TF2 was multiplatform on release, actually, unless you were calling it unplayable as in badly ported?
Nvm,
this lists out the differences, apparently the game was abandoned on consoles in 2009, which makes sense since some really important stuff like community weapons (almost all non-stock weapons are community made) seems like an annoyance to deal with rights and updates wise in the console. So probably just unplayable.
Also Overwatch is pretty good but the TF2 thing seems like a big red herring to me. TF2's way more of what I call arcadey, while Overwatch is more of what I call RPGey. TF2's also a lot more twitchy in the old quake way (of which the original TF was a mod). It's an arena shooter at heart.
Overwatch matches are way longer by design and I've seen players who aren't even that good have incredibly high survivability. It's a lot more like a MOBA than a competitive MP co-op shooter. There are TF2 classes in there too, but they're not really balanced in much the same way. In TF2, loadouts are a function of a class, so any balancing done to a single loadout will have to be placed in context with not just the meta of the full game with the 8 other classes, but with each of the atleast 3 other loadout options for that slot, counting also the synergies with the other two slots that class has. It's a difficult and time consuming task that's almost impossible to do without people screaming for your head. Take for instance the pyro weapon called the Phlogstinator: (spoilered for length)
It's a loadout for the pyro that eliminates his role as a support character (normally pyros can put out flames, reflect all projectiles (including arrows, which is fucking epic when you do it)). It quickly built up a reputation for being a weapon with a non-existent skill ceiling, and people who played Phlog pyro were often considered noobs who didn't know any better. Part of this is that reflects are a pyro's main line of defense against a very large array of things intended to hurt him, and the phlog didn't /have/ an airblast to reflect with. Another feature of the Phlog is that the more damage it does, the more a meter is filled up, which, when activated, gives you crits for 10-15 seconds and refills your health to full. It's a point at which Valve replaced one form of high skill survivability skill (reflects) with a low skill one (causing damage as pyro giving you a heal).
This then had to be balanced for the upcoming rollout of the competitive mode.
December 17, 2015 Patch (Tough Break Update)
The base Flamethrower's damage fall off over distance has been decreased, resulting in higher damage output at range.
Changed attributes:
Removed 10% damage penalty.
When activating 'MMMPH', the taunting Pyro gains temporary invulnerability and immunity to knockback effects
January 20, 2016 Patch
Changed attributes:
No longer restores player to max health on MMMPH activate.
Increased amount of damage required to fill MMMPH meter to 300 from 225.
The first change didn't really affect /anything/ in the meta (because pyros are outclassed in pure damage by every other class) and people screamed that Valve made a shitty unbalanced weapon overpowered. The second one makes the Phlogstinator impossible to actually use. Since the survivability feature the original had, which healed you to full health for doing low-mid range damage to people, was removed. Meaning the Phlog gameplay is now both "Chase after and kill as many people as you can" and "take care of your health, you're not getting it back". But the first one was an issue because the phlog's meter builds with /any/ damage. Including spamming with a shotgun or a flaregun (pyro secondaries). In fact, three of the secondaries can inflict afterburn status on enemies, farming damage for the pyro. The second attempts to solve this by making secondary damage even /more/ valuable to pyros, which means Valve is training pyros to be good at flaregunning. It removes the health increase so that pyros don't try to inflict too much primary damage in the first place. They're trying to make the Phlogstinator the 'real' secondary, because it will only come out when the mmph meter is full now.
I think Overwatch won't have such problems because it doesn't have mixed loadouts. Each class is its own independently balanced thing. It's a completely different focus than TF2's system. The only things you have to worry about synergizing with are
other players.
I expect the end result between Overwatch and TF2 being the same as between LoL/DotA and HotS. Blizzard is going to make a game that's attractive to a new-ish audience that wasn't really the core of the already existing game's player base. HotS didn't kill or even affect LoL, Overwatch is going to do nothing to or against TF2. The people it's aiming to pick up are the people who don't already like TF2. Just like Heroes wants the MOBA players who don't want to play MOBAs. People who aren't interested in the grind that mobas usually have, as evidenced by HotS' streamlined gameplay. And as far as I can see, from the drop system to the making learned TF2 skills actual activatable skills to making seperate loadouts in TF2 their own classes in overwatch (Widowmaker and Hanzo are simply regular sniper and huntsman sniper with some fresh skills, Bastion and Zarya are different takes on Heavy, Tracer is a BFB scout with a grenade ultimate while Reaper is a Bonk scout with his invuln mode, Torbjorn is a regular/frontier-justice engi while symmetra is a turned-up-to-eleven gunslinger+wrangler-engi, Junkrat is a regular Demo and Reinhart is a Demoknight), it looks like Blizzard is streamlining TF2, much like HotS streamlines MOBAs.
Usually marketers assume game genres appeal to people instead of the games themselves, which results in the thousands of games trying to do WoW 'better'. But the reality is that a lot of games are their own genre. I think Blizzard understands this pretty well, since
it's not trying to REPLACE TF2.
Blizzard are confident that there’s enough difference between the two; so much so that Overwatch will have it’s own niche in the market. (emphasis mine)
“[Team Fortress 2] is one of my favourite games of all time” said Overwatch's game director, Jeff Kaplan. “But we’re going in a different design direction than they are.”
The comments came in answer to a fan's question during at Blizzcon.
“If people want to compare Overwatch to Team Fortress 2, we would take that as the world’s greatest compliment," said Kaplan. “We love that game; it’s probably one of my favourite games of all time. Those guys are geniuses; that guy, Robin Walker, up at Valve - I had the honor of meeting him.
“I think though that as you start to play the game, you realise the differences there are to Team Fortress 2. Sure, there are some similarities in the team-based objectives, but already at this show we have twelve heroes here. Team Fortress 2 does something very different. They have nine roles that can be customised; your Demoman could be suddenly charging you with a sword. But we’re going in a different design direction than they are.”
It's a phenomenon mentioned by Steamspy in his article
here and Blizzard would most likely be aware of this, since it's their game he's talking about.
World of Warcraft market
A good example here would be the success of World of Warcraft that, as analysts explained to us ten years ago, has “vastly expanded MMORPG market beyond all expectations”.
Except it didn’t. It created a new market, World of Warcraft market, gathered new audience from other games in different genres, attracted quite a few people that haven’t played before, but haven’t expanded MMORPG market much. There were no big successful MMORPGs after World of Warcraft not because WoW took all the audience, but because there were never too many people in “MMORPG but not World of Warcraft” market to begin with.
I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague “MMORPG crowd”, “MOBA crowd” you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.