No, Marvel Rivals isn’t the reason you’re getting Overwatch 2 Stadium mode

Overwatch 2 Stadium features fresh abilities and third-person support, but it's not the panicked reaction to Marvel Rivals many claim it is.

Marvel Rivals has been flying high ever since it launched at the end of last year, climbing to the top of the pile when it comes to hero shooters. In a few days, Overwatch 2 will release its new Stadium mode, one of the most radical and experimental things Blizzard has ever done with its FPS game, and many are claiming that such innovation and effort has only arrived due to the pressure applied by Marvel Rivals. While I can see why some are coming to that conclusion, it appears to be pretty far from the truth. In actuality, Stadium has been in the works for a long time, and one of its key components has been stashed away in Blizzard’s back pocket for many, many years.

With its fast-paced, condensed matches and best-of-seven format, Stadium aims to breathe some new life into Overwatch 2. Even though it has a smaller pool of heroes, they each come with revamped kits tailored specifically for Stadium, and between rounds Items can be bought to enhance them further. It’ll even support a third-person perspective. There’s been a lot of talk recently, and even some hard data, about how Marvel Rivals’ enormous success has eaten away at Overwatch 2’s player base, but this refreshing new experience could well see a resurgence for Blizzard’s FPS game.

While Marvel Rivals’ recent dominance is no secret, I have been a bit confused by the accusations of Stadium being some kind of panicked reaction from Blizzard. I get that the inclusion of third-person, in particular, looks like it is directly squaring up to Marvel Rivals. But Stadium is an extremely deep mode with lots of reworked hero abilities, a huge array of bespoke Items, custom maps, and more. To have pulled all of this off in the four-and-a-bit months that Marvel Rivals has been around, or even in the nine months or so since the game’s first major beta, seems implausible.

Speaking in a developer roundtable, attended by PCGamesN, senior game designer Dylan Snyder confirms that he’s been working on Stadium for “just about two years” and says that the concept for the mode has been around for a long while.

“In some form or another, Stadium has been in discussion and ideation since before Overwatch 2 launched,” Snyder says. The current version of Overwatch was released in early access in October 2022 and fully launched in August 2023. “We’ve always wanted to tackle ‘what is that next big core mode?’ What can that bring to the table and let us do that we can’t do otherwise.”

He adds that while development began with a small and “scrappy” team of devs, there’s been “a core group super focused on this [Stadium] for a while now.”

As was regularly alluded to in the roundtable by Snyder, as well as game director Aaron Keller, third-person support also isn’t something that’s been recently developed solely for Stadium. Even in the core, first-person Overwatch experience there are some characters whose abilities force a brief perspective change to third-person, such as Reinhardt and Wrecking Ball. Blizzard apparently toyed with the idea of doing more with third-person as far back as the early Overwatch 1 days, but never found the right opportunity – until Stadium, that is.

Blizzard will absolutely be wishing that Stadium reverses the trend of players leaving for Marvel Rivals, something recently shown with some cold, hard stats in a report by NewZoo. However, if you’re one of those saying that Stadium only exists because of the pressure exerted by Marvel Rivals, consider that myth busted.

Stadium mode arrives in Overwatch 2 with the start of Season 16 on Tuesday, April 22.

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