Overwatch 2 releases in early October, and its community of players are in uproar over its battle pass.

When Overwatch first released, it occupied a unique space in the shooter genre. You didn’t necessarily have to have the best aim and reflexes like a pro Counter-Strike player because each character also had special powers, and class roles. As a support player, you could focus on healing, and as a tank, protecting your team from oncoming fire was just was important as shooting. Over the years the game has changed greatly, but the upcoming changes in Overwatch 2 has made players nervous, especially the game’s new monetization scheme.

The original Overwatch was a game you paid for, and that received free updates over time, including new heroes with new and exciting powers. Overwatch 2 will be free to play with a seasonal battle pass, bringing the game in line with popular shooters like Destiny 2, Apex Legends, or Fortnite. This means that heroes aren’t exactly free anymore. The first new hero for Overwatch 2, Kiriko, can be unlocked on the battle pass at level 55 out of 80 if you’re on the free version of the battle pass. You can also unlock her immediately if you pay for the premium battle pass, which will be $10. If you play Overwatch now and log into Overwatch 2 during the first or second season you’ll get Kiriko for free, but Blizzard has made it clear in a blog post that in the future, all new heroes will be on the battle pass.

Unlike other shooters like Apex or Destiny, in Overwatch, you’re not able to choose your own weapon loadout. Along with their abilities, each hero comes with their own specific kit. Think of each character as essentially being their own gun. What this new monetization scheme feels like as a player is that I’ll either have to grind to unlock a new gun, a core component of gameplay, or pay for it. 

To say that players are frustrated by this move would be a severe understatement. 

“The blog post trying to explain why this isn’t fucked over seven paragraphs and failing miserably tells me they know it’s janky,” on player wrote in a comment on the Overwatch subreddit that has been upvoted over 400 times. A terrible decision that goes against their original values—the skins etc. are sick, why not let your artists continue to carry your game.”

Not helping matters, Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller told journalists at a press event that the reasons why players are mad aren’t actually a big deal.

"Going forward, what we've done is we're trying to take some of those really hard rock-paper-scissors interactions out of the game, and replacing them with more player choice," Keller told PC Gamer. 

He also said that players are unlikely to switch out heroes because of the time it takes to practice and be good at any particular character.

“As the players get to be a higher and higher skill level, that band of heroes they play, it actually narrows because it takes a really long time to get good at a hero to play at that level," he said.

But players insist that this isn’t how they play the game, and that being able to swap heroes to counter the other team is an essential part of gameplay. They feel that these changes are against the spirit of Overwatch, and make it more like every other shooter out there as opposed to its own unique experience. On the official Overwatch forums, players have dug up a quote from Keller in 2016 saying that heroes would never be locked behind anything as an example of how unexpected and unwanted this change is.

“It was actually a game design decision, a balance thing. Sometimes you need a different hero on your team. Like if you really need a Widowmaker right now, you don’t want everybody saying ‘I don’t have Widowmaker!” Keller told Ars Technica at the time.

Overwatch has changed a lot since 2016, and Overwatch 2 will bring even more changes. What remains to be seen is how many players will be able to roll with these punches.

Netflix stock is plummeting, it's hemorrhaging subscribers, and the company is pledging to finally crack down on password sharing. The company that once completely transformed the landscape of television and movies is now also a victim of that change.

This isn’t to say that Netflix is dead or dying, just that it has, for the moment, saturated the market. The platform is losing subscriptions and trying to get people to stop sharing passwords because there are simply no longer a significant number of new subscribers to get. Netflix invented the model of streaming television and movies that is now dominant across the industry. The problem is, now it has actual competitors in that industry and is no longer its ruler by default.

Netflix is a giant company in its own right, but its competitors generally have an incredible amount of archive content, have been formed as a part of megamergers that have only strengthened those archives, and also—in the case of Disney+, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime—have thriving businesses that have nothing to do with streaming, perhaps putting less pressure on them to make money with their streaming offerings out of the gate. Netflix is now also in the difficult position of trying to figure out how to build a line of revenue with advertising even though it has no history in the advertising space and, according to The Information, very few employees who know how to sell them. 

Netflix losing subscribers hasn’t come from nowhere. Ever since the company started streaming movies and television shows over the internet, people have assumed that the price wouldn’t stay at $9 per month—the original price for a netflix subscription—forever. When the price first jumped to $10 in 2014, my dad threatened to cancel. At the time, existing subscribers would be able to continue to pay $9 dollars for the next two years. Almost 10 years later, the service has three tiers of subscriptions. The lowest tier, at ten dollars, only allows Netflix to be used on one device at a time and does not have HD playback. The next tier is $15, and the highest tier is $20 (services like Disney+ and Apple TV+, which are both cheaper, offer 4k streaming for no extra charge). 

