This Isn't Going To Be A New Thing Is It?

#1 - June 27, 2022, 9:38 p.m.

With the Brig skin, I mean. Why in the hell would I want to gift 3 gift subs to some random streamer that I will never watch again just to earn a skin? LET ALONE ONE WHO NEVER EVEN PLAYS THE GAME UNTIL NOW. Like am I the only one who can’t believe how stupid this is? I don’t even get to support the art team who I would bet poured a lot of effort into making the skin, just some “LeT’S gO dUdE” clown fiesta trying to make a living by sitting on their butt playing video games all day that I’d honestly rather file my teeth down and then try to eat rock candy rather than actually suffer through their stream, let alone actually support them.

It’s a shame and definitely one of the most stupid ideas I’ve ever been able to witness in a game. At least the skin is a 4/10 at best I guess…

Overwatch New Skin and a New Low for Blizzard - YouTube This is worth a watch and definitely pinpoints the issues with the event more eloquently than I did

AndyB

Community Manager

#15 - June 27, 2022, 10:02 p.m.

Content creators are an important part of the community. Both in terms of community building for a certain segment, and in terms of driving both visibility and awareness of what’s happening with the game.

Like it or not, traditional marketing is no more and content creators serve an important function in the existing ecosystem. What we’re focused on doing is providing opportunities for creators to be successful with Overwatch, so that creating content for the community is a more sustainable choice for them. The hypothesis is that this is a far better mechanism than just throwing piles of cash at people to stream the game, as that rarely yields long lasting positive results.

To be clear, we’re not being paid in any way for this skin, aside from the obvious marketing value of increased visibility on platform. You can think of it as marketing budget put towards a skin for the purpose of promoting the game (even though that’s not tacitly what it is)

AndyB

Community Manager

#20 - June 27, 2022, 10:07 p.m.

to be transparent, there was never a world in which this promotion was only existing core OW streamers. I feel as though we have a good mix of familiar faces and new folks who will bring plenty of new eyes to both the game and community

AndyB

Community Manager

#26 - June 27, 2022, 10:10 p.m.

I’m sorry, you mean over 150, right? Because that’s how many are on the list

AndyB

Community Manager

#36 - June 27, 2022, 10:14 p.m.

That’s a personal goal of mine, should there be future iterations. This is a new program, both for Twitch and us, and there are a lot of unknown unknowns right now. We put into place as many reasonable controls as we could to learn from this first execution.

AndyB

Community Manager

#47 - June 27, 2022, 10:16 p.m.

Forums =/= 99% of the player base. Forums more realistically represent less than 1% of the player base and have pretty well established biases.

Forums are also historically very adverse to change and us trying new promotions like this. The response today was anticipated and factored into our decision making process