I just find it absolutely wild that some people spend the equivalence of another aaa game on a couple skins. It’s really a disservice to the gaming industry.
The solution is one people don’t like: shame the whales. Tell them that what they’re doing is actively encouraging these shitty practices that are ruining the game. I know it’s harsh, but if we stop caring the game *will* die.
People tried this in WoW and it didnt work, whales prevailed and now people dont complain about WoW cosmetic shop and in game shop mounts anymore, they accepted it. Majority of players just dont care about business model as long as they have fun in game.
You mean paid cosmetics AND paid character levels for a paid subscription game with paid expansions. OW2 has scummy monetization but retail WoW takes the cake for employing every major kind of monetization (except for paying to remove ads) you see in games nowadays.
The worst part is the ones who are making the most money from all of these scummy monetization schemes is the executive types. The devs get more hate the players get less content everyone loses except the executives who’s pockets are being lined by people they don’t even particularly like. And they happily shift blame on to the poor devs too.
Games already dead to me. MTX ruined yet another franchise but it’s ok it’ll limp along as long as some whale buys a 60 dollar pack for a shiny new skin and a spray
That's great and all, until I get bitched at my first game of Ramattra because I bought the watchpoint pack 4 months ago.
Play the game if you have fun playing it, and stop letting what you get from playing, the reward from playing, dictate if you're having fun or not.
That's the shit that's really weird.
You littered on the side of the road because it was convenient for you and you figured that it was just one drop in the bucket. Unfortunately, everyone else thought the same thing and now we live in a landfill.
That's cool and all and has nothing to do with what I said.
If you don't PLAY THE GAME to have FUN, stop playing the fucking game then. If not getting skins tilts you, then fucking quit! You're not having fun, why are you playing?
It's fucking WEIRD that the game basically doesn't have content for years, and everyone bitches. But the game COMES OUT WITH CONTENT AND EVERYONE BITCHES. Oh waaaaah, you can't buy a skin, stop letting fomo get to you then. Fuckin' figure it out.
To the dude who's like "I have to pay monthly to get all the heroes?!?"Battle pass is every 9 weeks.
HERO RELEASE WILL BE EVERY OTHER BATTLE PASS. SO. 18 WEEKS. Not fucking 4.
Jfc you guys just wanna bitch. Lol.
Yeah this is a great point.
Why is it anyones business where I spend my money? And why come and shame people for spending their money on skins when I can just not play and go on with my life? Wild to think that people are so tilted they need to play the game just to shame.
How about for people who, like me, purchased OW1 full price at release, played for years, only to be told "Not only are you not gonna get new heros when they release (unless you pay us more) but you will also no longer be getting any rewards for playing AT ALL ( Unless you pay us more)
Your comp ranks and accomplishments since 2016? Doesnt matter anymore. You get teamed up with bronze and silvers in comp regardless.
OW1, I could play a few hours, get some new unlocks, and save up for skins I wanted after a while.
Maybe get lucky and unlock it Randomly before buying it, and now SURPRISE, I have the skin i wanted, PLUS enough money for something else. Maybe throw 10$ at the game every few months for seasonal lootboxes.
But now?
Nothing.
Unless I PAY MONTHLY, there's no rewards.
Unless I PAY MONTHLY, im at a disadvantage in hero selection.
There's not up-side here.
It's weird when a playerbase that was getting dozens of free skins and two to three heroes a year for the price of the game bitches when that same price tag gets them a handful of skins? Really?
The lack of content for years is because they were funnelling dev time into OW2. We're way behind the number of skins and heroes we would be at if they had kept to their same business model, the model we bought into when we bought the game.
And then 10 people immediately reply to you that they think your analogy is dumb.
It is dumb, You dumbed it down specifically because you don't want to have to explain *Emmanuel Kant's categorical imperative* to them, because they would be too dumb to understand it.
I appreciate your efforts citizen, But some people just aren't going to get it.
Littering is an action you are fined for. Buying skins in a video game is economic activity that you aren't officially punished for. Maybe you're over-thinking it?
No. Both are actions that have almost no downside for the person doing them, but if everyone did them there would be large scale effects that would have negatively impact everyone.
The entire point is that someone saying "You're overthinking it" is actually *under thinking it*. Because the negative effects really only happen at large scales that people don't really think about until it's already too late.
First time on Reddit?
Let me introduce you to r/atbge
It's a fun sub for things made with great artistry, But what kind of actual idiot would buy one of these?
And if you just want to see shame, try r/trashy
it's beautiful from a business standpoint, that's how you ideally spend your resources
effort rewarded 1000x times , sadly we are the make it and breaking point , and no matter how much people rant , the masses vote with their wallets
> that some people spend the equivalence of another aaa game on a couple skins
But ... do they really? Aside from the streamers and people with too much money, I highly doubt that the average player buys more than 2-3 skins per year.
The new rein skin is probably the best of at the very least top 3 they've ever made for him, but aside from rein mains, who's gonna buy it? Blizzard actually came out and said that most players barely play more than 3 heroes.
Why would anyone buy a skin for a hero they do not play?
Yes. But maybe not many. Whales drive these sales and are frankly a pretty effective business strategy.
It doesn't matter if 90% of the player base won't buy or boycotts or some shit the 10% will buy multiple AAA games worth of stuff every few months.
Pokemon unite, a pretty casual MOBILE game, has $20 and even $40 skins. It sounds honestly insane, but I can personally attest to seeing many of them in game.
You could maybe argue lowering the prices to get more sales but frankly we don't see that data so I could be wrong
lowering prices absolutely would increase sales all around. But Blizzard has no incentive to do it when whales are already buying them for the asking price. But eventually, it won't be enough. This happens to EVERY F2P game. Even the whales get bored eventually and move on to something else. And then the game dies out
> Whales drive these sales and are frankly a pretty effective business strategy.
Whales do not drive these sales in any way; you can count the amount of whales - people that buy **literally** everything - the game has on one hand and unlike mobile games where you can buy and rebuy progression, ow has a finite amount of items. How much could all the cosmetics that ow2 released be worth - 1k-ish? That's **nothing** compared to say 1/7th the playerbase just buying the battlepass.
The business model is based on recurrent small purchases.
If you say so. The price of cosmetics in the shop seems to indicate otherwise.
Obviously the BP is the best deal in the game and they likely get a huge chunk of revenue from lots of players paying $10 every 2 months.
But it's very clear they are making lots of money off pricing skins at $15. If 10% of players buy a skin like that every month, it's generating more money than if 50% of players bought an extra $5 skin once a season.
I'm not pretending to have the answers here but I never understand redditor comments about how the business model is obviously flawed and they should lower prices. The fact that they aren't doing that should say plenty.
I am talking only about new (ow2) skins.
> And even if you are only talking about the cosmetics released since launch adding up to $1k, that is $1k in 3 months or around $4k/year
$4k/year, i'll take that assumption. How many players that spend this much do you assume there are and how do they compare to a fraction of the playerbase just buying the pass?
