Overwatch vs. Call of Duty: The Battle Pass War

One thing I want to cover to close out the episode is a bundle of battle pass changes. So you have Call of Duty, which is introducing perma boosts based on the number of seasonal battle passes you get to the amount of XP you earn through player progression and weapon XP. You have what we are looking at here, which is a new way that OverWatch is managing their battle pass, which is that there'll be no changes to the amount of content, but instead you'll have these tracks that you can progress. A track is just a sequence of levels, and so you're basically just choosing the order in which you can unlock your content in the battle pass. And then there's one final change, which Battlefield has announced that content that is in the battle pass can appear in the store, but on a blackout window of 3 months. So this is basically
[laughter]
everything we've been talking about when it comes to battle pass. You have the idea of FOMO cratering little by little. So the idea that

Battlefield is going to bring back content. They under That's the thing that helps maximize revenue for that content is getting it in front of as many eyeballs as possible, especially since they have acquisition from Red Sect. The problem with the battle pass design as we've talked about is if you join the middle of a 3-month season your earning opportunity, your value proposition is a lot different. And so now you can essentially evaluate the pass based on how many different tracks they have. So you know, if they have like, let's say five tracks versus their initial 100 tiers, you know, I can just evaluate whether or not I can want to get the things that are contained within that track as my evaluation proposition for the battle pass versus the end of the season, which I think is very interesting. The other thing that it it does though is it craters that menu. Right? So the thing I want that might be at tier 100 is something now I can get at tier 10. And so are you putting engagement risk out there? And then I would just say the other one we just briefly talked about is the Call of Duty benefit that's stacking multiple passes on top.

The thing that I really want to drive home in all of these changes is that we still haven't solved the ARPU problem we've talked about on this podcast on how to increase the monetization of a lot of Western first-person shooters. I think Battlefield in particular struggles with this. That's my biggest concern for us is that it can't support a live service cuz it's marginal ARPU just isn't there. And I would say the same thing for Overwatch. I think it struggles with this, too. And the only monetization vector we really have in the West is the battle pass, which is why we keep touching it. Like we used to like to say on the main pod tweak podcast that new platforms are new opportunities for growth. But to me, like new genre expectations are new opportunities for monetization. You know, we talked about insurance within side of DMZ was a new monetization vector that Call of Duty was like starting to experiment with what is the line of like, "Hey, you know, maybe there's some gear prevention loss. You know, maybe there's some streak prevention." And I I fear for us because I think what people fail to understand is that monetization is also what employs us and like helps the sector grow. And so if we

aren't able to attach like significant ARPU to these titles, then we can't support healthy live service teams. So you know, what is this? This is a plea This is a plea for more monetization services.
So there's a lot to unpack with what you said. And I'm going to be the boring person and say something that I think we've all said before. Battle passes are not supposed to be used mainly for monetization. They're supposed to be engagement tools. So we just got that out of the way. I think everyone has
No, but no, but no, but hold on, hold on, Frost. But but that's But see, people now look at Helldivers and you're it's your point. It's a DLC pack that we now wrap in like this certain set of systems design.
Exactly. But war bonds are not battle passes. The battle pass is basically, when it first came out and became very popular, this was just a rebranding of seasonal progression, basically. We found like a way of like, okay, let's rebrand seasonal progression. Let's call it the battle pass, and then we can add the monetization layer to it. And what was

interesting about this monetization layer is that if players buy the battle pass, they end up actually wanting to get the best value out of it, so they end up staying in the game. But at the end of the day, what defines a battle pass versus like a war bond versus other systems that we're seeing in the game? The only difference is a battle pass is a seasonal progression that disappears when the season is over by the definition of a seasonal progression. War bonds are actually DLC packs because once they get released, they stay in the game. They're not tied with a specific season. Therefore, they're not really behaving like a battle pass or like a seasonal progression. And I think this is why by default the if the content stays in the game, you're increasing the player spend cap, but you're also not going with the sole for the battle pass is supposed to deliver. So, if you have such a thing where the content stays in the game, then you need to find other methods to engage players on a seasonal perspective, which again,

