Blizzard is desperate here. Am I right in thinking this is the first time they've put anything on Steam?

Enjoyed Overwatch back in the day, i.e. when it was new; but really not a fan of them reducing team sizes to make it a more conventional "fit" with other 'esports'.

just how dead the game is

Is it though? Can't be by player numbers since it takes less time to get in match than CS:GO and you wouldn't call that dead.

Also, who exactly is going to install it through steam?

I am. It's the only game I have on Battle net and after OW2 is on Steam I can uninstall Battle net.

That's why they're putting it on Steam. They're hoping for an injection of players

Yep, since the very beginning

you have 3 options:

• Pay 10bucks every 4ish months to get the hero immediately
• grind 45 levels of the free battlepass (note that the hero is locked in competitive for the first 3 weeks). Personally this takes me about 10hrs.
• wait until the season ends and do some rather trivial challenges (essentially play a tutorial for the character and play like 20 games)

Personally I see it as a subscription based game, and 3bucks/mo is pretty fair imo. like all competitive MP games, it doesn't really make much sense to play it unless you can play a fair amount of it.

Miserable game design for something that is trying to get players to come back every few months for content releases. "You can't play the new hero until you grind for it until you burn out or pay" is just not a compelling pitch to get people to resume playing your game.

It's only going to get worse over time as the proportion of premium characters grows... 😐

There isn't really a "second one". Overwatch 2 was just a patch with essentially two major changes. They changed the monetisation, making the game free-to-play and introducing the battle pass. An especially unpopular part of that is that new heroes now have to be bought with real money or unlocked through the battle pass. The other big change is the move from 6v6 to 5v5, which was controversial. There are definitely some positives, like getting rid of the "double shield meta", which did make the game more fun. But there's also more pressure and focus on the single tank.

The game is free and if you bought OW1 you still have all your stuff (cosmetics and all the non-OW2 heroes), so if you're curious you can just check it out. Personally I'm still enjoying the game but there's also a lot of valid criticism.

Idk if it's "bad," exactly, but I don't like it. I liked the meta for the first game way more, I miss the old 6v6 team structure, I don't like the changes made to my favorite characters, and the monetization is really sucky. It felt to me like they took everything that was wrong with the first game, kept it as is, and then took a bunch of the good stuff and made it worse. lol

But that's just my opinion, I know there are def people that like it. I only wish they'd release "Overwatch Classic" or something so that people who prefer OW1 can still play it--ideally with the lootboxes removed and a way to unlock character skins and stuff by playing those characters and progressing, but I'd honestly take just like a snapshot of the last stable release before the OW2 update. It was one of my favorite games and I just really don't like the OW2 updates. 😥

Aparently not -- the store page doesn't say it requires a third party launcher (which it says for EA and Rockstar Games), only that you'll need a battle.net account, which you could create online. A journalist has also confirmed this on twitter, although I don't have a link right now.