In late August and early September of last year, the cultural sphere around video games was alight with what will most likely go down as the single largest failure in the medium’s history. While some may argue that the infamous 1982 Atari game based on the seminal (and overrated) Spielberg classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial will always and forever be the most catastrophic failure in the annals of video game lore, as it has often (and hyperbolically, perhaps) been stated to be the catalyst for the legendary Crash of ‘83 that tanked the entire industry1, I think it’s safe to say that 2024’s Concord sufficiently eclipsed that debacle. After ten years in development, an aggressive marketing blitz, and a budget that may have been as high as four hundred million dollars, the ill-fated game was only online and available for sale for a grand total of twelve whole days. This wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill bomb - this was the video game industry’s equivalent of the Tunguska event, wiping out the studio responsible, casting the entire future of the hero-shooter genre in further doubt, and sending shock waves rippling through the fabric of the industry that will doubtlessly be felt for years to come. Publishers and developers will be paying consultants in the future, if not right now, to study this event to the most minute detail so they can be told how not to have a Concord-class failure on their hands.

The reasons for Concord’s spectacular flame out are many. I wrote about the game’s catastrophic collapse and many of the reasons it failed extensively in this article when it happened, if you’re interested in learning more. One of the chief factors in Concord’s untimely but well deserved demise, I speculated, was the simple fact that the game was entering into an oversaturated and declining genre - that is to say, the hero-shooter genre - and aping a much more successful product that had already established itself as the definitive hero-shooter game - that is to say, Blizzard’s Overwatch.

Here’s what I wrote:

By the time Concord showed up to the scene, it the scene wasn’t already just saturated with competition - the competition had already dug its heels in, and trying to make a dent in their market share was a fool’s errand. The genre itself, as many have said, is already played out, past its prime, and the golden age is gone. People who play hero shooters already had their hero shooter of choice, and they weren’t about to abandon Overwatch, Paladins, or Valorant after years of playing them to jump to a new game that was showing up to the club while the music was fading and the lights were being turned out. Especially when all of those games are, to some extent, free-to-play. Concord cost forty US dollars on launch.

And, keep in mind, it made sense for Sony to develop Concord when they did. As stated above, Concord entered development in 2016 - the same year that Overwatch released. If they had managed to strike while the hero shooter genre was printing money and at its peak, there’s reason to believe that it would have done better. But, after dragging their feet over almost a fucking decade of development, they were showing up to a party that was already effectively over.

I still believe this theory holds water. Mostly.

Yet, in the months since Concord went up in flames like the Hindenburg, much to the horror of all thirty something of it’s dedicated players, there’s been an interesting development that has led me to reevaluate my claims from that time.

Part of the reason that I was confident that aping Overwatch was one of the Concord team’s biggest mistakes was the simple fact that Overwatch itself was not in great shape. It hasn’t been for a while, now.

It is very difficult to ascertain Overwatch’s exact player count from it’s release in 2016 to today. I’ve found various sources and all of them have wildly differentiating numbers. According to this source, the average monthly player count circa the end of 2021 was twenty million, with an average daily player count of one million. This source reports that the player count is still in the twenty million a month range, and has been remarkably consistent for the past two years.

I’m not entirely sure how accurate these numbers are. There’s reasons to be skeptical. For one… no one talks about Overwatch. You just don’t hear about it anymore. There’s a small, insular fandom of dedicated players that you occasionally see breach the surface of the cyber-sea, soyjaking when some new ugly ass character debuts, but given the glacial pace that Overwatch drops new content, it doesn’t happen often. The only exception to this is - and, no, I’m not exaggerating - the staggering amount pornography it still generates. Don’t ask me how I know. But just because degenerates on the internet are gooning their brains into mush over Widowmaker with a purple kiolbasa between her legs doesn’t mean they’re playing the game2.

Secondly, according to the graphs available on the digital storefront-cum-game service, Steam, the all-time peak of concurrent players is only around 77,000, which it reached in August of 2023. Looking at the graph from a six month range, the daily player count was regularly 50,000+ circa the fall of 2024, and has since halved in the opening months of 2025, often dipping down into the low 20,000’s. Now, this may only account for players using Steam to play Overwatch, and not factor in the players using Blizzard’s proprietary launcher to access the game. If that’s the case, it would go a long way to explain the discrepancy between the purported millions of monthly players versus Steam’s statistics of sub-100,000.

