Skip to content
Gamenator
Search

Battleborn, Overwatch and the name “hero shooter”

Where did the term hero shooter come from? 2K's 2014 Battleborn pitch, Overwatch three weeks later, Team Fortress 2's role, and Concord and Marvel Rivals.

  • Published
  • 5 min read
Pencil-sketch portraits of Randy Pitchford of Gearbox (left) and Jeff Kaplan of Blizzard (right), both wearing headsets during streamed interviews

On 8 July 2014 Gearbox Software, the studio behind Borderlands, revealed its next game, Battleborn. GamesBeat asked its publisher, 2K, whether it was a MOBA, the genre of League of Legends and Dota 2. 2K answered the same day: “Battleborn is not a MOBA, in fact it’s far from it. As the term hero-shooter implies, Battleborn is first and foremost a first-person shooter.”

That is the earliest use of “hero shooter” we could find. Wikipedia dates the term to September 2014, two months later. Either way, 2K’s marketing line went on to outlive the game it was made for.

Why “hero”

The 2K spokesperson explained the word too. Battleborn was “heavily inspired by lots of genres, not least of which are character-centric games like the ones you mentioned, as well as fighting games, hence the ‘hero’ in hero-shooter.”

By September, USA Today was writing that Gearbox hoped to “carve out a new category in the overcrowded FPS genre”. Randy Pitchford, Gearbox’s boss, later explained to Game Developer why the label stuck inside the studio: “If you go back to what got us into Battleborn, it was all about the playable heroes. ‘Hero shooter’ was really easy to say, and said so much about what our priorities are, that we just started using that as our way to talk about this game.”

He also remembered feeling alone: “When we started on Battleborn, there wasn’t anyone else doing anything like this. And we thought we might be insane.”

Then Blizzard showed up

Four months after Battleborn’s reveal, on 7 November 2014, Blizzard announced Overwatch at BlizzCon. USA Today called it “a hero-driven shooter”. Blizzard’s chief executive Mike Morhaime said the goal was “an awesome FPS experience that’s more accessible to a much wider audience”.

Overwatch had a history of its own. It grew out of Titan, a cancelled Blizzard project that had classes, not heroes. Game director Jeff Kaplan described the change on Reddit in 2017: “When we simplified for OW, we chose only the abilities that worked well together and then created a HERO rather than a class.” Titan’s Jumper class became Tracer. “Tracer had a personality, an origin etc. That’s what made her work.”

Kaplan knew which game everyone would compare Overwatch to: Valve’s Team Fortress 2. So he planned the reveal around it. “I really pushed the team to have 12 heroes and three maps complete,” he said. With nine or fewer heroes, “players and press would map each hero to a TF2 equivalent.” With more, they would see the game was something different. “Also, no hats.”

The game both of them owe

Neither studio pretended to start from nothing. “Team Fortress 2 was a huge influence on Overwatch,” Kaplan told Game Developer in 2016. Pitchford went further: “Team Fortress 2 might have been one of the earliest hero shooters.” TF2 came out in 2007, and PC Gamer argues its comic Meet the Team shorts, which gave each class a face and a voice, “were one of the most influential forces in establishing the hero shooter genre.”

The other ingredient was the MOBA. Kaplan put it this way: “There was this genre of first-person shooter that people love so much, and then there was the MOBA genre, which many of us had fallen in love with at the same time.” His team wondered why nobody had combined them yet. “Nobody’s put the chocolate and the peanut butter together, so to speak.”

Three weeks in May

Battleborn came out on 3 May 2016. Overwatch followed on 24 May. Wikipedia records Blizzard reporting more than seven million Overwatch players within its first week. Kotaku later summed up what happened to Battleborn: Overwatch, “a more straightforward hero shooter with a much bigger marketing budget,” “cannon-balled onto the scene”.

Pitchford wondered aloud in 2017 whether the timing had done the damage. “Maybe Battleborn would have had the same exact audience it had, it just wouldn’t have been compared,” he told IGN. In November 2019, 2K announced that Battleborn’s servers would shut down in January 2021. Kotaku called it a game “destined to go down in history as a high-profile flop”.

Pitchford still claimed the name. “Yes! Battleborn successfully spearheaded the hero-shooter genre,” he tweeted in July 2020. Not everyone agreed; PlayStation LifeStyle answered that Battleborn “spearheaded nothing”.

Everybody’s a hero now

By then the term belonged to everyone. When Hi-Rez opened the beta of Paladins in September 2016, Eurogamer introduced it as “Hi-Rez Studios’ hero shooter” and said its trailer was “clearly meant to blur those differences” with Overwatch. Riot calls Valorant “a 5v5 tactical shooter featuring agents with unique abilities”, which is a hero shooter by another name.

The label also became a warning. Sony’s Concord launched on 23 August 2024. On 3 September Sony announced it would go offline on 6 September, with full refunds. The Verge reported sales estimates under 25,000 and a Steam peak of 697 players. In October PlayStation’s Hermen Hulst told staff “the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio”, and about 210 jobs went with it.

Two months later NetEase’s Marvel Rivals arrived with 33 heroes and, as IGN reported, “10 million players in three days.”

A name that outlived its game

The term 2K coined so Battleborn wouldn’t be mistaken for a MOBA now describes Overwatch, Valorant and Marvel Rivals far more than Battleborn itself. You can see the whole family on our hero shooter page. If you prefer the other big genre of that era, there’s the story of where battle royale came from.

Sources

Checked .

  1. Battleborn is 2K's new 'hero shooter' from Borderlands 2 developer Gearbox Software -- it's not a MOBA [update] — VentureBeat GamesBeat (Internet Archive copy)
  2. Preview: 'Battleborn' introduces the 'hero shooter' — USA Today
  3. Hero Shooters: Charting the (re)birth of a genre — Game Developer (Gamasutra)
  4. Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan traces line from Project Titan to Overwatch — Eurogamer
  5. How Team Fortress 2's silly videos sparked a whole new era of shooters — PC Gamer
  6. Gearbox Boss on Overwatch's Effect on Battleborn — IGN Unfiltered — IGN
  7. Battleborn Is Shutting Down In 2021 — Kotaku
  8. Randy Pitchford Says Battleborn 'Spearheaded' the Hero Shooter Genre — PlayStation LifeStyle
  9. Sony is taking Concord offline on September 6th after disastrous launch — The Verge
  10. Sony is shutting down Concord developer Firewalk Studios — The Verge
  11. Marvel Rivals Is a Smash Hit With 10 Million Players in Just 3 Days — IGN
  12. Overwatch (video game) — Wikipedia
Image credits
On this page
On this page