“Any third-party application that impedes on the competitive integrity in “Overwatch” is not allowed,” wrote community manager Tom Powers on Blizzard’s forums. “For example, a third-party application that offers users information such as enemy position, enemy health, enemy ability usage, or Ultimate readiness creates an uneven playing field for every other player in the map.”
Beyond vision, though, we might also add Activision-Blizzard’s financial interests. In many ways, the company’s approach to policy for third parties is best understood as game-dependent, which is why we have lots of third-party tools for “World of Warcraft” and relatively few for “Overwatch.” But it’s hard to talk about “Overwatch” without also talking about Overwatch League, a multi-hundred-million-dollar experiment that was carefully designed to look and feel like a traditional sports league in order to entice traditional sports conglomerates.
From this perspective, one way of thinking about Blizzard’s choice to shut Visor and Pursuit down, squandering millions of dollars of seed capital in the process, is as a kind of “correction” to one of the history of sports’ biggest missed opportunities. The sports industry couldn’t manage to hold on to data about their games, and two huge secondary markets – sports analytics and fantasy sports – popped up under their noses, but just out of their reach. Overwatch League is a chance to set the record straight. Blizzard’s rhetoric about third-party apps, in other words, smuggles a material goal (the expansion of markets) within an altruistic one (competitive integrity).