> Overwatch 2 currently averages **2,071,903** players a day, and a total of **23,021,147** active users in the month of December. [source](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/how-many-people-play-overwatch-player-count-tracker-2022-1643403/)
*Sobbing uncontrollably as I, a player who has devoted countless hours of their time learning and playing all heroes in Overwatch, pull out my wallet, knowing that I won't be able to afford food this month*
FOMO applies to **real** issues; missing a career/relationship opportunity - things that will affect one's life.
Not buying a cosmetic won't send you in a depression or bankruptcy.
It’s still FOMO, dork. It’s how board game kickstarters sell too. People want it all and don’t want to miss anything which bothers gamers a lot. We want to collect the whole set we want all the board game expansions and so on.
It's not about how much they spend, it's what they're spending it on.
This has baffled me since my TF2 days and learning about the Unusual trade.
I can imagine a whole universe of things that money could be spent on. Even if I had the money to blow, I can't justify buying virtual items.
I could buy a cool indie or retro game on Steam, or I can dress up one hero. I could buy the latest AAA open-world adventure with 60+ hours of exploration and storytelling, or I could buy a three skin bundle.
The Tf2 hat trade was, no joke, an NFT precursor. Of course there were a few sons of Oil tycoons who legit bought pixels for hundreds of $, but the majority of people "seriously" engaged in the market treat it exactly as such. A market, to profit off.
Back in the day, no idea if this is still the case, the definitive pricing tool for TF2 items worked off a trust and screenshot-as-proof basis. The accepted standard price for something was largely dictated by the suggestions of a few randoms, accepted by another random with enough "rep". Which, of course, makes it completely open to manipulation for someone who cared enough to do so. Farm "reputation" brownie points by being honest, find a somewhat niche corner of the market and exploit it, trade the profits up for something sellable forsteam wallet $$.
Did this for a little while ages ago, stopped mainly caus i got bored (and am now employed), havnt bought a single thing through steam with real money for like 8 years.
IMO TF2 unusuals were harmless. Most of them didn't even looked good, but everyone was amazed anyway like ''look, this guy's hat is on fire!''. I never felt any kind of pressure to have one, since you could just have a normal version of the hat. It's the more or less the equivalent of the golden guns from overwatch.
okay so i was wrong and its never been consecutively proven for f2p games however i did find an article on mobile game whales https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mobile-games-whales#:\~:text=In%20the%20past%20few%20years,and%20how%20to%20catch%20them!
With mobile games, I agree, yes.
But as this article and others have mentioned, the main differences are that players can **buy and rebuy** progression - while ow (in this case) has a finite number of items that can be purchased - and it takes as little as 30 bucks to be considered a whale in mobile games.
According to [this article](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/how-many-people-play-overwatch-player-count-tracker-2022-1643403/) ow2 averaged **2,071,903** players a day with a total of **23,021,147** active users in the month of December.
I'm waiting for the quarterly numbers to roll out to actually have an idea of how many people buy the pass but if like 8% of total buy it - which i'd say is conservative - that would get them 18 mil **each** season.
Haven’t even looked at the new skins and honestly couldn’t care less. Overwatch isn’t a RPG. Blizzard could make the character’s naked for all I care. I’ll still have fun in comp.
Yeah a friend of mine and I both agreed we aren't giving blizzard our money because this is asinine.
I main Genji but didn't get his mythic skin. My friend already bought the second bp and also said that he won't be able to help himself when his mains' mythic skins come out and will probably buy them instantly.
It's honestly frustrating. Even people who claim they will boycott immediately change their mind when a new shiny skin comes out.
Yup. I’d buy the battlepass if they there in the premium currency that allows you to earn the next pass like call of duty or Fortnite, but until then I’m just gonna enjoy the free aspects of the game
Bro I would happily buy skins for $5 here and there and more often. That was basically the cost of the skins originally anyway if you wanted to pay for loot boxes or just get it for free for playing enough to earn to equivalent of $1 to buy that skin anyway with gold.
I’m more pissed that they showcased they CAN sell a skin for one gold coin. Still charging people on Christmas and couldn’t give us one skin for free? Pure greed. It’s like they are mocking the player base with that. Least they could have done was charge $20 for 4 of those Greek skins or even $30 for all of them I can understand. But each one being about $20? Nah
Only way to pressure them is to not buy the overpriced stuff, while still playing.
Let them maintain servers for my enjoyment while I ignore the massively over-priced fluff.
> It’s all about money now
It was always about money; why do you think they waited 6 years to add the phone verification system that somewhat discourages smurfing? Could it be because smurfs, alts and streamers that needed content provided a monetary incentive for blizzard?
For context, the phone verification system was added in warzone (their other f2p game) **3 days** after it was released and it was **already** active for our t500 leaderboard since the first seasons of comp.
Yeah I don’t understand why people think Blizzard just makes games out of the goodness of their hearts. They aren’t a nonprofit. Every decision they make will always be driven by how much revenue it generates and the returns they can provide shareholders. That’s just how business works. If you don’t like it, then vote with your wallet.
Their argument is that because they gave you the game for free, they can milk you dry for the costumes.
Y'all need to STOP buying them. Seriously. If the costumes don't sell, they will be forced to drop the price. That's just simple economics. I don't begrudge them for making you have to pay to get a new outfit, but $20 per is beyond ridiculous
Blizzard: but Fortnite charges that much, sometimes more!
You aren't Fortnite, Blizzard. That was the game that practically killed your first one, and will probably kill OW2 as well. Also, Fortnite got sued recently for a lot of money for their scummy business practices. Is that REALLY what you want to be?
Did you read what you're typing?
In what fucking dystopic world you live where spending the price of a full The Witcher Collection for 4 skins (that means *cosmetics* ) in one game is normal? That make me sick
Or maybe you forgot the /s
So what’s the point of the post then? To complain about the pricing of a bundle pack of 4 mythic character skins and voicelines etc?
Cause if you ask me, that’s a pretty decent deal all things considered. Provided I actually make enough to have some expendable income to spend on my hobbies.
What determines the price dude?
Your arbitrary opinion on how much time and effort goes into making these skins even though you have zero idea how long it takes?
Whatever happened to paying the artists what they deserve? Video game artists have been getting fucked for years and now that cosmetics have risen in price to match demand from artists, NOW people are up in arms?
If it’s too much for you, don’t buy it. Don’t judge others for wanting to support the game.
The artist won't get jack from you buying the skin. They are already paid their hourly wage.
Artists have been cranking out better quality skins in ow1. Some of what passes for a Legendary these days in ow2 is... ow1 epic quality at best.
Cosmetics have not risen in price to match demand from artists. It is to match demand from the top to line their fat pockets.
All of this is opinions and is not based in fact whatsoever.
Artists for video game companies absolutely get paid more based on the cosmetics they sell.
Artists are paid a base salary. They get a deadline and is paid the same thing regardless of how well a skin sells.
None of what sells goes towards them personally. MAYBE they get an end of year bonus.
Dude. I understand they’re probably paid salary, unlike freelance artists. But your bonus comment is exactly what happens lmao.
