Well, here I am, proud recipient of the “Fell for It Again” award. Just days after we published my hopeful wishlist of future character additions for Overwatch Stadium, Blizzard announced it is ending development on new characters and maps for the mode, effectively killing it. Once again, my optimism has been revealed as foolishness.

Make no mistake: This is the end of Stadium. People are not going to stick around for a mode with a stale meta and no hopes of future content. So let’s talk a look at how we got here and how Blizzard’s lack of conviction for its own product killed a great game mode.

The news was rather quietly sneaked into a dev diary covering a range of topics, including the player counts for various modes. It shows Stadium with a very small percentage of the overall population.

It’s worth noting that because of the wonky way numbers are displayed, we still don’t know the exact number of people who are playing Stadium. Certainly something is hinky because these numbers would seem to indicate Stadium quick play and competitive are equally popular, but that can’t be true as competitive queues are orders of magnitude longer than they are for quick play. I also want to say that Overwatch is such a big game that even a small portion of its community is a playerbase a lot of developers would probably be very happy with.

Still, whatever the exact number is, it’s clearly very low compared to mainline modes, so in that sense the end of support isn’t surprising. But what this doesn’t illustrate is why the numbers are so low. We know that in its first week after launch, roughly half of all time spent playing Overwatch was spent in Stadium. A lot of people were interested in the idea of the mode; they just didn’t stick around.

It’s not hard to find potential explanations for this. I’ve always been a fan of Stadium, but it’s always had issues. Balance is a problem, for one. Not just between heroes, but also between builds, with many characters having only one viable build. This was forgivable when Stadium first launched, but by and large these problems were just left to fester for months.

The issue of fliers comes to mind. Stadium managed to cram in pretty much every flying hero… and also most of the heroes that have no realistic way of fighting flyers. The devs tried to address this by adding anti-flyer items, but these just boost your damage against them, so all they do is make the characters that were already good against flyers even better, while doing nothing to help the characters who can’t reliably hit airborne targets.

About half the characters I play regularly are flyers, and the other half are mostly characters that struggle against flyers, so I can really see both sides of this, and it’s not a good situation for either side. If I’m playing Pharah, a competent Soldier: 76 can pretty much invalidate my existence, but if I’m against a Reinhardt/Mei/Vendetta/Mercy/Brigitte team, I might as well have god mode cheats.

This shouldn’t have been an unsolvable problem. Add a gadget that lets us grapple hook flyers down to the ground. Add more anti-flyer powers. There are ways to balance this. The team just… didn’t.

I think we pretty much all agree that splitting the game into competitive and quick play queues was a mistake. People disagree on which should have been the One True Stadium — I say quick play, some say competitive — but Blizzard definitely needed to pick a lane. That’s a broader philosophical issue with Stadium; the devs never decided whether it should be a casual-focused or competitive mode, and both sides suffered for it. Myself, I firmly believe Stadium was not made for serious competition and should have leaned into its wackiness and creativity.

There’s also the limited hero roster. One of the most common reason I’ve seen people give for not playing Stadium is that their main wasn’t in yet. This is a problem that only got worse over time as the new hero release slowed to an absolute crawl even as the cadence for new hero releases in the main game mode accelerated. Of course people are going to neglect Stadium when vanilla Overwatch is getting all the new toys.

Now, you’ll probably point out that the reduced hero cadence was likely a response to already low player numbers, and you’re probably right, but it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see that’s just creating a vicious cycle that will drive even more people away.

The choice of which heroes to add was also often baffling. Everyone was begging for Symmetra for the entire life of the game mode, but we get Jetpack Cat instead? Why?

Then there’s the bugs. Almost every new Stadium patch came with game-breaking bugs, and often it was the same kind of bugs. How many times did Gloomgauntlet not work on the newest hero?

But by far the biggest complaint I’ve seen from non-Stadium players is that they found the build system simply too overwhelming. Personally, I think people got in their own heads a bit and made it seem more daunting than it really is. Mindlessly clicking through the example builds is generally good enough, at least when starting out.

