Overwatch 2—now just called Overwatch—is one of video games’ biggest recent redemption stories, but it didn’t happen overnight. Developer Blizzard made a series of mistakes after the franchise’s 2016 launch, culminating in what game director Aaron Keller said was a rock bottom for the studio: Overwatch 2 becoming the most negatively reviewed game on Steam in 2023.
“Morale on the team was at an all-time low. Turnover, including many of the project’s original leaders, was at an all-time high,” Keller said during a talk at GDC Festival of Gaming 2026. “For those that remained, the task was how not just to turn the game around, but turn around our players and hopefully, eventually, the broader gaming community.”
The first step for the team was admitting that they were wrong and had to do something about it. The second was to start doing something about it. It sounds simple (and kind of obvious) but for a game as huge and visible as Overwatch, it needed to be done correctly. For Keller and the rest of the developers, it came down to another seemingly simple idea: over-communication with its player base.
Communication needs to be a two-way street. Blizzard has been open about how important player feedback has been to developing Overwatch, especially as it was working on revitalizing it. Keller admitted that it did lead them astray a bit, since players were clamoring for a PvE mode that ended up dragging down development. However, what Blizzard improved—and continues to do—is increase communication with the players. And it seems to be working.
Overwatch’s strong launch and eventual stumbling blocks
It wasn’t just one poorly-received development decision that led to this low point for the franchise. There were a lot of controversial, structural changes made between Overwatch and Overwatch 2. For one, there was the shift from a 6v6 format to a 5v5 one that, among other things, changed up the flow of each round and how players worked together. The previously announced PvE mode was also scrapped after years of development hell. Then there’s the “2” of it all. Longtime fans felt that the changes didn’t justify a completely new sequel, and that was after Keller said the game was starting to feel stale. As he stated during the talk, Overwatch felt “complete” at launch, which sounds great on paper but poses a real challenge when you have to keep evolving it.
Keller explained that the PvE change specifically caused friction within the studio. As player growth plateaued and the team started working on PvE, they had to pull away resources from PvP development, which led to its core competition mode suffering. Even with the added resources, the PvE wasn’t coming along as the team hoped, with early feedback showing that it just wasn’t “fun.”
There was a lot of confusion among the audience about what the future of the game would look like. For a franchise that had been on top for so long, this reputational hit rocked the studio. This would be a problem for any game, but for a live-service title that people play over months or years, it can be a death knell. Players need to trust that the team making the game they play every day will take care of them, keep things feeling fresh, and listen to them when they have feedback.
“At their core, these players want to know that a game is in good hands, that the company standing behind it has their interests in mind as they’re continuously developing the game… In other words, players need confidence in the future of a live service game and really the team behind it in order to play it in the present. Because of Overwatch‘s history. We no longer had that confidence from our players.”
Building trust, blog by blog
A key change that Keller said really helped was to provide the player base with constant updates. That includes traditional communication like patch notes, but the team also crafted long essays and explanations for upcoming changes and inside looks into decision-making processes on the Overwatch blog. Keller publishes frequent “Director’s Take” articles, for example, that look into why the team made certain choices, with teases for what’s to come.
It’s one of the most extensive developer blogs out there, providing extended looks into development that you don’t see with other large teams, even within Blizzard.
That meant over-communicating and being consistent. It meant rewarding players for paying attention, getting them involved in the development process beyond things like test modes. For players who cling onto every post like it’s gospel, this was the right move.
“Since we were rebuilding trust, our communication couldn’t just be reactive or occasional. It really had to be continuous, and speaking to the community became an important layer on top of how we ran the game,” Keller said.
“We wanted our players to feel like we were open and transparent, and it sometimes means talking about the mundane as much as you’re talking about the magnificent,” he continued.
They don’t have to be perfect either. A tension with any company or public figure is whether their messaging will have unintended consequences or be interpreted incorrectly, leading to more problems. Keller emphasized to the audience that perfection isn’t the end goal.
“When we stopped optimizing for perfect messages and started showing up consistently, players eventually stopped asking if we were listening, because they could see it,” he said.
Take this blog from March 2023, which was published six months after Overwatch 2‘s official debut. Keller emphasizes “player feedback” constantly throughout, pulling out specifics and using terms that hint at—but don’t outright admit—fallibility. In it, he actually addresses the communication problem and that the team was working to correct. It’s broad, but specific enough that it shows that the team is listening. Other entries note that developers were going back to the game’s roots over upcoming updates, that roadmaps were coming, and that they were making changes to those roadmaps on top of it.
Steam reviews and new opportunities for Overwatch
So far, it seems that the Overwatch team’s efforts are paying off. Sentiment in the community is overall more positive. It’s not perfect, of course. The game still isn’t positively reviewed on Steam at the time of this writing, but recent reviews show it’s now “Mixed,” which is a huge improvement. Blizzard also recently released a Switch 2 port full of bugs, but in line with this communication strategy, issues have been officially addressed.
As Keller previously stated, working in live-service is a constant push-and-pull between seeing what the players want, gathering the data, and implementing it in a way that doesn’t distract from the core experience. With new heroes being added more consistently, along with new modes and maps, there are sure to be problems. However, with the new communication updates, Keller said he can sleep better at night.
“If you think about it, running a life service game, it’s like being in a relationship. We want to build the same sort of trust with our players that they could have with a friend. And honesty and vulnerability are a part of this. And when you think about it, much of what I’ve discussed today, it really is this back and forth with players, this loop of experimentation, analysis and communication,” he said.
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