There’s reasons to believe these claims of millions of daily players are just outright fudged. Aside from the numbers provided by Steam, which directly correspond to the exact amount of players online at any given time, the other sources are rough estimates drawn from nebulous and often uncredited sources. For their part, Blizzard touts the twenty-million player count number, but also lacks the transparency that Steam affords in offering concrete data.

But, hey - why would Blizzard lie about the player count of their game? It’s not like a big company like Blizzard would have any incentive to lie to the public, right? I mean, if players knew that the game was tanking, they wouldn’t abandon it for something else, would they? I can’t imagine all the stockholders who put their money into Activision-Blizzard’s coffers would dump their shares en masse if they found out that one of Blizzard’s flagship games was faltering.

I’m sure Blizzard is being honest.

Whatever the truth about Overwatch’s player count may be, it is undeniable that the game has fallen from the lofty peak it once occupied at its release in 2016 into inarguable irrelevancy.

I remember when Overwatch dropped. I was there. The hype was real. Overwatch was released before Blizzard dumped gasoline on themselves and self-immolated, burning away every iota of good will they’d spent thirty years building. It was their first major release and new IP in decades, and the anticipation was high. Hell, I remember that I as broke as a joke at the time and I spent my last forty bucks to buy it, which earned me a well earned ass-chewing from my mother.

And, at the time - it was a great game. I loved Overwatch when it first came out. The gameplay was fast and fun. The characters were creative, colorful, unique, and played off each other well. It was the kind of game you could spend hours whiling the night away with a group of friends. And one of the characters was a talking gorilla. Who’s also a genius scientist. From the moon.

It just doesn’t get much better than that.

But the halycon days of Overwatch were not to last for long.

In my opinion, two major factors contributed to Overwatch’s sharp decline in quality just months into it’s release.

The first of these was the dreadful balancing. If you played Overwatch at launch, you remember when the character McCree was basically the fucking worst thing you could see on an enemy team.

Which, fun fact: did you know McCree was named after a Blizzard employee? Kinda cool, right?

Did you know they (allegedly) also renamed this character to Cassidy3 because the employee he was named after was fired for being a sex pest? And I don’t just mean your he was playing unconsentual grab-ass with the intern or calling the secretary sugar tits; the (alleged) official reason the guy was (allegedly) terminated was because he was one of the employees caught in a sting operation after the breast milk a nursing co-worker was saving in a fridge kept suspiciously disappearing.

Now, I have… questions about why this woman was collecting her breast milk while on company time4, let alone storing it in the break room fridge, but, I’ll admit - lactation, it’s a bit of a blind spot for me since it’s… just not a thing I’ve ever needed to know that much about. I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt and assume that, like other bodily functions, when nature calls you gotta pick up the phone, and you gotta get it while you can so your little angel back at home ain’t drinking formula laced with mercury. You can’t extend the same benefit of the (alleged) doubt to Mr. McCree that, just maybe, he drank the milk by accident, since it was both stored in a baby bottle and clearly labeled and, I mean, you really shouldn’t need to be told not to drink the contents of random baby bottles you find in the break room fridge. Especially when they’re labeled as BREAST MILK: DO NOT DRINK.

That aside, the grizzled gunslinger with a robot arm, named after an (alleged) breast milk-guzzling sex pervert, was fucking dangerous. He could stun you, then pop off a shot to the dome with his techno-six shooter that was so accurate and powerful he could bean you between the eyes from a mile away. So, what did Blizzard do to fix this? Well, they just… fucked him up. Completely. He was basically worthless. His stun grenade lasted about as briefly as the wingbeat of a gnat and his once formidable revolver shot peas instead of slugs. This set off a chain reaction where, every other patch, McCree would be tweaked, rapidly oscillating between Unstoppable Mother Fucker Supreme and BooBoo the Fool, with no in-between.

Did they ever find a happy middle ground? Dunno. If they did, it was after I stopped playing.

One of my favorite characters, Torjborn - the angry Swedish dwarf - got similarly dicked over again and again. His first Ultimate ability5 supercharged his deployable turret and increased the rate of fire of his gun, which turned you into a rampaging berserker gnome for a few seconds. It was awesome. Then, they changed it so that he just pissed lava out of his prosthetic claw arm. Not only did it not just make sense as to how he was storing megaliters of melted iron in his arm, but the deluge of molten metal was about as worthless as spraying your enemies with a shaken-up can of LaCroix. I distinctly remember a friend of mine calling it the Torbjorn Cumshot.

