After Just 1 Year, Overwatch is Officially Ending Support for a Game Mode
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When Stadium came to Overwatch, plenty of lapsed fans flocked back to the hero shooter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like those returning players stuck with Stadium when they did come back, as a very low player count has been cited as the reason for Blizzard pulling the plug on additions to this Overwatch mode.
This is hardly the first form of Overwatch content that Blizzard has stepped away from. Perhaps the most infamous — at least prior to Stadium — was the abandonment of PvE story missions following the release of Invasion. Both the Hero Mastery gauntlet and courses were also removed from the game, not to mention the retirement of the unbalanced 2CP maps from competitive modes. While Stadium will thankfully still be playable, making it more comparable to Invasion than the Hero Mastery content, the MOBA-like experience is going to completely stagnate since no new heroes or maps will be added.
Why is Overwatch Cutting Support to Stadium?
Image via Blizzard
As is usually the case with live-service games, developers can only justify putting time and resources into the content that is actively being played, and for many players, it seems Stadium left their gameplay loop a while ago. Some have cited unbalanced perks and controversial hero additions as their reasons for falling off Stadium, others have pointed to dwindling content drops, and even more have lost interest because new heroes are not usable within Stadium when they debut. Controversial hero drafts and splitting the player base between quick play and ranked may also have contributed. Whatever the answer is as to why Stadium’s player count fell off, there’s no denying that it has, as Director Aaron Keller recently highlighted the low numbers for the mode.
Put the consoles in the correct order.
Per Aaron Keller, Stadium ranked and unranked players only make up just 6% of the user base, with 3% in each version. Since even Unranked Mystery Heroes has 4% of the user base to its name, these numbers are undeniably shocking. With every hero needing multiple unique abilities, re-balancing, and so on — not to mention the map development — stadium content is surely time-consuming, and with so few players, it’s harder than ever for Blizzard to justify. Instead of fully supporting a game mode that’s on its last legs, Blizzard is putting all its resources into the core 5v5 and 6v6 experience, with Stadium only getting balancing changes, rewards, and rank resets going forward. No more heroes or maps will be added.
According to the blog post, 5v5 unranked contains 54% of the player base, while 5v5 ranked has 37% of players. Unranked 6v6 has 19%, and ranked 6v6 has 8%. The remaining players are in Stadium or Arcade modes.
While the low player count reasoning is certainly understandable, there could be more to Stadium’s benching than Blizzard is letting on. For one, the studio may just be spread too thin because of the increased cadence in Overwatch hero releases, with a new character per season and Stadium additions possibly being too much to keep up with. Alternatively, Blizzard may be preparing for the looming Microsoft layoffs. While Xbox has already cut hundreds of jobs, Blizzard’s cuts are said to be coming “at a later date,” and it’s very possible that Blizzard is ripping off the band-aid since the Stadium team could be in danger. This, however, is purely speculation.
Obviously, the Overwatch community is not happy with this announcement, taking umbrage with the idea that players are to blame for the mode’s falloff instead of mismanagement from Blizzard. Regardless of the “why,” though, it’s downright shocking to see Stadium go from having close to the same number of players as the core modes at its peak to being on its last legs just a year later.
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OpenCritic Reviews - Top Critic Avg: 77/100 Critics Rec: 65%
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