'There is no secret sauce' to a successful live service game according to Overwatch's associate game director, but knowing your audience is a good start

Not many live service games have stood the test of time quite like Overwatch. 10 years in and it's still been able to retain its playerbase, maintain momentum, and even ramp it up. How, you ask? Well, besides having really cute skins and a very enticing game loop, Team 4 figured out exactly where Overwatch needed to stand years ago.

"Overwatch exists in an incredibly competitive space among live service shooters," Overwatch's game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Some of the biggest games in the world are here."

To have (and crucially, maintain) a successful live service game is the golden goose egg of this industry right now. With publishers like Sony trying to force it upon countless studios before pulling the plug on eight out of 12 projects when things start to go sideways. Even games that manage to land with an eager audience like Arc Raiders can struggle to maintain momentum. But for some, like Overwatch, the live service model has worked, so what's the secret?

"That's a big question," associate game director Alec Dawson says. "I think some of the things we've learned is to shut away fear as much as possible and push beyond, experiment within that experience. But what it really boils down to is coming to work each morning and making good decisions every day. We've lived that over the last two years." But unfortunately for any eager Sony execs reading this, "there's no secret sauce in particular."

"It's incredibly hard to make something that players can interact with every day for years on end," Keller adds. "You can get 95% of the way there, and your game could still die three months after release. It is much, much harder to come up with that initial sort of experience than I think a lot of people give it credit for. But once you've done it, you've kind of just started the race."

Free time and cash are both at a premium for most players, and with so many options available, games studios need to offer up exactly what they're looking for. Because if they don't, someone else will.

"Our players really want novelty and they really want variety, but they want it inside of a competitive framework," Keller explains. "If you look at other games on the market, there's ones that are really just more about the novelty side of the game, and there's other ones that are really just about straight up competition. There's not a lot of change in those games. We occupy this really unique spot in the middle."

Marvel Rivals came the closest to taking Overwatch's spot, but that didn't last long as it cemented itself as a casual game which is more concerned with balancing for fun. Alternatively, Overwatch offers higher skill ceilings and a "sense that your time was worthwhile in the experience," Dawson explains. "That the rules and structure of the sport were fair towards the outcome."

This isn't to say that Team 4 have uncovered the secret to perfect game balancing, I'm not sure that'll ever be possible, but the idea still stands that players should be able to take away some kind of lesson from each game, lessons that'll help form them into a more skilled player. Even if that lesson is to 'don't solo queue at 2 am'.

"There's a design value at Blizzard called control is king," Keller adds. The idea that players want to feel like they're in control of everything their hero does and therefore experience the cool moments that come from that. Overwatch's newest hero Doctrine is "a powerful example of something like that."

Doctrine offers two experiences: a primal and slightly simplistic one in which it feels good to just use his base kit to land shots. Then there's a more nuanced version, which offers players the chance to raise the skill ceiling with his Infuse mechanic.

"It's so satisfying to be holding down Infuse while you're trying to line up your shot, as the beam gets bigger, you get that sound effect, then you pull the trigger, and you see that connection. It's so satisfying. The hero team, and the audio team, the VFX animations, everybody kind of comes together to have that one moment where control really is king. That moment just needs to feel as good and as visceral as possible."

Doctrine is the only hero I've played since the new season came out last week, and I can confirm his kit is just as good as Keller makes it sound. It's a testimony to Team 4 that 54 heroes later they're still able to offer players something that feels unique, specialised, and just a hell of a lot of fun to play.

"One of the Blizzard greats, Chris Metzen, always described our company as a hero factory," Keller says. "This is just what we do, and you can see it in a lot of our other games, from StarCraft to Warcraft to Diablo, just all these characters that are really larger than life. It's what our fans can really throw their passion behind.

"I think that Overwatch really carries that torch forward. We're trying to make these amazing fantasies that people can just jump into and live out. I can't wait for players to see some of the archetypes that are coming next season, and especially Season 1 next year."