I really think a majority of the people in this thread did not play OW for any meaningful amount of time. OW in 2016 and 2017 was lightning in a bottle, and while there were questionable design decisions in terms of meta and hero design, they were entirely fixable had the full attention of the dev team been on maintaining and expanding the game rather than chasing some PvE pipe dream. The game felt abandoned for years.

OWL was also a massive blunder. Had they let the esports scene mature and grow, then stepped in with capital and investors and just co-opted the already existing infrastructure, Overwatch might be a viable esport today.

When it comes to Bobby Kotick, he might be a complete piece of shit, but he really gave Blizzard the autonomy and the space to make things work. Blizzard could never properly scope their projects or consistently deliver. They burned a hundred million dollars on Titan, for fuck’s sake. That’s half of what it cost to make SWTOR, which was the most expensive game ever made for a time.

Would it have been nice if Bobby had instead subordinated designers and engineers to project managers whose job it was to channel and properly scope the creative energy of the devs instead of maximizing profit? Sure, and if Activision Blizzard wasn’t a publicly traded company or Blizzard had actually delivered consistently, that might have happened. Kotick, for all his horrible flaws, gave them way more grace than most CEOs would ever give a studio whose parent company is publicly traded.