And then… there was Symmetra. Oh… Symmetra.

Now, I won’t go into detail about how they fucked Symmetra up so bad because even I can’t exactly remember how it went. Her toolkit got revised so many times I don’t even recall what she originally did except for set up portals that didn’t last long, and usually set up by the idiot playing her for maximum inefficiency. But I do remember she was effectively worthless. So, naturally, they buffed her to make her a viable character that could actually, y’know, do shit other than just eat bullets with her face.

But they didn’t stop there; they made her stronger. And stronger. And stronger.

Unlike McCree, once Symmetra got buffed, she never went down on the power scale again. It got to the point that Symmetra became the single most annoying fucking character in the entire game that could wipe an entire team with all the effort of holding down your left mouse button and moving towards an enemy.

And do you know why Symmetra got such preferential treatment? Well, according to some, she was the favorite character of the game’s lead director, Jeff Kaplan. Kind of like the Soldier in Team Fortress 2, you could really tell what characters were the dev team's favorites just by who got the most buffs and who got nerfed into irrelevancy.

Now, these balancing issues were part and parcel with the other contributor to Overwatch’s decline - and that was the e-sports scene.

Over the past several years, e-sports have risen from a niche interest exclusive for people who get no bitches and stack no paper and who’ve never seen a bare titty in their life before to a much more broadly accepted and popular affair. Now, I’ll admit - I might be biased, here, because personally, I fucking hate e-sports. To me, it’s basically the equivalent of people saying, What if we took everything fun about this game, banned it, and then played the same game for twelve hours every day? These professional players fancy themselves athletes on the level of Tom Brady, but the only endurance their testing is just how long a person can sit in one chair before they begin to fuse to it, and how much blue-light the human eyeball can absorb before it begins to come apart on a molecular level. I’ve seen the e-sports scene quite literally ruin the lives of several past acquaintances before, and so far as I’m convinced, it’s effectively an antlion trap for the unemployed that ensures they’ll never get out of the hole.

But that’s a topic for another day.

The point is, around the time of Overwatch's release, e-sports were beginning to be embraced by a wider audience, with games like League of Legends and Dota 2 leading the pack. E-sports were a major selling point of these games. They brought both new players, renewed interest, and, most importantly, lots and lots of cold, hard cash. For example, the first place cash prize for 2016’s League of Legends World Championship was a cool two million fucking dollars. In December of 2024, the same contest had quadrupled the pot.

Almost makes you wanna download League of Legends and throw your hat in the ring, doesn’t it? But don’t. Seriously. Don’t. Unless you’re Korean and also have no job, no life, and your only friends are terminally online and chronically unemployed - you’re not gonna even sniff that level of competition.

Obviously, Blizzard saw this and was practically frothing at the mouth to get in on the action. But, the thing about the e-sports scene around League of Legends, Dota 2, and just about every other game with a dedicated e-sports league, is that the e-sports arose naturally from the community. They did not come from the top down. They were not originally organized by the developers of these games until the scene became sufficiently big enough to warrant their involvement. They were organic outgrowths of the most competitive members of the player base that evolved over time into organized leagues without much outside input, which was a process that took years to foment.

So, what did Blizzard do?

The exact fucking opposite of that, of course. Rather than allow the Overwatch community to grow, expand, and a competitive scene to evolve on its own, they brute forced it into existence by establishing the Overwatch League in 2017 - less than entire year into the game’s life. Hell, it was announced only a few months after the game launched, before the new car smell had even faded.

This attempt can best be described as embarrassing.

Millions of dollars were blown on this thing. Tens of millions, actually. The original twelve teams, with money cobbled together from enthusiastic (read: stupid) corporate sponsors, invested twenty million dollars a pop in the league to gain a spot in it. Later additions would invest up to sixty million dollars, all for the privilege of having a bunch of Korean dorks play video games and wear their company logo on ill-fitting jerseys mass produced on the cheap in a Bangladeshi sweatshop.