Helldivers realized like it's not only mainly about the war bonds as much as about doing the major orders and all these stuff they're doing on the bigger narrative beats. That's their seasonal drive rather than the war bonds is the content that comes with it. The second thing that you mentioned is also very fascinating about seasonal progression design is when a battle pass is very interesting when a player comes in on day one, but if they come in at the last week or the last 2 weeks of the season, the hypothesis was, well, if they really like the items, they're going to purchase them, purchase the skips, but that's not the standard behavior you get, which is why player agency in battle passes and seasonal progression showed up. We were trying to solve for the players coming in late and they didn't have a chance to go in. The third thing, and this is my conspiracy theory, started by looking at Fortnite cuz we again when when we're just working games all the time to design these things. Fortnite just keep changing the battle pass all the time. And here is my conspiracy theory. 90% of

the reason of doing the change is for change's sake. I think when you have users staying in for a long, long time, even if your system is doing good, they just need to change it for a while. And if it's your biggest money maker, which usually it's not, the store is your biggest money maker, then it's fine because you're trying to find retention from other avenues. Your revenue is coming from the store, the seasonal progression system, again because it's a progression system, you need to change it every now and then just to keep the players engaged. And I think that's what maybe some other shooters are missing. They're approaching it from this perspective, so they're too precious to it. But the only way for it to stay engaging is they actually change it around. And it's a bit risky cuz you lose players sometimes when you do it wrong, but I think that's the way for you to survive if your live service is uh evergreen.
This is a really keen insight cuz to your point, like they don't tie seasonal progression to war bond. Like it isn't just like the FOMO mechanic cuz yeah, like Halo Infinite has like the non-expiring battle passes, but it's explicitly not a part of their seasonal beat. Like when

they do an ODST integration, that's not a part of the beat. And so that also lets them change the timetables and the pace at which they release war bonds. They can do three a month, they can do one a month, they can do two a month.
What is even a season when you think about it? So in games like COD, Battlefield, Fortnite, the season begins and ends when the battle pass is removed from the game. In Helldivers, what is a season? It's when a new arc drops, when a new trailer drops, it's when Helldiver tells you it's a new season. It's not tied to the battle pass anymore. So their approach to live service is very different than anyone else, and I actually quite like that approach because they managed to redefine seasonality in the shooter space with a very small team. Because they're are small team, they had to do it cuz the other option is you go out, you do the same thing that's all of these big games are doing, and it's not going to work. So, they said, "Okay, we're going to define our season. It lasts as long as the community decides, right? If the community wants to finish the season, it'll be tomorrow. If they stay in and

they don't fulfill it, then it will take much longer. I think that's the play they did there, and I think that's quite smart.
Also worth noting for us, Helldivers 2 is a fully premium soft premium game. So, that gives them some flexibility to call out their seasons versus if you're free-to-play game, you live and die by the output.
And they don't discount. They don't discount that frequently. I mean, obviously they're part of some sales, but where the is Arc Raiders on the strategy? This is This is like the easiest playbook I've ever seen that's been gifted to Arc Raiders. Like, they're all in Sweden for us. What Are people out drinking enough? Together? Can you connect these people? Like, do they not understand that like down the hall, there's like this massive success that has all of their monetization answers?
I think you can't apply the same strategy to Arc Raiders. Again, extraction shooters suffer from retention challenges in a very very different way. I feel like extraction shooters have the inherent challenge of

as you as a player asking yourself, "Why am I playing this game if everything I'm doing is to lose a lot of the content that I have?" So, you need quite strong engagement systems that connect to that. But, usually extraction shooters are premium games, so they don't come with these free-to-play strong engagement systems. That's That's my take on extraction. I don't think you can take what Helldivers is doing and apply it to Arc Raiders and that would work. But, I think even in the whole extraction genre overall, once you find that hardcore set of players, they engage, but to maintain the bigger numbers, maintain the majority of your audience, you need a lot of these systems that I don't think are prevalent in that to genre.
I don't know if that was in part strategy was to like get one and run with it forever. I do like I do think it was a miss for sure as like an outsider, but I don't know what like internally their goals are. But I do I agree with like everything for us is saying here. I think something that we run into and like as Western developers is this almost like necessity

