What Happened To Omega Strikers?

imagine this a 3v3 soccer game like Mario Strikers with abilities like League of Legends a game developed by ex Riot employees that featured crossplay across all platforms and was put on a pedestal by some of the biggest streamers in the world oh what a beautiful team play boys but despite this foot brawler being polished wellmade and fun across the board it was dead in the water less than 1 month after its release this is the story of A game that fell apart despite ticking basically every box of a successful title this is Omega Strikers Omega Strikers is a free-to-play action sports game developed and published by Odyssey interactive a new studio started by four former leads at Riot games the game has teams of three players each playing a character with their own unique abilities who fight against each other while attempting to score as many goals as possible people call Omega Strikers in like this sort of like short Snappy version like rocket League of Legends right it's a it's kind of a sports like chaotic mesque 3 versus three uh brawling game it's got elements of air hockey just you know where the sports comes in and kind of just the fast pace knock them around you know beat him up type of type of gameplay and then it's got you know like ability based uh character gameplay and uh that type of thing the game first became playable on Steam through a closed beta on September 16th 2022 and entered open Beta shortly afterwards right off the bat the game was met with praise because it was easy to pick up but also its distinct and fun gameplay which featured a unique roster of characters we really just focused on trying to take those best lessons from something like OverWatch something like my hero and mix them together to create really like a vision for competition in the game that would be more we use the term like hopeful and energetic were like the two key words throughout our development and that was really you know to reflect the nature of the game like when we played Omega Strikers that's how we felt and so we wanted to develop a world that complemented that with such a great first impression it felt like the game was set up for success to make sure you could play with your friends anytime and anywhere the game was set to release on all consoles as well as mobile devices which the game was built specifically for I think like in the west we've seen a lot of games in recent years in the recent isn't thinking of like when we started the studio in 2020 like you know pubg mobile Call of Duty mobile fortnite like had become some of the largest games in the world because of the mobile platform and uh yeah I think for us it was like let's not let's not put the blinders on and forget that Mobile's a platform that like real gaming happens on to help build up hype and excitement for the game Odyssey interactive announced a Creator versus event where players could rep their favorite content creators and earn points for their team by playing and winning games there's only one person to be worried about and it's Shaka everybody else is an NF non factor in this equation at stake for the creators was an in-game skin based on them as well as well as a percentage of the game's revenue for Content creators that came in the top three for the first season in the end the event was overwhelmingly won by moist Critical with raiken and Lily Pichu coming in second and third thanks to the amazing initial response to the game as well as the success of the Creator versus event Omega Strikers was able to hit a peak of 19,200 and 36 players while averaging 10,000 players throughout the first month of the open Beta however despite the Fantastic start there were a few issues that began to creep up the biggest being player retention which saw steep drops in the game's player base in the following months Odyssey themselves addressed this in a blog post disclosing their plans leading up to the official launch of the game there they highlighted two main goals the first was to increase variety from game to game every match should feel fresh and interesting always with something new to learn or experience second was to add appreciable momentto moment depth to the gameplay matches should not simply come down to who's better at winning strike wars in the same post it was announced that the game would end its open beta and go offline in January to focus on its official release in February however the game was ambitious and planned to launch on every single console so Odyssey pushed back the official launch 2 months to sometime in April promising that the weight would be worth it by showcasing some of the upcoming features such as map hazards and character Buffs finally on February 8th fans got their next big update through a Nintendo Direct duke it out in this free-to-play online multiplayer Showdown revealed within was the game's launch date releasing on all platforms April 27th along with some more changes and additions to the game that were detailed through a blog post Omega Strikers it's a game anime air hockey yeah basically throughout the leadup to its official release a continued to drive home the point that they were doing everything in their power to make players want to come back and keep playing the game to help build the hype Odyssey announced that they would be running the Creator versus event once again and that they would be working with Studio trigger the animation team behind kill aill cyber Punk Ed Runners and other amazing animes to create a music video to promote the official release of the game through a member of the team had a contact at trigger I hit him up and I was like hey we would like to work with you guys in the future I thought that it was really low probability that anything ever comes this but I'm like you know what it's like our favorite Anime Studio it'd be a dream to work with them we think the IP is a perfect fit for their style and then at one point he was just like you know what everyone at triggers played the game they love it we're in with all the marketing and the return of the Creator versus event Omega Strikers officially released on April 27th on all platforms and hit a peak just shy of 14,000 players on Steam throughout its first month it averaged around 7,000 players which is pretty good unfortunately that 7,000 turned to 3,000 and then less than 1,000 pretty quickly and by November 3rd barely 6 months after the game's initial release Odyssey interactive announced that they would be moving away from Omega Strikers and shifting their focus to a new game by the end of the year the full Odyssey team is pivoting to work on new games set in the Omega Strikers Universe after shipping our next update we'll stop making new content updates for Omega Strikers so what went wrong How could a game that was universally praised and super fun struggle to grow and maintain a player base well one of the big issues the game faced was one of perception although the gameplay was unique it still Drew comparisons to other games and genres such as League of Legends and DOTA in the mobile genre this was due in part to its isometric camera perspective and similar control layout which unfortunately did more harm than it did good for the game but the fact that it shares those conventions I think people do immediately look at it and go Boba right and and so there's like um there there's definitely a bit of a learning there and uh we'll probably apply that to Future stuff I'm thinking about like um why do people feel that way about you know that camera and this type of thing um when they don't like you know look at a first person camera and go like shoot her like in like a sort of a bad way right like a second nature to us as kind of developers from Riot who grew up in the League of Legends