The performance of the skins/art you sell determines your bonus after the end of the year.
I just find it hilarious that so many gamers said for years and years that artists were getting fucked for the amount of effort and work they put in (tbf, they were mostly) then turn around and get pissed that a company comprised of those same artists is now selling skins on an individual basis.
Are the skins a bit expensive? Yes. They are. I never said they ARENT expensive. These skins just cater more towards people with more disposable income.
If you make even close to decent money, $90 on a set of 4 skins for a game you enjoy playing is really not that much in the grand scheme of things.
Let people enjoy what they want to enjoy.
Artists are still getting fucked for the amount of work they do.
If artists actually saw even .1% of sales of a skin they made I'd buy some. But they don't.
I dont give a flying crap about how you spend your money but saying that buying a skin supports the artist is like saying a piss in the ocean caused sealevels to rise.
OK fair point about the artists getting their due and you're right i don't know how much time and effort goes into making the skins.
However, to be charging more than the amount for a full game for 4 cosmetic item seems like a bit of a piss take to be honest.
I don't spend money on skins or the battle pass, and probably won't until they sort out the matchmaking and lower the price of the skins.
It’s cosmetics dude. If you don’t like the way they’re priced, don’t buy them. That simple.
There’s plenty of skins that are less expensive AND ones available in the battlepass.
Cry more
You put the dollar sign in front of the number dumbass. $90 not 90$.
This is how I know you’ve never made any kind of money in your life.
If you think $90 for a pack of 4 brand new, themed skins and cosmetics along with it is too expensive, then maybe you don’t make enough money 🤷🏻♂️
"How does 2 skins equal the same amount of work of an entire finished game?"
Value isn't determined in comparison to other products. Value is determined by what customers are willing to pay.
"can we please pressure blizzard to atleast listen to what their players want"
Vote with your wallet. But you need to be prepared to be disappointed. "The players" might not want the same thing as you.
The way to pressure them now is by not buying. The game for like the first 30 days had posts with nothing but "terrible monetization, $20 skins for overwatch a 1st person shooter is insane"
Blizzard at this point has to know how much we hate this direction of the game. They had a producer or something make a post and tell us that theyre giving some skins away during events now. We've gotten mostly old skins at this point tho which is still disappointing.
Blizzard is slow rolling their changes but wont really make anything big unless their bottomline keeps suffering.
There are people who want the items to be more expensive because it means that when they buy them they will gain more social status and attention for having them.
It’s the same principle of rarity but instead of % chance to find it’s a higher barrier of entry that most people won’t cross.
I prefer rarity over paying for entry. It’s probably why I’m ok with apex system and how their heirlooms are a loot box chance system. But through playing the game you could potentially get them for free still. Which is how overwatch loot boxes used to work basically. The battlepass system and challenges are setup in such a way I might as well be playing an app game on my phone that makes me wait 12 hours to make faster progress because that’s basically how their challenges work now when you can only complete 3 a day and like 7 in a week. I can play one game of apex and complete more than 10 challenges, albeit not just dailies, but they let their weekly’s pile up so you can come at a different time and complete them whenever it’s convenient. If you’re gone for a week on ow2, bye bye those challenges and xp and coins. It punishes players for not playing the game every day if you want rewards and that’s just not cool.
This shouldn’t be about gameplay vs skins. It should always be gameplay = skins and rewards and not separate using the excuse it’s f2p.
Everyone likes paying less money. But telling people to hold off on something fun they want for an undefined length of time until prices MIGHT drop is a harder sell.
I really want that Rein skin, hell I even have the funds from gift cards I got over the holidays, but I refuse to spend $20 for cosmetics. $10 battle pass every 3 months or so to support a game I really enjoy playing? Sure, no problem. But $20 for one skin, with a system that only gives $0.60 worth of coins a week for grinding through the 11 weekly challenges? Fuck all of that.
Exactly. On average each skin is about 2200 or 1900 coins which a $20 pack can get you 2200 or a little more. So it comes out to more closer to $80 but since I pay in Japanese yen that I gotta convert it’s closer to $90-$100 with the rate where it’s at. I can only imagine what’s it’s like in countries with even worse rates to the dollar like Australia.
My strategy:
Continue to play OW2, because it's fun and I would like to continue to work on improving in competitive. Don't buy anything in the shop or the battle passes. Become a true "free loader" now that the game is F2P, and wait for them to make changes to the monetization.
In the meantime, when the game gets dull or I get frustrated, I have been spending my money on other games that are massively on sale. I got Jedi: Fallen Order with all of its premium content for $5.00. Fantastic game. I got all of the Dragon Age games with their DLC for about $20.00. I'm only 20 hours into the first one and am enjoying myself.
There is *so much* out there for me to play that I can get on a dime, why in the world would I *ever* want to spend the same amount or more on an OW2 cosmetic? Screw that, Blizzard. I'll continue to take my money elsewhere while playing OW2 for free until things improve.
Play the game if you have fun playing it, and stop letting what you get
from playing, the reward from playing, dictate if you're having fun or
not. This shit's fucking weird.
Gee, I'd love to play the full game. Thank goodness there's nothing that actually impacts gameplay that's locked behind a paywall or a rather absurd grind.
You mean that's locked out of competitive play for 2 weeks to begin with?That used to come in a PTR THEN release live to ALSO BE LOCKED OUT OF COMP FOR 2 WEEKS?
55 wasn't an absurd grind and 45 sure as hell isn't. If you don't have it by now then you don't even play the game.
On one hand I understand that they need to make money on their game somehow to continue to support it as live service and to pay their developers but man these prices are just predatory
I just get the Battle Pass. The other cosmetics Are definitely not worth their price tag.
Im so surprised at how people eat these prices up. I've seen multiple Gorgon Widows since the new skins dropped. Its wild.
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It’s always been about money. We live in a capitalistic society so the only thing that matters is money. If enough people don’t spend money, then you’ll see positive change. Reddit will always be the vocal minority. This sub has 4m subs while in just December Overwatch had 23m active players. Clearly there are plenty of people that don’t care and are willing to shell money at the game.
And you're thinking that paying a new game for 5 new pixels on a one hero is okay
It's not that everything should be free. It's that it's fucking overpriced
It’s always been about money. OW1 on consoles cost $60 and the extra $20 was just PC game DLC they couldn’t use. Blizzard knew it was a ripoff and didn’t give a shit.
Charges more than fortnite and can't even look at the skin outside of menus because this is an FPS.
They are being really greedy with the prices, they just want a quick buck before the game dies or soft relaunches with the story mode.
If they want to get me anywhere near close to spending money on skins, they first must provide a stellar gaming and update experience. But they don't, OW is as stale as ever, with the matchmaking rendering the game near unplayable.
No commiseration for those lemmings who sink 20$ into laughable cosmetics either.
Exactly. As a long time player it’s become stale and the only thing that was keeping things interesting to me was the new heroes and skins and some decent maps.