to not listen, but like we are kind of owned by the Reddits and the Twitters of the world in a lot of the ways that we make design decisions. I don't think that we have the ability to stretch and test as much stuff as people do in the East, which allows them to play around with monetization more to really figure out what is new. Battle passes are accepted to like Western players' minds and so like we have to do everything within the context of a battle pass in order to not worry about the negative sentiment that will that will come from it. And I think there's fair arguments to be like, are these negative sentiments actually that negatively impactful to like revenue in the business? I think it's a game by game basis, but I think that is really kind of the the strain and outside of the rising costs of Western developers cuz like we're relatively entitled, we want really high salaries, like there's all these other things tied to the downfall of Western development. I do think one of them is just like our inability to really test out new monetization due to the fear and obedience that we have to

the masses, the players. And to be fair like that maybe that's how it should work. Maybe that's how things should go. Like the player should have that much power and impact. I think that's kind of where we really don't really have any options to play with new monetization, so we have to all keep it within this like battle pass context. And I think that's kind of why like I just kind of feel like the shooter space a little bit boring in most senses because people want new stuff and then like you try something new and just get on and then the next developer's like, "Hey, they got on, so I don't want to try anything new." And it's just like is the cycle that goes down and and we're kind of I think that's kind of what's led us to where we are with Western development, you know, quote unquote Western development's dead. And I know I'm not like I'm only like the millionth person to say that. But I do think this is like one of the key issues is like we do not have a place to play with monetization unless you're like an unknown company that comes out and tries something. Right? Warbonds, I'm sure Warbonds, I'm sure that concept exists in another game before Helldivers 2. It doesn't like immediately jump to my head. But you know, they were like they were not at EA or they were not at Activision when they

did this Warbonds. And so I I think that a lot of this comes from more unknown studios. Cuz I think also as Western gamers, we tie so much pressure to like the brand and IP. We like care so much. We hold like so many restrictions tied to like how we feel a brand is. That has a huge impact. So when something like Helldivers 2 comes out, Helldivers 1 may have had like a success, it may have had like an audience, I don't really know a lot. But Helldivers 2 is obviously much more bigger or a much larger. And they were able to try this Warbond to an audience that, you know, they were a small team, they were in a crunch, they had to figure something out. And so what they found out, players didn't have the expectations of what it meant to have a premium live service with these Warbonds. And so it was kind of a nice combination. I think recreating that is something that's really hard. I don't think it's something that AAA companies can actually do. It's got to come from somewhere else, like double A or lower.
Besides, I agree with you completely what you say as developers were like hesitant to really explore monetization side. Perhaps in the future episode, I would love to hear everyone's Frankenstein experiment of how to push

that to the limit. If you were a dictator in a game, what monetization would you apply? What are the pros and what are the cons? I'm sure we have a lot of ideas, but I think I lean towards
blacklisted, baby. Let's do it. Yeah. Can't Anjos. Get us graded by Reddit.
The thing is is like because Western developers, because we are so like afraid to do these things, we're afraid of the negative sentiments, we've allowed the Eastern developers to come in and dominate us. Right, Genshin Impact could not have been made by EA. But, it's a loot box, a gotcha mechanic game, but it's massive in the West.
Mhm.
And because we've been so scared in the West to like try any of these things. Trust me, I've been in a billion conversations where it's like, "Hey, let's like this thing they're doing in the East is really sweet. We should try that here." And it just gets shut down cuz some creative director is like, "Oh, Reddit will be upset." Like, that happens at every AAA company. And like, that's what is driving like us to not have any new fun abilities, nothing fun to do while the Eastern dominates us cuz they get to do all

types of stuff and then it eventually makes its way to the West as the Eastern developers and the Western development dies. You have all these layoffs. I just wish that AAA companies would just take that risk and like, the people in charge who are making the decisions wouldn't be so worried about what Reddit's going to say because if they do say something and it does have a negative negative impact, that does suck, but if we don't do anything, it also sucks.
[laughter]
Like, but the we're in a like lose-lose. Like, we have to make a decision here. I just don't find any AAA company is making a decision. That's my rant. Sorry.
Um come back come back in next time. We are going to be talking about War Dogs. It's a game you've heard us mention here. They're making a real play at Battlefield. They've got a lot of design innovations coming. And we're going to be coming at you with a deep dive. We might even play amongst each other at some point. Maybe if we all get into the beta. Pre-order now. See you next week. Ching. I don't know, some gun sound effect.
[laughter]

Uh Sugar Sugar Monthly episode 10 11 in the can.
[music] [music]