Highlights
- Overwatch 2 has received overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam, becoming the lowest-rated game ever and surpassing the previous record holder, War of the Three Kingdoms.
- Review bombers are expressing their dissatisfaction with Blizzard's decision to charge a full price for the original Overwatch and then replace it with a heavily monetized free-to-play experience in Overwatch 2.
- Many negative reviews criticize Overwatch 2's monetization practices, battle pass model, scrapped PvE content plans, and reuse of cosmetic items from the original game. The potential impact of these reviews on Blizzard's plans to bring more games to Steam remains to be seen.
Overwatch 2 is now the lowest-rated Steam game of all time, having amassed over 87,000 negative reviews two days into its debut on Valve's digital storefront. Overwatch 2 already cracked the top ten worst-rated Steam games within 24 hours of its release.
Blizzard's decision to bring Overwatch 2 to Steam took many fans by surprise, not least because the company's PC catalog has been exclusively beholden to its Battle.net platform for many a year. The gaming giant described the move as a sign of things to come, vowing that more of its PC games will be coming to Steam in the future.
It would appear that a vocal portion of Valve's userbase might not be holding its breath for that to happen, as Overwatch 2 only took some 48 hours to become the lowest-rated game ever released on Steam. It seized that unenviable title with over 87,000 overwhelmingly negative reviews, dwarfing the 29,000 user ratings attached to the second worst-rated Steam game of all time, War of the Three Kingdoms, according to third-party tracker Steam250.
A notable portion of the ongoing review-bombing effort can seemingly be attributed to fan activism against Blizzard's decision to charge a full price for the original Overwatch, only to eventually replace it with an aggressively monetized free-to-play experience that is Overwatch 2. While the first game had a six-year run until its follow-up entered beta, many negative reviews argue that Overwatch 2 is essentially just a more predatory version of the original, bemoaning Blizzard's decision to officially kill Overwatch 1 in October 2022 as part of a bid to accelerate the sequel's adoption.
Even many of the negative Steam reviews of Overwatch 2 that didn't mention its predecessor took aim at the game's monetization practices, criticizing its battle pass model as anti-consumer and hindering to enjoyment. Some Steam users also lambasted Blizzard's scrapped plans for PvE content, while others condemned the recently announced Overwatch 2 Season 6 roadmap and the reuse of an old Spray cosmetic from the original game as a battle pass unlockable.
It's unclear if this turn of events could affect Blizzard's plans to bring more of its games to Valve's storefront. That likely depends on its reasons for deciding on the strategy shift that brought Overwatch 2 to Steam in the first place. If the idea was to make the game more accessible due to its free-to-play business model that demands a massive audience in order to be as profitable as possible, then Blizzard might not have that many more Steam releases in the pipeline anyway, with Hearthstone being the only other freemium PC game that it's currently supporting. But it's also possible that the company turned to Steam in anticipation of its sale to Microsoft, whose games have long been available on Valve's platform. In that case, the overwhelmingly negative reception of Overwatch 2 likely won't have an impact on Blizzard's Steam plans.
Overwatch 2 is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