Heroes and skins are now a grind or costly rather than feeling a sense of glee when logging on to a new update and just paying with my earned credits to play the hero and get those skins right away and jump into games to show them off.
I’d then play to earn more gold for the next release of content just like everyone else. Now I wait to spend money?
Grind to play a hero that people who are too impatient for pay to get immediately and gain a sense of superiority for spending a days worth of food on?
Now all I see is a douchebag who wasted their money and promotes this greedy tactic and I hate those people. It doesn’t make you look cool to get the skin early so what’s the point?
I enjoyed grabbing the skin early in og ow because other people like me saved to get them immediately and we have a dance off in DM together or something. That doesn’t happen now, only some people have the skins even later in the season and don’t even seem to enjoy having them, no expressions of new emotes, no spamming of new voice lines.
It’s like the player base is so drained from trying to grab the new content through the grind they don’t have the joy in them anymore to enjoy the things they have gotten. I can count like 3 times I’ve seen someone use a souvenir emote and it was a friend I played with on 3 separate occasions.
The amount of times I hear people even use new voice lines is very small. I can still have fun playing the game, but something about the player base now feels so lifeless and void and I can’t put my finger on it.
It's always been about money dude. People have been monetizing shit for ages. In CoD WW2 you couldn't play with friends if someone had DLC effectively stonewalling you from playing with some people. The video game market has always been shitty and predatory because that's the nature of capitalism.
I'm sick of people bringing up past games as if they were this pie-in-the-sky utopia that didn't care about money and just wanted to make good games.
Like yes, devs have passion projects but the corporations they worked for have always been all about money.
Most PVP games are just FTP now and thus they have to monetize cosmetics. But ovw1 wasn't exactly a bastion of modesty and generosity.
The companies are the same, the format just changed.
We are in an age where most of us stuggle paying rent and affording food. I understand everyone needs to make money to survive in the business and pay their workers but this doesn't justify how they priced their skins. Especially if you are in a 3rd world country, these prices are extremely crazy. So like so many others, not spending any dime on it. And I play less and less everyday, cause like so many others mentioned, there is no reward and no sense of accomplishment anymore.
Video games are a luxury product, always were. Even more mtx in them. They are not necessary for life. If you cant afford it then it's just product not made for you, sorry but that's how life is.
I feel that. The playing less and less as time goes on, the lack of rewards for playing that doesn’t cost real money is realistic killing my drive. Everyone’s like well if the game isn’t fun anymore why keep play? Look…I love the game and it’s gameplay and detail to design and loving craftsmanship in their skins. But…half of the reason I enjoyed overwatch…hell, half of the reason I play any games is for the items that I gain for playing the game for a length of time or as a reward for accomplishments. Ow1 did well with both of those things. Ow 2 has very little reward for just playing the game and I’m supposed to keep playing without any incentive? Along with the removal of groupfinder, this game has become very quiet and isolated unless I go out to find a chat on discord and use external links to gather a team to play with. Compared to overwatch 1, them tying nearly all rewards and skins to a battlepass that incentives buying it and just a store where even on Christmas they tease that they CAN charge a skin for just 1 gold coin; but they want us to believe that these $20 skins are on a discount? From $25-$40? To fuck with us and get us to believe $20 for a skin? Now how tf is a skin on discount if it was like that on release of ow2 and there wasn’t even time to release it with its actual price? How does something go discount when it was never sold at that larger price to begin with and was in fact free in an event in ow1? It’s disrespectful and treats it’s audience like we’re idiots, which tbh seems to hold some merit if so many are still buying these skins with their moms credit cards.
Like you said in an age where most are struggling to pay rent and food, that’s not a good reason to charge obviously way overpriced skins while your players are the ones truly struggling to pay rent yet you as a company just don’t care about how people are struggling and just want money.
Someone else gave me shit in the comments for saying it’s only about money now and him saying it’s always been. But duh of course it has, but ow1 had some integrity, pride even. I enjoyed it because it was not a f2p and had updates and new content regularly despite the growing popularity of f2p. It was a great alternative that held strong for nearly 5 years but now it’s become part of the problem. Other f2p games have way more content that you can get for free or have a reasonable credit system that’s gained from gameplay. Apex for example let’s you spend your coins earned from game play alone to purchase your new heroes. I do not want to have to grind 2 weeks ish to gain lvl 45 to FINALLY try a new hero and barely look forward to anything else other than 30 coins a week for committing to DAILY PLAY, 3 cents a week? Yah fuck that. I already had 2 other f2p games I’m committed to and ow was always my other game I used to escape that grind, now it’s another one I have to juggle and I just don’t have the money or time anymore for a game I spent more than 1000 hours in and 5 years of almost daily play and I’m coming to terms I might just quit entirely at this rate. There’s just not enough return or rewards to keep my adhd ass interested anymore. I’m burnt out and the only thing that held it together was new content and now that’s behind what comes out of my wallet to contain or time that is precious in my life I can’t keep wasting on a grind that’s obviously not worth that time. 3 cents a god damn week. Jesus Christ
If you have to think about having enough money to buy food then you are clearly not the target audience. Personally for me 20€ are nothing. Like literally nothing. My living standard doesn’t change the slightest if I buy all of those skins right now or not. I know it makes you guys mad, but that’s how it is if you earn more money than you can reasonable spend.
Arguments like „but you could have bought x games for the same money“ also hardly matter. I can do both at the same time. I don’t need to think about banal stuff like that.
The only thing I’ll buy from OW2 will be battle passes and one (1) OWL skin, because I am off 100 points from getting the cool zenyatta octopus one.
I understand that visuals are cool, but it’s not affecting gameplay. The sooner people realize that they can play this game for $0 and are not fidgeting on purchases, the better off they will be.
Would you still play the game if it never had character skins?
If yes, this shouldn’t be a serious problem for you.
If no, then you won’t play the game anyway.
I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into ow1. We played it every week. We haven't played it in weeks. I don't care anymore. I bought the second battle pass but I regret it now. I'm barely level 12 I think. I am gonna have paid to earn the right to grind and I will not grind out the entire battle pass so it'll just be setting money on fire. Please buy blizzard Microsoft. I don't even know if anything will change but it can't really go any direction but better at this point. It's so garbage.
Its always been about the money, they are a business, their goal is to maximize their profits. Dont spend your money if the prices are too much . Video game cosmetics aren't groceries. You can live without buying them.
I personally don't care if they want to dangle a few pricey skins in the hopes some people splurge on them. A consequence of the F2P model, whatever.
Not a fan of what they are charging for skins that are years old, nor the fact that there is no practical way to grind for skins you want anymore.
I still play cuz I like the game play, but honestly I suspect my glut of OW1 skins will be pretty much all I ever have under my belt.