If you’re one of the people sharing a password with a family member that Netflix is about to crack down on, you’re also just in a different streaming environment than when Netflix first started. When Netflix started streaming television, it started the entire practice of streaming television. My dad didn’t cancel his Netflix subscription in 2014 because there wouldn’t be any other way to stream his favorite movies if he did so. If Netflix suddenly makes it harder to share passwords, it's not clear people will simply get their own Netflix subscriptions. Netflix doesn't have, for example, Star Trek or Buffy or Gossip Girl. Star Trek is on Paramount’s streaming service, Buffy is on the Disney owned Hulu, and Gossip Girl is on HBO Max. 

Netflix isn’t dying, exactly. It's just being forced to actually compete in the market it created. Netflix is increasingly having to rely on its own programming, which isn't bad, exactly, though a lot of it is absolute drek. Meanwhile, Paramount, NBC, Disney, HBO, and Warner Brothers have taken their back catalog of original content off of Netflix (if it was ever there), and stuck it on their own services. Hell, in some cases, new competitors to the streaming television and film market don’t invest the kind of time or money Netflix has into making new content and sometimes it gets them even better returns. Apple, already a wildly successful company, was able to cop an Oscar this year by distributing a movie that already had positive buzz on the festival market. Winning Best Picture at the Oscars, something which Netflix has not been able to do, boosted subscriptions to Apple TV+ by 25 percent. Meanwhile, Netflix is spending $30 million per episode on Stranger Things, a show I keep forgetting is still happening.

Netflix likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but it appears the company can no longer print money, and can no longer take its dominance for granted.

Amid budget cuts and mergers, streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max have canceled a huge number of animation projects. If you have work in, or have ambitions of working in, animation, the past few months have likely been painful.

In May, as Netflix’s subscriber count flagged, the platform canceled some of its announced animation projects, including Antiracist Baby, Wings of Fire, and Pearl, an animation project from Meghan Markle. In the world of adult animation, Netflix also scrapped a planned adaptation of the acclaimed adult comic Bone, as well as original series Boons and Curses from animator Jaydeep Hasrajani. 

Do you work in streaming animation? We'd love to hear from you. Contact the reporter at [email protected] or via Signal at 267-713-9832 for extra security.

According to animators reacting at the time, Netflix was once seen as a place where their animation projects could flourish, and these cancellations made their livelihoods more precarious. Hasrajani, for instance, told The Hollywood Reporter that they had planned to ship their first episode on the same day that they learned that their show had been canceled. Chris Nee, who was the showrunner on another canceled animation project, Dino Daycare, tweeted that Netflix was on a “killing spree.”

“As soon as the ink is dry on one, they've moved on to the next. Intense environment to be in,” she said on Twitter.

The same fate seems to have befallen animation projects at HBO Max. After Warner Brothers’ merger with Discovery, the streaming platform has been cutting projects left and right. In the past week, animation projects have been hit especially hard. This is further exacerbated by HBO Max not only canceling projects, but removing them from the platform entirely, including animation projects that are original to the service. 

According to Cartoon Brew, 37 titles were removed from HBO Max, including original projects like Infinity Train and Cartoon Network show Uncle Grandpa. It also canceled the upcoming animated movie Driftwood and a Matt Reeves- and Bruce Timm-produced Batman show, Batman: Caped Crusader.

It’s difficult not to catastrophize about the state of American animation in the wake of this news. While Cartoon Network has saved one of the canceled HBO Max shows, Summer Camp Island, the fate of everything else is up in the air. Some projects, like Driftwood, were greenlit just a few months before their cancellations. If Netflix was on a killing spree, then HBO Max has gone scorched earth. 

Making this more—or less, depending on your perspective—puzzling is the popularity of Japanese animation with U.S. audiences. We now live in the age where Goku from Dragon Ball Z is in Fortnite; where the Jujutsu Kaisen movie premiered at the number two spot on the box office; where Megan Thee Stallion performed in a Sailor Moon-inspired outfit at Tokyo’s Summer Sonic festival; and where rival corporation Sony has already acquired two American anime streaming services, Crunchyroll and Funimation. (HBO Max used to have Crunchyroll branding on the streaming service before Crunchyroll was acquired by Sony.) More recently, HBO Max has acquired the acclaimed anime movie Belle, and it already has extremely popular series like the aforementioned Jujutsu Kaisen, Mob Psycho 100, and Tokyo Revengers. It’s probably easier and cheaper to license an animated project than to make a new one—good news for bottom lines, less so for anything else.