Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards.

To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their player's concerns, and instead focus on metrics instead of gameplay or fun activities.

People at Blizzard certainly have forgotten that games are supposed to be fun.

They try to cloak their declining userbase by saying they have the highest number of logins ever, but they quit reporting individual subscribers a long time ago. One of them is a completely worthless metric and the other keeps the lights on.

The last of the original WoW dev team quit Blizzard last year, and they are running with a crew that don't have the chops to make engaging games.

Their developer churn is through the roof, having a huge impact on their capability to ship quality which they compensate with shoveling in low effort extrinsic reward content systems.

The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games.

There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained about the slow trickle of balance changes and the casual community has always complained about the lack of new content (maps, events, heroes). The communication was decent at first then fell off a giant cliff. A lot of competitive players and streamers burned out of playing boring and/or frustrating metas (for a year or more) and casual players ultimately got bored.

My theory is (I'm stealing this from someone else) is essentially Activision saw they had a huge player base who paid $60 once and never again. The extremely consumer-positive loot box system (you can get ample loot boxes by just playing the game, and loot boxes avoid giving you items you already have) means that most players didn't need to buy loot boxes; in fact if you played the game a lot (as a potential whale) you didn't need to pay at all for your favorite skins.

Activision saw that after Year 2/Year 3 the revenue growth for OW fell off a cliff and deprioritized people who would have been making new art/content for the game. In order reclaim that revenue those people were then moved to "Overwatch 2" and all new content was focused on that game. However that game has been delayed (again, and again) so now the player base is hemoragging even harder.

I say this as someone who loves the game, and doesn't play any other game. The game might have lasted longer if they followed Riot's model and made it free to play with micro transactions.