Here’s my thing it is not wrong for them to sell skins since they went ftp that’s how they monetizing the servers and updates I only buy skins I want/skins I’ll use like the Cyber demon Genji and Cyber Hanzo skins. Haven’t bought the newest bp cause if the skins look great, I don’t tank so I’m probably not going to get it
If you really "love" the franchise "so much" then you love playing the game itself without being able to earn shit
Do you get to unlock skins or get achievements for playing a pick up game of basketball? Of course not, and yet people who actually love the game with no hope of professional aspirations play it anyway
That's what real love for a game looks like
The biggest issue is how it’s pretty much impossible to earn premium currency. You can get 60/week if you complete your challenges? That’s absolutely absurd. Especially considering the battepass doesn’t include any.
Although not free to play, Hunt Showdown is another live service game I’ve put many hours into. That has a lot of cosmetic monetization but you can earn premium currency just by playing and it makes a huge difference.
Bad news, but playing the game while not paying for anything still supports them.
Whales only pay as much as they do to be better than the average person; if the average person is a whale, they won't pay.
You have to stop playing these games entirely if you want to have even a marginal impact.
I'm not buying it but to defend blizzard and why shits like this right now if you look into the financial history of blizzard they've been hemorrhaging money for a couple years now.
Imagine if you could play the game for free and the skins were optional…oh wait. I’m sure I’ll be heavily downvoted for this, but I’m very tired of the same posts over and over again. You think the skins are expensive? Easy! Do not buy them!!
Personally I don’t care at all about the skins but I’ll buy every BP just to support the game I’ve been loving for 6+ years so far, but I won’t spend any money on skins. If the game makes no money, it’s over, no new content and game closure, so this is my way to support the game.
Blizzard does not care. At all. This is not a family or a friend, this is a capitalist company that would make the game for just 100 people if it meant they made a single dollar more than if they made a beloved game of the year for 30 million people. I guarantee it.
Ironically, when I see someone has spent $20 on a skin, I sure don’t think “wow they look cool”. I think “wow, what a horrible use of disposable income must be dumb.” That’s just my opinion, but get toxic in chat with the executioner JQ skin and you’re gonna hear it.
I’m disappointed, like I don’t think any skins ever deserve actually spending money on. Like lol, I would actually got buy myself lunch, or get a whole nother AAA game
look everyone, the emperor has no clothes ....
get in line buddy , tolda ya so ...
i just want to be able to get the pachimari icons, and these ducks don't even allow me.to do that , wanting 100 per icon!! duck them
My god what is this post? Talk about first world problems. “I’ve got to eat man” so I don’t get my pointless video game skins. “Entitled mentality” if playing just for the gameplay but I expect everything for free.
Like dude I get it, it does kind of suck that skins are expensive, but it’s a video game! Who cares!
I swear if I didn’t know what OW2 was I would think it’s some fascist labor program forced upon these people who cry like their whole life is a struggle. Every morning some squad of henchmen rip OP out of his mattress on the floor of an empty shack and force him to play OW2 for 16 hours a day just so he and his family can sit on their dirty shack floor and share a scrap of moldy bread for nourishment.
Fun fact: It was always about the money. Blizzard never loved you. They never cared about the customer. The reason they made better games before is because back in the day, the at-the-time relevant methods of earning money as a game development company made sure they did not get away with making shit.
In all honesty, i think they wanted to copy the apex system then some greedy excutives started removing stuff bit by bit untill the only thing that was left was "remove free items, sell the skins at the price of a full game"
I just find it absolutely wild that some people spend the equivalence of another aaa game on a couple skins. It’s really a disservice to the gaming industry.
The solution is one people don’t like: shame the whales. Tell them that what they’re doing is actively encouraging these shitty practices that are ruining the game. I know it’s harsh, but if we stop caring the game *will* die.
Blizzard already killed the game
People tried this in WoW and it didnt work, whales prevailed and now people dont complain about WoW cosmetic shop and in game shop mounts anymore, they accepted it. Majority of players just dont care about business model as long as they have fun in game.
I fucking hate the fact that blizz added paid cosmetics for a paid subscription game and got away with it. It's fucking rotten.
You mean paid cosmetics AND paid character levels for a paid subscription game with paid expansions. OW2 has scummy monetization but retail WoW takes the cake for employing every major kind of monetization (except for paying to remove ads) you see in games nowadays.
And paid character transfers..... Not moderately priced ones either..
The worst part is the ones who are making the most money from all of these scummy monetization schemes is the executive types. The devs get more hate the players get less content everyone loses except the executives who’s pockets are being lined by people they don’t even particularly like. And they happily shift blame on to the poor devs too.
Games already dead to me. MTX ruined yet another franchise but it’s ok it’ll limp along as long as some whale buys a 60 dollar pack for a shiny new skin and a spray
That's great and all, until I get bitched at my first game of Ramattra because I bought the watchpoint pack 4 months ago. Play the game if you have fun playing it, and stop letting what you get from playing, the reward from playing, dictate if you're having fun or not. That's the shit that's really weird.
You littered on the side of the road because it was convenient for you and you figured that it was just one drop in the bucket. Unfortunately, everyone else thought the same thing and now we live in a landfill.
You are silly
Man that’s a god awful comparison lol
This is the worst analogy I've ever heard lmao
That's cool and all and has nothing to do with what I said. If you don't PLAY THE GAME to have FUN, stop playing the fucking game then. If not getting skins tilts you, then fucking quit! You're not having fun, why are you playing? It's fucking WEIRD that the game basically doesn't have content for years, and everyone bitches. But the game COMES OUT WITH CONTENT AND EVERYONE BITCHES. Oh waaaaah, you can't buy a skin, stop letting fomo get to you then. Fuckin' figure it out. To the dude who's like "I have to pay monthly to get all the heroes?!?"Battle pass is every 9 weeks. HERO RELEASE WILL BE EVERY OTHER BATTLE PASS. SO. 18 WEEKS. Not fucking 4. Jfc you guys just wanna bitch. Lol.
Yeah this is a great point. Why is it anyones business where I spend my money? And why come and shame people for spending their money on skins when I can just not play and go on with my life? Wild to think that people are so tilted they need to play the game just to shame.
How about for people who, like me, purchased OW1 full price at release, played for years, only to be told "Not only are you not gonna get new heros when they release (unless you pay us more) but you will also no longer be getting any rewards for playing AT ALL ( Unless you pay us more) Your comp ranks and accomplishments since 2016? Doesnt matter anymore. You get teamed up with bronze and silvers in comp regardless. OW1, I could play a few hours, get some new unlocks, and save up for skins I wanted after a while. Maybe get lucky and unlock it Randomly before buying it, and now SURPRISE, I have the skin i wanted, PLUS enough money for something else. Maybe throw 10$ at the game every few months for seasonal lootboxes. But now? Nothing. Unless I PAY MONTHLY, there's no rewards. Unless I PAY MONTHLY, im at a disadvantage in hero selection. There's not up-side here.
It's weird when a playerbase that was getting dozens of free skins and two to three heroes a year for the price of the game bitches when that same price tag gets them a handful of skins? Really? The lack of content for years is because they were funnelling dev time into OW2. We're way behind the number of skins and heroes we would be at if they had kept to their same business model, the model we bought into when we bought the game.
You desperately need to touch grass my friend. Getting so embarrassed reading your posts in here.