Hilariously, to give the whole thing a more professional look, they decided to ape actual sports leagues and name each team after a city, where they were nominally based. I say nominally because the players did not live in these cities. They did not even go to these cities to play their matches. So far as I’m aware, pretty much all the teams, all their players, and all their games, were in Los Angeles with the occasional expo match played in other cities. So, what was the point of calling teams the Toronto Defiant or the Atlanta Reign6, then? Presumably to bilk local sponsors into investing. Mark Cuban, erstwhile owner of the Dallas Mavericks, dumped a small chunk of change into the ostensibly Dallas-based team, the Dallas Fuel7. I remember walking into the American Airlines stadium in downtown Dallas for various events and looking up to see the Dallas Fuel’s e-sports training facility - yes, they really call them that - above the ABC Channel 8 news studio on the ground floor.

No one was ever there. So far as I know, it was rarely, if ever, actually used.

One year, I attended the massive gaming/e-sports convention, DreamHack, with a buddy who wanted to go when it came to the Big D. Naturally, the Dallas Fuel team was there to rub elbows with their adoring fans. A professional fighting game player called BrolyLegs had more people waiting to speak to him, and he wasn’t even a featured guest; he was just there as an attendee.

If it sounds like this whole “league” was a poorly thought out boondoogle, that’s because it was.

Unsurprisingly, after only a few scant years of middling success and generally being the laughing stock of the e-sports community since it took itself way too seriously, the Overwatch League folded in 2023 after most of the dupes that owned the various teams realized the reeking, rotten lemon they’d purchased and tapped out.

The dozens of ardent fans were disappointed.

Now, this whole dumpster fire wouldn’t have been much of a problem for the lion’s share of Overwatch’s player base who couldn’t give a Dutch fuck about competitive play and just wanted a game they could chill out and bum around with their pals in… if the entire game wasn’t beholden to every whim of the competitive community. As time wore on, and Blizzard desperately continued to try and breath life into the cold cadaver that was the competitive scene, they decided the best way to keep competitive players from jumping ship to other e-sports scenes was to change the game according to their critique. Like slavish Grooms of the Stool to a spoiled noble, every time the e-sports goons tapped their scepters to the ground and demanded a change be made, Blizzard was quick to implement them.

The aforementioned Torbjorn nerf that changed his ultimate? Well, that was because competitive players and e-sports “athletes” complained that he was broken and needed to be nerfed? Symmetra was buffed because they said she wasn’t competitive. Pretty much every character was “broken” and “repaired” in this Sisyphean cycle of madness, all made to cater to the passing fancies a vanishingly small percentage of the overall player base. A small percentage that, I must remind you, do not like fun, because otherwise, they would just… y’know. Play the fucking game. E-sports types are the kind of people who would play chess, bitch that the queen is over-powered, and then gradually find reasons to strip away every unique piece until you’re left with sixteen pawns on both sides of the board.

The end result of this hostile capture of the game by competitive players and e-sports fanatics was that Overwatch became increasingly unfriendly and, most importantly, not fun to the filthy casuals. Unfortunately for Blizzard, those filthy casuals they were pissing on to taint-tickle the august competitive aristocracy were also the game’s lifeblood.

Things continued to attrite as the game’s lore, which had never been particularly cohesive or fleshed out, became an incomprehensible mess. Every time they tried to add more story to the game, new material would end up conflicting with previously established facts. No one really cared about the story, but if anyone wanted to, they couldn’t because it was just too plain messy to make heads or tales of.

Of course, the usual culture war shenanigans crept their way into the game, as well. Several characters were revealed to be gay, which, honestly - not the biggest deal in the world, but it was also done in such an embarrassing and ham-fisted way that it made JK Rowling’s proclamation of Dumbledore’s proclivity for men look tactful in comparison. Jeff Kaplan himself revealed Symmetra was autistic, which… matters why, exactly?

I think they’re up to two non-binary characters, now. One just looks like the one token gay guy that Ulta or Sephora are apparently legally obligated to have on staff, and the other looks like they smell like spoiled deli meat.

In a crowning moment of cringe that I doubt will ever be topped, though, Blizzard released a quote-unquote tool that calculated each character’s diversity that was so fucking pointless and poorly thought out than even many on the progressive left recognized it for what it was - that is to say, pointless and hollow lip service that didn’t even make sense if you gave it more than two seconds of thought.

