This is way less egregious than Blizzard shutting down Overwatch 1 (which I paid for) and just replacing it with Overwatch 2. It's not even out yet and previews are not great, especially the new player grind - it seems designed to explicitly fish for the whales from the original game only. As someone that plays OW casually, I'm not happy that Blizzard is taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want in the slightest.
I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.
Maybe a year ago or so there was a big Microsoft server outage that caused Xbox Live to go down for a few hours. During the outage you couldn’t access any online games. Fair enough. I own a handful of single player games on disc (rather than through the Xbox store) but while Microsoft was having all of their server issues I couldn’t play those games either. It seems, even when you own the disc outright, the system automatically phones home before the game is permitted to launch.
> taking away something that I paid money for and giving me something that I do not want
In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game. It's no different from the many games which have previously gone free-to-play.
And to be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to be unhappy, I'm saying that your framing is really just not accurate. Overwatch 2 is really just a peculiar name for Overwatch 1's free-to-play update.
> In that sense, there's really very little difference between Overwatch 2 and an update you don't like in any other live service game.
Yeah, I totally get it. I'm still miffed that they updated the game in a way that leaves me unable to play the version I actually like. I do not find this new update appealing at all.
When Overwatch came out (when I bought it) "live service" games hadn't really reached a critical mass in the market yet so the idea that they would do something like this was kinda unheard of.
I can still play CS:Source to this day, yet they need to shut down Overwatch because the sequel is out? Modern gaming is absolute garbage. This whole "you only purchase a license to play the game" nonsense is getting out of control.