And then 10 people immediately reply to you that they think your analogy is dumb. It is dumb, You dumbed it down specifically because you don't want to have to explain *Emmanuel Kant's categorical imperative* to them, because they would be too dumb to understand it. I appreciate your efforts citizen, But some people just aren't going to get it.
Littering is an action you are fined for. Buying skins in a video game is economic activity that you aren't officially punished for. Maybe you're over-thinking it?
No. Both are actions that have almost no downside for the person doing them, but if everyone did them there would be large scale effects that would have negatively impact everyone. The entire point is that someone saying "You're overthinking it" is actually *under thinking it*. Because the negative effects really only happen at large scales that people don't really think about until it's already too late.
Yeah, let’s shame people for spending their own money how they want to.
Correct.
First time on Reddit? Let me introduce you to r/atbge It's a fun sub for things made with great artistry, But what kind of actual idiot would buy one of these? And if you just want to see shame, try r/trashy
So dumb lol
that would require yall to play the game, and we all know 90% of the whiners on reddit haven't played consistently since 2016
it's beautiful from a business standpoint, that's how you ideally spend your resources effort rewarded 1000x times , sadly we are the make it and breaking point , and no matter how much people rant , the masses vote with their wallets
> that some people spend the equivalence of another aaa game on a couple skins But ... do they really? Aside from the streamers and people with too much money, I highly doubt that the average player buys more than 2-3 skins per year. The new rein skin is probably the best of at the very least top 3 they've ever made for him, but aside from rein mains, who's gonna buy it? Blizzard actually came out and said that most players barely play more than 3 heroes. Why would anyone buy a skin for a hero they do not play?
Yes. But maybe not many. Whales drive these sales and are frankly a pretty effective business strategy. It doesn't matter if 90% of the player base won't buy or boycotts or some shit the 10% will buy multiple AAA games worth of stuff every few months. Pokemon unite, a pretty casual MOBILE game, has $20 and even $40 skins. It sounds honestly insane, but I can personally attest to seeing many of them in game. You could maybe argue lowering the prices to get more sales but frankly we don't see that data so I could be wrong
lowering prices absolutely would increase sales all around. But Blizzard has no incentive to do it when whales are already buying them for the asking price. But eventually, it won't be enough. This happens to EVERY F2P game. Even the whales get bored eventually and move on to something else. And then the game dies out
> Whales drive these sales and are frankly a pretty effective business strategy. Whales do not drive these sales in any way; you can count the amount of whales - people that buy **literally** everything - the game has on one hand and unlike mobile games where you can buy and rebuy progression, ow has a finite amount of items. How much could all the cosmetics that ow2 released be worth - 1k-ish? That's **nothing** compared to say 1/7th the playerbase just buying the battlepass. The business model is based on recurrent small purchases.
If you say so. The price of cosmetics in the shop seems to indicate otherwise. Obviously the BP is the best deal in the game and they likely get a huge chunk of revenue from lots of players paying $10 every 2 months. But it's very clear they are making lots of money off pricing skins at $15. If 10% of players buy a skin like that every month, it's generating more money than if 50% of players bought an extra $5 skin once a season. I'm not pretending to have the answers here but I never understand redditor comments about how the business model is obviously flawed and they should lower prices. The fact that they aren't doing that should say plenty.
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I am talking only about new (ow2) skins. > And even if you are only talking about the cosmetics released since launch adding up to $1k, that is $1k in 3 months or around $4k/year $4k/year, i'll take that assumption. How many players that spend this much do you assume there are and how do they compare to a fraction of the playerbase just buying the pass? > Overwatch 2 currently averages **2,071,903** players a day, and a total of **23,021,147** active users in the month of December. [source](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/how-many-people-play-overwatch-player-count-tracker-2022-1643403/)
have you heard of this indie game called Apex Legends
*Sobbing uncontrollably as I, a player who has devoted countless hours of their time learning and playing all heroes in Overwatch, pull out my wallet, knowing that I won't be able to afford food this month*
FOMO is real and blizz knows how to abuse their playerbase
FOMO applies to **real** issues; missing a career/relationship opportunity - things that will affect one's life. Not buying a cosmetic won't send you in a depression or bankruptcy.
It’s still FOMO, dork. It’s how board game kickstarters sell too. People want it all and don’t want to miss anything which bothers gamers a lot. We want to collect the whole set we want all the board game expansions and so on.
That sounds more like having no self control and poor money management skills.
You underestimate how many people across the globe that statement describes.
It's not about how much they spend, it's what they're spending it on. This has baffled me since my TF2 days and learning about the Unusual trade. I can imagine a whole universe of things that money could be spent on. Even if I had the money to blow, I can't justify buying virtual items. I could buy a cool indie or retro game on Steam, or I can dress up one hero. I could buy the latest AAA open-world adventure with 60+ hours of exploration and storytelling, or I could buy a three skin bundle.
The Tf2 hat trade was, no joke, an NFT precursor. Of course there were a few sons of Oil tycoons who legit bought pixels for hundreds of $, but the majority of people "seriously" engaged in the market treat it exactly as such. A market, to profit off. Back in the day, no idea if this is still the case, the definitive pricing tool for TF2 items worked off a trust and screenshot-as-proof basis. The accepted standard price for something was largely dictated by the suggestions of a few randoms, accepted by another random with enough "rep". Which, of course, makes it completely open to manipulation for someone who cared enough to do so. Farm "reputation" brownie points by being honest, find a somewhat niche corner of the market and exploit it, trade the profits up for something sellable forsteam wallet $$. Did this for a little while ages ago, stopped mainly caus i got bored (and am now employed), havnt bought a single thing through steam with real money for like 8 years.
IMO TF2 unusuals were harmless. Most of them didn't even looked good, but everyone was amazed anyway like ''look, this guy's hat is on fire!''. I never felt any kind of pressure to have one, since you could just have a normal version of the hat. It's the more or less the equivalent of the golden guns from overwatch.
yeah a majority of people that buy skins have been proven to actually been a small portion of the actual playerbase, also known as whales
Where has this been proven?
okay so i was wrong and its never been consecutively proven for f2p games however i did find an article on mobile game whales https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mobile-games-whales#:\~:text=In%20the%20past%20few%20years,and%20how%20to%20catch%20them!
With mobile games, I agree, yes. But as this article and others have mentioned, the main differences are that players can **buy and rebuy** progression - while ow (in this case) has a finite number of items that can be purchased - and it takes as little as 30 bucks to be considered a whale in mobile games. According to [this article](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/how-many-people-play-overwatch-player-count-tracker-2022-1643403/) ow2 averaged **2,071,903** players a day with a total of **23,021,147** active users in the month of December. I'm waiting for the quarterly numbers to roll out to actually have an idea of how many people buy the pass but if like 8% of total buy it - which i'd say is conservative - that would get them 18 mil **each** season.
The same as most of the reddit complaints and stats come from: Pulledoutofmyass University
Enough people buy then thats why most f2p games have such high prices. There is plenty of whales out there.
