Blizzard removes Tracer pose from Overwatch, causing community backlash

Blizzard’s Overwatch may be set to be the next big thing, but right now a victory pose for one of its characters is causing some major controversy.  Earlier today, a community member posted about one of the poses that the game’s most well known character Tracer can take after winning a match. A parent of a thirteen-year-old, the poster complained about the nature of said pose.

Forum user Fipps said this in the complaint.

“We aren’t looking at a Widowmaker pose here, this isn’t a character who is in part defined by flaunting her sexuality. This pose says to the player base, oh we’ve got all these cool diverse characters, but at any moment we are willing to reduce them to sex symbols to help boost our investment game.”

Fipps also had this to say.

I have a young daughter that everyday when I wake up wants to watch the recall trailer again. She knows who tracer is, and as she grows up, she can grow up alongside these characters.

Overwatch Game Director Jeff Kaplan later replied in the thread saying that the pose would be removed.

“We’ll replace the pose. We want *everyone* to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented. Apologies and we’ll continue to try to do better.”

This action now has players up in arms, as many are upset that Blizzard elected to do this based on the one thread rather than opening it up for community discussion.

Things like this have happened in the past but usually the developer will reach out to the community to get an idea of how the majority feels about whatever is in question. This removal of the pose after a single complaint with little communication with the community has caused a huge uproar that is bringing the masses to bear in the forums.

Photo courtesy Elvine.

A petition has also been started on Reddit in hopes of saving the over the shoulder victory pose.

Blizzard has done a great job at creating strong female characters but this one pose brings into question whether they are trying to boost sales by using sexuality in the character to cater to the male player base.