisions — it just makes it easier for us to understand how things got to this point.

In this era of the Internet, where ragebait and confirmation bias are the main things that drive views, I’m glad that Team Liquid gave me the opportunity to write and produce an even-handed content piece about Overwatch. And I’m glad that Overwatch fans, both past and present, have resonated with it. That’s who I was making it for!

RESPONSE: The point about Overwatch being a lot of women’s first ever shooter game is one that’s been in my brain for the last 6 years. In 2019 I posted a Tweet (now deleted, sadly) asking women in the Overwatch community whether it was their first shooter, and if so, why they decided to pick it up. The overwhelming majority of responses from women confirmed that Overwatch was their first ever shooter, and that they picked it up because it felt more welcoming to them than every other shooter that had gotten popular before then.

It’s pretty interesting to think about how the very concept of “the shooter” was heavily masculinized before Overwatch came out — games like Counter-Strike and Halo felt very militaristic and serious, and even TF2 leaned heavily in the direction of Male Energy. Combined with the idea of nerd masculinity and skill as an expression of dominance over one’s fellow dudes, the genre definitely suffered from lack of gender parity. Nowadays, though, not only do hero shooters feature more women as characters, the playerbase has also diversified significantly.

In fact, Overwatch may have actually fallen behind in this regard. Sometimes it feels like games like Valorant and Marvel Rivals have even more gender-diverse playerbases than Overwatch does. More young girls are feeling encouraged to get into gaming than ever, which is both fantastic news for the future of the industry and a testament to the ripple effect that Overwatch’s success had, and continues to have to this day.

RESPONSE: One of my dad’s friends has a son who’s 13 years old right now. I jokingly refer to him as “my 13-year-old friend” because whenever I visit back home, I try to talk to him about the games he’s playing so I can gauge what’s cool with the kids these days. (Sentences that make me sound like I’m 50). He says that Valorant is really big with his friends, which isn’t a surprise, and that Overwatch isn’t super popular at all, which also isn’t a surprise. I don’t think he even knows what TF2 is.

My conversations with my 13-year-old friend make me think about how, with hero shooters more popular than ever, a lot of new gamers — especially those who were barely sentient when Overwatch first came out — don’t actually know anything about the Overwatch phenomenon. To those of us who were there and have followed the game’s journey ever since, it all feels like a fact of life. But to people just getting into the genre, it’s actually a part of gaming history that runs the risk of being buried under all the negativity and Overwatch 2 becoming “just another shooter.”

It truly boggles the mind that we’re not even a decade removed from Overwatch’s initial release, yet that moment in time feels unreachably distant to us now. So this video is, in part, also for the people who genuinely didn’t know about this part of the shooter genre’s history. And I hope my 13-year-old friend learns something new from it. I have no idea if he’s watched it yet. Next time I speak to him I’ll ask.

RESPONSE: During the early writing process of this video script, I had a period of time where I was going back and forth on whether my basic thesis — that Overwatch changed the shooter genre — was actually “correct,” or at the very least would be accepted by people. It normally would’ve been fine, since doubting oneself during the creative process is pretty normal, except this particular concern was inhibiting my process and affecting the way I saw the topic.

I decided to bring it up to my friend one day while we were playing Deadlock together. I (lovingly) refer to this friend of mine as a “video game boomer” because he basically thinks video games peaked with Call of Duty 15 years ago and hates every new game, so I knew he’d give me his honest opinion.

“Hey, [name],” I said. “Do you think Overwatch changed the shooter genre?”

His reply: “Yeah, dude. Look at what we’re playing right now.”

After that interaction, I stopped worrying.

RESPONSE: I think if you were into the Overwatch universe at one point (and most people who played the game back then were), it’s hard not to be disappointed about how its popularity died out. It wasn’t even for any apparent reason, like that they kept dropping lore updates that people hated. The reason it petered out was that they didn’t do anything, which is the worst way for something to happen. And the one time Blizzard did do something — namely, start developing an Overwatch series with Netflix — it fell through, because they decided to sue Netflix for poaching their then-CFO.

Still, though, I don’t think any of the games that followed it have developed a fandom quite as big and intense as the one that formed around Overwatch. Valorant and Apex Legends do have fans who are into the lore, don’t get me wrong, and they both have dedicated narrative teams working on building those worlds — but the Overwatch fandom still remains unparalleled for how big it was, and how rapidly it grew.

As I mentioned in the video, I still remember the exact Tumblr post that got me to download the game. I think it was the striking character designs as well as the novelty of a game that looked and felt like that. I talked a lot about how this approach was unprecedented in the shooter genre, but it also felt unprecedented in games at large. I’m not sure what they could have done to keep that momentum going — most fandoms do just fizzle out after that initial hype — but, certainly, they could have made more of an effort to convince people to stick around.

RESPONSE: I’m trying to think of the best way to say what I think about Marvel Rivals, and it’s actually proving quite challenging, so I guess I’ll say this: based on the quality of my Marvel Rivals games, I strongly believe that most of its playerbase is made up of people who’ve never played Overwatch before.

As such, I think Marvel Rivals “feels” like Overwatch because for a lot of people who are just now getting into games, or missed the wave in 2016, it basically is Overwatch: a fun, frenetic hero shooter with a bunch of exciting characters that anyone can get into. (Heck, even the same fan sentiments have started showing up — stop me if you’ve seen this before.) But, like you said, it’s also Overwatch for the live service age. It seems to have known from the jump that it will be beholden to an intense schedule of constant updates, because that’s what gamers expect nowadays.

Maybe I’m also not in the right circles for this kind of thing, but the Marvel Rivals hype, great as it is, still just doesn’t feel the same. Despite how popular it is, it isn’t really new in a way that matters. And not for nothing, but the fact that Marvel Rivals fans can’t stop talking about how their game is “killing Overwatch” maybe says more about Overwatch’s enduring legacy than it does about Marvel Rivals.