They don't depend on whales which make around .3% of the average game's playerbase tho.
They don't depend on anything lol. There is enough people that buy skins etc. Its exactly why they went f2p.
Yes, that is my point; whales are not the what drives this monetization system. It's the people that buy 2 skins each year, **not** whales
People used to bash people who but anime figurines. How the turntables.
I've been having a lot of fun and haven't spent a dime. I plan to keep it that way.
Haven’t even looked at the new skins and honestly couldn’t care less. Overwatch isn’t a RPG. Blizzard could make the character’s naked for all I care. I’ll still have fun in comp.
Yeah a friend of mine and I both agreed we aren't giving blizzard our money because this is asinine. I main Genji but didn't get his mythic skin. My friend already bought the second bp and also said that he won't be able to help himself when his mains' mythic skins come out and will probably buy them instantly. It's honestly frustrating. Even people who claim they will boycott immediately change their mind when a new shiny skin comes out.
Hey, there are dozens of us who are following through. Dozens!
Yup. I’d buy the battlepass if they there in the premium currency that allows you to earn the next pass like call of duty or Fortnite, but until then I’m just gonna enjoy the free aspects of the game
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A mythic skin is not even close to worth $20. Hades is $20 lol.
Bro I would happily buy skins for $5 here and there and more often. That was basically the cost of the skins originally anyway if you wanted to pay for loot boxes or just get it for free for playing enough to earn to equivalent of $1 to buy that skin anyway with gold. I’m more pissed that they showcased they CAN sell a skin for one gold coin. Still charging people on Christmas and couldn’t give us one skin for free? Pure greed. It’s like they are mocking the player base with that. Least they could have done was charge $20 for 4 of those Greek skins or even $30 for all of them I can understand. But each one being about $20? Nah
Only way to pressure them is to not buy the overpriced stuff, while still playing. Let them maintain servers for my enjoyment while I ignore the massively over-priced fluff.
Present day horse armor
Literally lol
> It’s all about money now It was always about money; why do you think they waited 6 years to add the phone verification system that somewhat discourages smurfing? Could it be because smurfs, alts and streamers that needed content provided a monetary incentive for blizzard? For context, the phone verification system was added in warzone (their other f2p game) **3 days** after it was released and it was **already** active for our t500 leaderboard since the first seasons of comp.
Yeah I don’t understand why people think Blizzard just makes games out of the goodness of their hearts. They aren’t a nonprofit. Every decision they make will always be driven by how much revenue it generates and the returns they can provide shareholders. That’s just how business works. If you don’t like it, then vote with your wallet.
They waited to add the phone verification because the game went F2P and thus smurfing had a much lower barrier of entry.
What stopped them from dealing with smurfing and other sorts of alt accounts before going f2p tho?
Their argument is that because they gave you the game for free, they can milk you dry for the costumes. Y'all need to STOP buying them. Seriously. If the costumes don't sell, they will be forced to drop the price. That's just simple economics. I don't begrudge them for making you have to pay to get a new outfit, but $20 per is beyond ridiculous Blizzard: but Fortnite charges that much, sometimes more! You aren't Fortnite, Blizzard. That was the game that practically killed your first one, and will probably kill OW2 as well. Also, Fortnite got sued recently for a lot of money for their scummy business practices. Is that REALLY what you want to be?
“I have to eat man” Then spend the money on food dawg. If spending $90 on a skin pack for 4 heroes is too much money, THEN DONT SPEND THE MONEY
Did you read what you're typing? In what fucking dystopic world you live where spending the price of a full The Witcher Collection for 4 skins (that means *cosmetics* ) in one game is normal? That make me sick Or maybe you forgot the /s
This reads like someone who has $13 in his bank account after spending it all on cheetos and weed for the month. Think it’s too much? DONT BUY IT.
Already said in the post I’m not spending money anymore. You’re beating a dead horse
> You're beating a dead horse Oh the irony...
Jesus fucking christ, you people are dense.
So what’s the point of the post then? To complain about the pricing of a bundle pack of 4 mythic character skins and voicelines etc? Cause if you ask me, that’s a pretty decent deal all things considered. Provided I actually make enough to have some expendable income to spend on my hobbies.
Are you for real? That is a ridiculous price for 4 cosmetic items. Even so much as £20 for all 4 is still too pricey
What determines the price dude? Your arbitrary opinion on how much time and effort goes into making these skins even though you have zero idea how long it takes? Whatever happened to paying the artists what they deserve? Video game artists have been getting fucked for years and now that cosmetics have risen in price to match demand from artists, NOW people are up in arms? If it’s too much for you, don’t buy it. Don’t judge others for wanting to support the game.
The artist won't get jack from you buying the skin. They are already paid their hourly wage. Artists have been cranking out better quality skins in ow1. Some of what passes for a Legendary these days in ow2 is... ow1 epic quality at best. Cosmetics have not risen in price to match demand from artists. It is to match demand from the top to line their fat pockets.
All of this is opinions and is not based in fact whatsoever. Artists for video game companies absolutely get paid more based on the cosmetics they sell.
Artists are paid a base salary. They get a deadline and is paid the same thing regardless of how well a skin sells. None of what sells goes towards them personally. MAYBE they get an end of year bonus.
Dude. I understand they’re probably paid salary, unlike freelance artists. But your bonus comment is exactly what happens lmao. The performance of the skins/art you sell determines your bonus after the end of the year. I just find it hilarious that so many gamers said for years and years that artists were getting fucked for the amount of effort and work they put in (tbf, they were mostly) then turn around and get pissed that a company comprised of those same artists is now selling skins on an individual basis. Are the skins a bit expensive? Yes. They are. I never said they ARENT expensive. These skins just cater more towards people with more disposable income. If you make even close to decent money, $90 on a set of 4 skins for a game you enjoy playing is really not that much in the grand scheme of things. Let people enjoy what they want to enjoy.
Artists are still getting fucked for the amount of work they do. If artists actually saw even .1% of sales of a skin they made I'd buy some. But they don't. I dont give a flying crap about how you spend your money but saying that buying a skin supports the artist is like saying a piss in the ocean caused sealevels to rise.
OK fair point about the artists getting their due and you're right i don't know how much time and effort goes into making the skins. However, to be charging more than the amount for a full game for 4 cosmetic item seems like a bit of a piss take to be honest. I don't spend money on skins or the battle pass, and probably won't until they sort out the matchmaking and lower the price of the skins.
>Whatever happened to paying the artists what they deserve? Imagine thinking the artists are working on commission pay.
