Okay, so this isn’t exactly breaking news, but I wanted to talk about it a little bit anyway. In case you haven’t heard, Activision-Blizzard recently rebranded Overwatch 2. It’s new name? Overwatch. Yep, four years after forcing Overwatch 2 onto fans and taking down the original, the publisher has decided that that “2” in the title wasn’t deserved after all. Of course, this still isn’t the same game as the original Overwatch, but, after 4 years of patches and updates, it’s close enough. Well, close enough to keep people playing, anyway.

Lest we forget, the justification for calling the game “Overwatch 2” hinged entirely on the promise that it would offer players an extensive, feature-complete single-player campaign. That promise was blatantly and unceremoniously broken, first by promising that it would come a few months after release, then saying that it would be broken down into regular installments. Those “installments” turned out to be not even a handful of shallow solo missions after which they were abandoned entirely.

Keep in mind that they and they alone decided to make this “sequel” and made all their (broken) promises unprompted by anyone. Remember also that even the little that was delivered was, for a very long time, utterly unfinished and even downright unplayable for many at launch. It took a good year of patches and updates to get the game feeling like Overwatch again, leaving a great many wondering why it was that they had to give up the original game (and all of their purchases with it) in the first place.

And now here we are again. After all that wasted time, money, energy and effort, “Overwatch” is back and is only now starting to see some actual effort put into development again due to the utter dominance of Marvel Rivals. I want to say it’s kind of funny in a way, but the reality is that Activision-Blizzard sold its customers a game (and took away its predecessor) based on a lie, and now is poised to be rewarded for doing so. So no, it’s not funny. It’s very, very unfortunate.

The internet is filled with people like myself who lament the current state of the video games industry, heck the state of the entertainment and technology industries too, yet hardly anyone can bring themselves to stop financially supporting the very practices they claim to hate. The only thing we’ve ever had to put a stop to all this crap is to simply stop buying it.

Stop buying the AAA slop. Stop paying for streaming services that you don’t even like watching. Stop pouring money into cruddy live services. Stop wasting time on social media. Stop allowing yourself to be price gouged on RAM. You don’t even need to go full cold turkey. You just need to use less. Many of us were around in the pre-internet world. We were around when free time didn’t revolve around technology, but around people instead.

Things aren’t what they used to be, true, but that doesn’t mean that those non-game or tech-based options aren’t still there. Heck, even if you’ve gotta have a movie or game or something, you could even go retro and start building up your own physical collection of classics or even just full downloads of old or indie games via GoG or something.

Or, maybe even take up reading. The point is that we do still have options besides handing over our money to scummy exploitative companies for bad products. The consumers still have power. We still have the power to say “no” and invest our time and money into ourselves instead. It’s just a matter of exercising it.

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Well that turned into more of a thing than I’d intended, but there it is. What do you think about all this?

Image is a promo screenshot