and you know even before that RTS like Starcraft era that isometric is an angle that works and there's all these cool things that you can do with it but it does have one really big Challenge and it's marketability and the word MOA just has a abs abolute stench on it like people people turn away from it so you know we tried out different descriptions for the game and we didn't want to call it them but we were like let's try it and anytime we use that language the interest in the you know would just plummeted uh that word smells like uh you know Cheeto dust I think it's a little stale uh and it has a bunch of like very specific associations that wouldn't even be accurate for our game right like there's no laning and minions and powers and all this stuff ort of thing in addition many criticized the game for feeling too competitive which was Amplified by the fact that the game lacked a proper tutorial to help players understand the mechanics and the objectives the decision to launch on all platforms also created constraints for the game itself as it meant that Omega Strikers had to be playable on mobile devices and function just as well as the console versions when we started designing the game we basically said let's design it to work on mobile and we did and I thought we made an awesome mobile game but then down the road having made that decision when we wanted to make changes to make the game deeper or you know more replayable on PC or console which we found to be the primary platforms that people were playing Omega Strikers on so many of those initial decisions that we made to work on mobile then put us in a corner where we couldn't do the right things for console or for uh PC later right and so I think like the biggest the biggest lesson to me from that uh for you know really anybody probably starting any kind of project the game development especially is like just be we had to be more selective about where we wanted to be successful we had support you know from the Publishers the platform holders particularly Nintendo was just so great to us but when it came to spending what budget we had you know we were spread pretty thin so I I think yeah if we'd been able to kind of focus our energy on on fewer places that that would have helped I don't know if it would have been the Difference Maker but it's it's one of those things where you think boy this could have been easier for sure despite the huge undertaking of trying to Market a game across multiple platforms and pretty limited resources to back it up it's easy to say that Odyssey didn't stand a chance at all from the start but they did make the most of what they had and created some great content through their creator versus event and the collaboration with Studio trigger I think we did about as well as you could possibly do as an indie developer with our marketing like from what we were able to do with content creators where we basically created an event that was like so wild and out there and created like so many interesting narratives like you know moist coming to take on the whole country of Brazil like that's the kind of thing that I think like we did something there that was like beneficial for us but also beneficial for the content creators in a lot of ways because they could create stories and it engaged their communities in like these fun and interesting ways and like I I think we did quite a good job with that we did a really good job with the stuff that we did with trigger like that as a dream come true for us in so many ways that it's like you know impossible to describe it really and I think that at the end of the day the challenge just ended up being that we had a product that wasn't quite ready for whatever reason for the market unfortunately Omega Strikers never lived up to the hype and what looked like the next big potential thing in Esports fell to the Wayside but the game's not dead yet it still receives the occasional update and still regularly has around 500 people playing it so if you want to try Omega Strikers out for yourself you can still download it on well any platform of your choosing still Odyssey interactive has made the decision to move its resources onto a new game taking away many lessons and positives from their time working on Omega Strikers despite you know the shortcomings that we may have had I don't think that anyone feels like we you know for lack of a better like half asked it like when we look at the response from our community like every single patch that we put out when we like read the feedback from people in the Discord people are impassioned people people feel like we cared as a Dev team because we do care because like we're Gamers ourself and we didn't get in here to like make a quick Buck we got in here because we want to make amazing experiences and I think like you can feel that from the game design to the character design to like every element of our marketing like it it I think for me one of the biggest things that I think we should be proud of is like that kind of expression of authenticity kind of across the experience I I I think we're just trying to take all of those lessons that we've learned with the mega Strikers from development to marketing basically all over the shop and make sure that like we're able to give something to players next time around that's got longer legs for the future because for us as a studio like Omega Striker taught us so many great things and hopefully provides us with a lot of great things for the future like the characters but we have to do better in a lot of ways as a developer I'm like optimistic that we could do it like I think if anyone's got a shot it's us you know that's a that's a big Challenge and it's something that we'll be we'll be working on and trying to prove for the course of the next probably two to three years I think right now there there's a community of people that built up around this game that believe in us and that are going to be with us you know on the journey to the next one and I hope we can keep them I hope we can you know if if anybody hears about Odyssey through this video you know and they're interested in what we're doing like you know come along for the ride cuz at some point we got some stuff cooking all right we we were play testing today for like a couple hours and it was pretty fun I'm not going to say anything else but there will be play tests right I mean we're making more games so I hope that people come along for the ride and that we keep this kind of positive we'll keep it real with you you know we'll we'll make a we'll make the best game we can and hope we make something that people love hey if you enjoy videos like this one make sure to subscribe and ring the bell to stay up to date thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video and want to learn about another foot brawler check out our video about the Esports scene for Super Mario Strikers which you can find in the description we hope you enjoyed see you next time shouts out to Cloud Steph be pass shampoo and yii for being patrons of the channel if you enjoyed this video leaving a like subscribing and hitting the Bell to stay up to date is much appreciated my name is Jonah thanks for watching

Channel: Akshon Esports

Views: 146,529

Keywords: akshon, akshon esports, esports, gaming, video games, omega strikers, what happened to omega strikers, omega strikers update, moba, sport game, penguinz0, football video game, playstation, nintendo switch, xbox, Fighting game, Sports video game, mario strikers, league of legends, alpharad, dyrus, hafu, IKeepItTaco, LilyPichu, riot games, video game developer, moist charlie, studio trigger, sports video game, free-to-play, fighting game, lilypichu

Id: 6blfDQzmIoQ

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024