Quite literally every move Blizzard has made with Overwatch has been an exercise in taking one step forward, ten steps back, and then shooting themselves in the foot with a .44 magnum. The amount of incompetence they’ve displayed (and money they’ve wasted) doesn’t just beggar belief, but is a stark and undeniable testament that they are categorically not the company they used to be. Probably because all of the old guard either left in disgust or were routinely drummed out to make way for new blood without even a fraction of the talent. This is a trend that has played out with pretty much every once-respected Western game developer, but none have quite matched Blizzard’s fall from grace.

If you weren’t into gaming in the late 90’s and 2000’s, it’s hard to impress upon you just how well-regarded Blizzard was. In the eyes of their fans, they could do no wrong. Their numbers and profits reflect a Midas touch. For many years, their proprietary convention, BlizzCon, was an annual event that routinely sold out of tickets and was considered something of a Mecca for fans of their games. In 2022 and 2024, the convention was cancelled due to low interest in attendance and controversy, and the one time it has been held live since 2019, in 2023 - their biggest event in years - it was so poorly organized that Blizzard reportedly fired their event coordination team. As of present, Blizzard has stated BlizzCon will return in 2026, but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t crash and burn before ever leaving the tarmac.

To bring this back to the hero-shooter genre, it seemed as if it was all but dead after the Concorde catastrophe. If the genre’s flagship of Overwatch was faltering, it seemed as if that style of game was on the fast-track down the way of the dodo.

And then December of 2024 happened.

Only a handful of months after Concorde’s nuclear detonation left onlookers convinced that the hero-shooter was naught but cinders dancing on the breeze, Chinese developer NetEase launched their own hero-shooter game, Marvel Rivals.

Being at arm’s length from the vast majority of the gaming community these days, I cannot tell you if there was any real hype surrounding this game leading up to its release. With the hero-shooter genre floating face down in a foot of stagnant gutter water and the Marvel brand irreparably damaged by several years of subpar output from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, combining the two seemed to me, and no doubt many others, a prospect that Laozi might call most unwise.

For what it’s worth, I heard about it once when it was announced, and I didn’t hear about it again until everyone was fucking playing it.

Within just seventy-two hours after launching, Marvel Rivals boasted a player count of ten million. The first month of its release, it would double that number. As of this writing, it’s quadrupled. Ascertaining the money it’s made in that time is difficult, but it’s estimated to be in the billions in only a scant four month time window. Right now, as I write this, there’s over 300k people playing it.

The immediate success of Marvel Rivals seems to have caught most off-guard. Those are pretty crazy numbers for a game to flaunt right after strutting out of the gate - especially when it was for a genre most were certain had passed its prime.

In the wake of Concorde, Marvel Rivals’ success seems unthinkable. This raises the question - why?

Well, when you think about it, the varnished layers of mystery rub out pretty quick. Let’s look at them briefly.

A) It’s fun.

I don’t play video games often these days, but I have played Marvel Rivals. I have sporadically for, like, two months. And I have to say: I like it. It’s fun. At launch, the game had thirty-three characters, with the entire line-up of the Fantastic Four added in short order and more on the horizon. For comparison, Overwatch, after almost a decade, only has forty two characters. With all those characters, there’s one bespoke for every player and play style. Personally, I like Squirrel Girl.

Yeah, yeah, I know; her entire gimmick of being a quirked-up, yappy chick with undiagnosed ADHD and totally XD RANDUME!!1! squirrel powers is insufferably quirk chungus-coded, but she’s fun to play. And easy, which is good for people like me who have jobs and responsibilities rather than unlimited hours to dump into learning the intricacies of a character you need a Ph.D. to master. It’s also funny to me that she’s basically been rehabilitated from a lousy gag character who’s only series was, simply put, God awful -

To a fan favorite in the Rivals line-up. Why?

I dunno, actually. I’m sure it’s her sparkling personality.

The recipe for Marvel Rival’s success was simple - take what made Overwatch originally work, and do it again, but this time with Spider-Man slapped on it. The games are so similar that many suspect that NetEase lifted Overwatch’s code, line for line. They are a Chinese company, so, I mean, it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Whether they did or not is largely irrelevant; they took formula that worked, something that Blizzard had discarded entirely, and repackaged it in a fresh box with new trappings.

But you might recall that I said the hero-shooter genre had gracelessly expired.

And I did. But, here’s the thing -

B) The Death of the Hero-Shooter was Greatly Exaggerated

I’ll admit - I was wrong about the death of the hero-shooter. But so was everyone else, so I don’t feel too bad about it. As it turns out, the hero-shooter wasn’t dead so much as dormant. Obviously, as I’ve made clear, a lot of people liked Overwatch. When Overwatch stopped being Overwatch, they stopped playing it.

