Image: Blizzard Entertainment
More than 17,000 reviews later, players are really not liking Overwatch 2 on Steam.
Overwatch 2 finally launched on Steam today as a result of Blizzard’s new push to publish their games on platforms other than Battle.net - but it’s not going well. The first-person shooter’s new season Invasion also launched today, and despite all of its new content, players are bombarding the game with negative Steam reviews.
When I say bombard, I mean that in the most Oppenheimer-esque sense of the word. When the game made its debut on Steam earlier today, it quickly racked up 6,000 user reviews that earned it a ‘Mostly Negative’ tag on the platform. Things have only gotten worse since, with more than 17,000 reviews at the time of writing that have earned the game an ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ tag. Only 3,000 of those reviews are positive.
Blizzard was likely hoping for a new wave of players to flood the game thanks to its arrival on Steam, as well as the promise of new content that include the long-awaited campaign missions. Instead, existing players have taken its Steam launch as an opportunity to finally drop a review of the game online, which is something they can’t do on platforms like Battle.net or the PlayStation Store.
These bad reviews range from ongoing controversies around the game, such as paywalling its PvE missions and locking heroes behind the Battle Pass, to new problems specific to Steam like some players being unable to access Invasion bundles they paid for. On SteamDB however, the game seems to be enjoying quite the successful debut. It has peaked at 50,000 concurrent players already, with more and more players hopping onto the game over time.
Steam reviews tell a different story. The top review under ‘Most Helpful’ right now is a rather simple statement: “The people who make Overwatch porn work harder than the people who make Overwatch.” User Ornge writes, “Overwatch 2 has no respect for you, it's an attempt to pry open your wallet while masquerading as the game it used to be.” User MasterPusheen simply provides a link to Team Fortress 2 on Steam.
These Steam reviews feel like an outlet for a burned gaming community. Remaining players are trying to make the best out of a less than ideal situation - with paywalled story content, cancelled Hero Missions, heroes being locked behind battle passes and expensive shop cosmetics being particularly tough to ignore. Other players quit a long time ago, and Season 6: Invasion is going to have a tough time enticing them back when all of these problems still exist in the game.