But I can’t really blame people for looking at the sheer variety of options and getting overwhelmed, and Blizzard never really made a serious effort to address this. The devs tweaked the armoury a little, added some recommendation pop-ups that appeared inconsistently and in my view just made things more overwhelming, but that’s about it.

It might be a bit of a controversial take, but I’ve been thinking for a while that Stadium just has way too many items. We have three different anti-CC items, one at each rarity, but none of them work the same way. That’s just needlessly complicated.

The way items were organized was also often confusing. Why on Earth is the item that destroys enemy overhealth under survival? I think there should have been a fourth category for that kind of niche counterpick item.

If it were me, I think the team should have drastically reduced the number of items. There should be one item to boost each stat, a couple hybrid items, some counterpick items, and that’s it. I shouldn’t have to choose between six different options if I want more armour. I also think they should have done away with there being separate items at each rarity; you should have bought items at uncommon and then upgraded them to higher rarities for better stats as the match progresses.

That’s my idea, anyway. You might have a completely separate idea for what Stadium should have done to turn itself around. Would my idea have worked? Would yours? Would anyone’s? I don’t know, but the point is Blizzard didn’t even try. It just gave up the moment it became clear Stadium wasn’t going to be an instant mega-hit. “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”

And here’s where I start to get really angry because we’ve seen this script play out before. This is exactly what happened with PvE and story missions. When the devs’ original plan for PvE didn’t prove viable, they could have downscaled their ambitions. They could have pivoted to a more realistic approach. They could just delivered some simple horde mode missions or the like. They could have done so many things. But instead, the studio – or whoever is calling the shots at the studio – gave up, just like it’s giving up on Stadium now.

I can’t get over what a breathtaking waste of time, energy, money, resources, and creativity this is. It’s like watching the Eric Andre “Who Killed Hannibal” meme play out in real time. I remember hearing that Stadium has been planned since before the now-abandoned Overwatch 2 rebrand, and Blizzard gave up on it after fifteen months, without ever making a serious effort to address its problems or broaden its appeal. This is one of the most wasteful things I’ve ever seen a game developer do, and in the current climate of random mass layoffs, that’s saying a lot.

I’m mad at Blizzard, but frankly I’m more mad at myself. I saw how the studio treated PvE, and I still let myself believe that this time would be different.

Twice now I’ve let myself believe Blizzard was opening the door to people like me who struggle with competitive shooters. Twice now I’ve believed Overwatch was entering a new and more casual-friendly era. Twice now I’ve evangelized in my columns and gushed to my friends about something Blizzard had already lost faith in. Twice now I’ve poured my time, money, love, and passion into game modes that I cared about far more than Blizzard ever did. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I’m not making the switch to regular Overwatch. I’ve tried it, and I just can’t compete without the third person camera. It’s too overwhelming for me. I want to be very clear on this point: Stadium wasn’t just a different game mode. It was, at least for me, a crucial accessibility tool whose third person camera and ability builds made the game playable for me despite my disability.

Beyond that, vanilla Overwatch just isn’t that fun to me. I don’t like not seeing my skins, the characters feel like pale shadows of themselves without Stadium powers, I can’t take playing the same two or three escort maps every game, and I hate hero swapping. I just want to play the hero I like, not memorize all the counters and keep changing according to what the enemy team is doing.

I’ve always loved the Overwatch universe. I love its art design. I love its characters. And more than anything I love its dream of an optimistic future where everyone can feel welcome.

But the reality of the game has never lived up to that potential. It’s a sweaty, competitive game with a toxic community and no room for those of us with slower reflexes. There’s so much more Blizzard could have done with this universe — other games, other modes — but every time the studio has tried to make something that could open the door to players like me, it’s just quit the moment it doesn’t turn into an instant money printer.

Overwatch might be a commercial success, but it’s an artistic failure, and you may laugh, but I still believe games should be about more than just making money. Overwatch had every opportunity to be so much more than it is, but Blizzard’s top management just doesn’t care enough.

Overwatch is a universe about how everyone can belong and how you should always pick yourself up and keep trying after every defeat. I’ve always believed in that dream, but it’s clear now that the decision-makers at Blizzard don’t.

The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.