Blizzard has confirmed that Overwatch’s annual Winter Wonderland event is being delayed.
Earlier in the week, Overwatch fans started voicing confusion over the lack of information about the Winter Wonderland event, which usually happens the second week of December. The winter-themed event is announced beforehand, with developers releasing legendary skins and other information leading up to the update.
But the Overwatch account was silent. In fact, the last tweet before today was on November 30.
Fans took to the official Blizzard forums to discuss the lack of information leading up to Winter Wonderland. That’s when Blizzard Community Manager Andy “AndyB” Bohan finally confirmed what the Overwatch community had feared: Winter Wonderland isn’t happening — at least not on time.
“Because of unforeseen circumstances, we needed to push the start of the event back by just a few days,” AndyB said.
No date was given, but fans may not have to wait long. But that’s not the issue. \
Blizzard is Killing Overwatch — and Doing Nothing to Stop It
If anything, Blizzard is actively pushing Overwatch towards a cliff and getting ready to kick it off.
The Winter Wonderland event is only being delayed by a few days, so some diehard Overwatch fans are probably thinking, “What’s with the dramatic article? It’s just a few days.”
But that’s just ignoring the real issues going on here.
Where are the Overwatch account’s tweets leading up to the Winter Wonderland event? Where is the communication in general? I’m not sure if you remember at all, but Jeff Kaplan used to actively discuss Overwatch candidly and openly with fans all the time. There were also multiple tweets a day, even if there was nothing major to say. It would sometimes just be fan art or a meme.
But Overwatch’s account had no tweets from November 30 to December 13.
A lot of fans within the Overwatch community have taken notice. When AndyB finally stated that there would be a delay, many pointed out how “vague” his statement was. Others felt there had been no transparency leading up to this point. Just silence.
The Overwatch team no longer seems to care about the community at all, a sentiment that many players have already expressed due to a lack of content and the team’s unwillingness to listen to feedback or address concerns. Imagine having such a popular game title and not tweeting for two weeks.
It’s really weird.
It’s easy to see why Overwatch fans were confused about the lack of information leading up to an annual event. You’d think that the Overwatch team would inform players of the delay much sooner, not the day it’s supposed to come out. It’s almost as if they just don’t care to tell players if the event is bothering to come out or not. Because they also don’t care about the event itself.
The Winter Wonderland Event Will Be Bad Anyway
It’s sad that the Overwatch community is even half-heartedly anticipating this delayed event. Because the event will literally be nothing at all.
For the past few years, Blizzard has all-but abandoned new content in Overwatch under the guise of working on Overwatch 2, a game that’s been delayed over and over and over yet has not really announced anything extremely revolutionary that makes the game even necessary.
After Echo, Overwatch has basically been brushed off by Blizzard. They reused the same events year after year, forcing us to endure Lucio Ball over and over and over for their own sick enjoyment, re-releasing skins that they’ve already re-released countless times. Instead of actual new content, like game modes or maps or lore, Blizzard would give us “events” that consisted of players having to win arcade modes (not new ones) a certain amount of times to unlock a very underwhelming skin.
That’s really all Overwatch has been given for years: Meh skins.
Winter Wonderland will just be more Christmas skins that are half-assed and uninspired. I’m surprised players even care. Look at this Ashe skin. It looks nice, sure, but is this really an exciting event? Unlocking this skin as almost the entirety of an event? Really?
Of course, there are a lot of reasons that Blizzard doesn’t have the capacity or interest in creating Overwatch events. The company is in quite a bit of trouble, facing an ongoing gender discrimination lawsuit and dozens of employee accusations pointing at abuse, racism, stolen breast milk, and mistreatment. There have been employee walkouts multiple times and executives leaving the company almost every month.
It’s clearly a tough time for Blizzard.
The delay of Winter Wonderland is understandable. But Blizzard hasn’t cared about Overwatch for a very, very long time — before all of the allegations. This has only made it worse.
While the Winter Wonderland event is said to already be available as a pre-release download with an official release date of December 16, there is still no official tweet about this. There are no tweets about the skin, no tweets about the community, the game, the lore, the heroes, the event, the sequel… Nothing.
But even if there wasn’t a strike, would there be anything worthwhile to tweet?
An art book? Is that all you have?
The truth is, there would be nothing impactful or meaningful to tweet. Just fluff. But they can’t even be bothered with that. The game has nothing new or exciting to offer players. The team has no passion for talking with the community about the game.
It’s just clear that nobody cares — so why should we?