But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t play a game like Overwatch. There was clearly an unsatiated appetite for a good hero-shooter in the gaming market that wasn’t being met. It’s no surprise that when a straight-forward, no-frills hero-shooter was released, those who had a hankering for colorful, quirky characters blasting the fuck out of each other picked it up.

Oh, and did I mention -

C) It’s a fucking Marvel property.

It’s no secret that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been unraveling since the release of Avengers: Endgame in 2019. The comic-wing of the Marvel Empire itself has worked diligently to make itself utterly irrelevant in the wider culture, and is now more or less a parasitic hanger-on kept on life support by the ever-dwindling box office hauls of the films.

The movies, the comics - they’re quantifiably not popular. But that’s not the case for the characters in Marvel’s stable.

Iron Man. Captain America. Spider-Man. The X-Men. Fucking Rocket Raccoon. People still love these characters. After decades of success, these characters have been indelibly stamped into the fabric of American culture, and have been for a long time that predates any of their movies. Many of them are seen as American icons, and not just the one spangled in stars and stripes. There is a desire by a not-insignificant amount of the population to see these characters in media that, y’know, is actually good.

And Spider-Man? If the Spiderverse movies have proved anything, it’s that you could throw the Spidey symbol on a bag of horse shit and people would still buy it. Not that those movies are bad, per say (nor are they as good as the rabid fans make them out to be), but if nothing else they reified just how popular the character is. That web-headed mother fucker will always move units of whatever he turns up in.

Much like fans of the hero-shooter, when content that isn’t hot trash featuring these characters is provided to them, it should be expected they’d flock to it.

Which leads me to my final point.

D) It just looks good.

In my article on Concorde, I really railed on the fucking atrocious character design as one of the main reasons no one wanted to play it. Let’s not mince words here - people want to play games that look good. They want to play as characters that look cool. This is just a fact of life.

When I play a male character in a game, I do not want to play as Tons-of-Fun, Terror of the All-You-Can-Eat Chinese Buffets, with his rinky-dink .22 plinker:

No, I’d much rather play as billionaire playboy genius Tony Stark in his god damn suit of flying, laser-blasting robo-armor.

When I play as a female character, I don’t want this:

There’s no way I can word this without it sounding weird, but suffice to say that is it any wonder why I’d pick the blonde Russian baddie over Ellen the Generous, but in a dumpy hazmat suit, any day of the week?

Now, I’m not saying that a cast of characters can’t include characters that are less genetically blessed than a Slavic supermodel or have a little more meat on their bones than Tony Stark. Like, Ben Grimm, the rock monster guy from the Fantastic Four, is a character I enjoyed playing, and I very much do not want to help him… get his rocks off.

There’s absolutely no problem with having characters that don’t look like a model for Calvin Klein skivvies or lacy unmentionables. That’s not what I’m saying. The concept of a character can be whatever so long as they got that oomf, that spice, that, y’know: good character design.

But Concorde’s characters?

Yeah, no - these were bad and weird. Not a winning combination.

But beyond that, the game is much more colorful and striking than the muddy, washed-out earthtones of Concorde. It’s got an appropriately comic book aesthetic almost reminiscent of the Spider-Verse movies that makes it interesting to look at, as opposed to the generic, boring hyper-realism of Concorde. Each character is visually unique and you’re not going to mistake any of them for one another while running around the map. Everything about it is fun, colorful, robust, and exciting in a way that the miserably drab Concorde wasn’t.

As of this writing, Marvel Rivals is gearing up for their much-anticipated second season. And it’s totally not because it’s going to introduce popular X-Men villain-turned-hero, Emma Frost, as a playable character.

And, look - a lot of hand-wringing has been made about the game banking on, er… the feminine wiles of certain characters to keep the audience retention up. And, yeah. I’d agree with that. But, as the old engineering adage goes… if it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.

Will the gravy train continue to pull into NetEase’s station? Or will I be back here next year, writing about how they managed to fuck it up, just like their predecessors at Blizzard? Time will tell, but… NetEase. Guys. On the off-chance any of you are reading this… hi. But, fellas. Listen. If you do develop an allergy to money and popularity, might I just make one polite request of you?

Can we get Rogue as a playable character first?