Blizzard Stops Adding Heroes and Maps to Overwatch’s Stadium Mode

Overview

• Game director Aaron Keller announced Wednesday that Blizzard will no longer develop new heroes or maps for Stadium and will limit support to seasonal balance updates, rank resets and rewards.
• Blizzard’s usage data show Stadium ranked and unranked each account for about 3% of daily players, a figure that led the studio to reprioritize development resources toward more popular modes.
• Stadium required custom builds and large engineering work for each hero so only 33 heroes were ever added, which means recently released or upcoming characters such as Mizuki, Anran, and the presumed tank D.Mon will not be made playable in the mode.
• Team 4 will reassign the developers who built Stadium to other Overwatch projects and apply lessons from Stadium’s build and perk systems to the core game.
• Players will still be able to play Stadium but should expect a smaller hero and map pool and the potential for further decline in activity as Blizzard focuses on 5v5 role queue and other priorities.