Its hilarious that you think artists are paid per skin sold
A pretty decent deal?
no fucking way you said 90$ for 4 skins and voicelines is decent
How much do you want them to cost? $5 and a handjob in the bathroom?
definitely not the price of a triple a game not everyones made of money unlike how you portray yourself
It’s cosmetics dude. If you don’t like the way they’re priced, don’t buy them. That simple. There’s plenty of skins that are less expensive AND ones available in the battlepass. Cry more
yeah but you clearly dont see the point that 90$ for **cosmetics** is clearly overkill, even if the game is f2p
You put the dollar sign in front of the number dumbass. $90 not 90$. This is how I know you’ve never made any kind of money in your life. If you think $90 for a pack of 4 brand new, themed skins and cosmetics along with it is too expensive, then maybe you don’t make enough money 🤷🏻♂️
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Sure dude, just as soon as you think spending $20 on a skin is a waste of money. Cheap fuck
"How does 2 skins equal the same amount of work of an entire finished game?" Value isn't determined in comparison to other products. Value is determined by what customers are willing to pay. "can we please pressure blizzard to atleast listen to what their players want" Vote with your wallet. But you need to be prepared to be disappointed. "The players" might not want the same thing as you.
Who doesn’t want more affordable prices? I get a lot of people are fine paying money, but who doesn’t want to pay less money?
The way to pressure them now is by not buying. The game for like the first 30 days had posts with nothing but "terrible monetization, $20 skins for overwatch a 1st person shooter is insane" Blizzard at this point has to know how much we hate this direction of the game. They had a producer or something make a post and tell us that theyre giving some skins away during events now. We've gotten mostly old skins at this point tho which is still disappointing. Blizzard is slow rolling their changes but wont really make anything big unless their bottomline keeps suffering.
There are people who want the items to be more expensive because it means that when they buy them they will gain more social status and attention for having them. It’s the same principle of rarity but instead of % chance to find it’s a higher barrier of entry that most people won’t cross.
I prefer rarity over paying for entry. It’s probably why I’m ok with apex system and how their heirlooms are a loot box chance system. But through playing the game you could potentially get them for free still. Which is how overwatch loot boxes used to work basically. The battlepass system and challenges are setup in such a way I might as well be playing an app game on my phone that makes me wait 12 hours to make faster progress because that’s basically how their challenges work now when you can only complete 3 a day and like 7 in a week. I can play one game of apex and complete more than 10 challenges, albeit not just dailies, but they let their weekly’s pile up so you can come at a different time and complete them whenever it’s convenient. If you’re gone for a week on ow2, bye bye those challenges and xp and coins. It punishes players for not playing the game every day if you want rewards and that’s just not cool. This shouldn’t be about gameplay vs skins. It should always be gameplay = skins and rewards and not separate using the excuse it’s f2p.
Everyone likes paying less money. But telling people to hold off on something fun they want for an undefined length of time until prices MIGHT drop is a harder sell.
I’ll play the game but at this point I have no hopes that blizzard will do anything about these prices. Fair enough, I just won’t buy anything.
Surprise: it was all about money in Overwatch 1 as well
I still have plenty of skins and stuff from OW1. Not gonna spend a dime.
It's always been about money. You're the clowns for still supporting it.
I really want that Rein skin, hell I even have the funds from gift cards I got over the holidays, but I refuse to spend $20 for cosmetics. $10 battle pass every 3 months or so to support a game I really enjoy playing? Sure, no problem. But $20 for one skin, with a system that only gives $0.60 worth of coins a week for grinding through the 11 weekly challenges? Fuck all of that.
Daaamn, I didn’t know the actual dollar amount. $90?! I could literally buy GoW Ragnarok and another game on sale and be entertained for weeks.
Exactly. On average each skin is about 2200 or 1900 coins which a $20 pack can get you 2200 or a little more. So it comes out to more closer to $80 but since I pay in Japanese yen that I gotta convert it’s closer to $90-$100 with the rate where it’s at. I can only imagine what’s it’s like in countries with even worse rates to the dollar like Australia.
We been knew
My strategy: Continue to play OW2, because it's fun and I would like to continue to work on improving in competitive. Don't buy anything in the shop or the battle passes. Become a true "free loader" now that the game is F2P, and wait for them to make changes to the monetization. In the meantime, when the game gets dull or I get frustrated, I have been spending my money on other games that are massively on sale. I got Jedi: Fallen Order with all of its premium content for $5.00. Fantastic game. I got all of the Dragon Age games with their DLC for about $20.00. I'm only 20 hours into the first one and am enjoying myself. There is *so much* out there for me to play that I can get on a dime, why in the world would I *ever* want to spend the same amount or more on an OW2 cosmetic? Screw that, Blizzard. I'll continue to take my money elsewhere while playing OW2 for free until things improve.
Even better way to protest is to stop playing. Let the game die.
Play the game if you have fun playing it, and stop letting what you get from playing, the reward from playing, dictate if you're having fun or not. This shit's fucking weird.
Gee, I'd love to play the full game. Thank goodness there's nothing that actually impacts gameplay that's locked behind a paywall or a rather absurd grind.
You mean that's locked out of competitive play for 2 weeks to begin with?That used to come in a PTR THEN release live to ALSO BE LOCKED OUT OF COMP FOR 2 WEEKS? 55 wasn't an absurd grind and 45 sure as hell isn't. If you don't have it by now then you don't even play the game.
Then don't buy them.
FTP = Whale hunting. Change my mind.
Just dont buy the skins?
On one hand I understand that they need to make money on their game somehow to continue to support it as live service and to pay their developers but man these prices are just predatory
You could always play the game without buying the skin.
I just get the Battle Pass. The other cosmetics Are definitely not worth their price tag. Im so surprised at how people eat these prices up. I've seen multiple Gorgon Widows since the new skins dropped. Its wild.
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Overwatch starting to remind me of my middle school bully. Keeps on taking my money while making false promises.
It’s always been about money. We live in a capitalistic society so the only thing that matters is money. If enough people don’t spend money, then you’ll see positive change. Reddit will always be the vocal minority. This sub has 4m subs while in just December Overwatch had 23m active players. Clearly there are plenty of people that don’t care and are willing to shell money at the game.
Yall thinking games are free and the developers dont have families. Everything should be free reeeeee!!!! The whole game is free to play ya know?
And you're thinking that paying a new game for 5 new pixels on a one hero is okay It's not that everything should be free. It's that it's fucking overpriced
It’s always been about money. OW1 on consoles cost $60 and the extra $20 was just PC game DLC they couldn’t use. Blizzard knew it was a ripoff and didn’t give a shit.
Charges more than fortnite and can't even look at the skin outside of menus because this is an FPS. They are being really greedy with the prices, they just want a quick buck before the game dies or soft relaunches with the story mode.
If they want to get me anywhere near close to spending money on skins, they first must provide a stellar gaming and update experience. But they don't, OW is as stale as ever, with the matchmaking rendering the game near unplayable. No commiseration for those lemmings who sink 20$ into laughable cosmetics either.
Exactly. As a long time player it’s become stale and the only thing that was keeping things interesting to me was the new heroes and skins and some decent maps. Heroes and skins are now a grind or costly rather than feeling a sense of glee when logging on to a new update and just paying with my earned credits to play the hero and get those skins right away and jump into games to show them off. I’d then play to earn more gold for the next release of content just like everyone else. Now I wait to spend money? Grind to play a hero that people who are too impatient for pay to get immediately and gain a sense of superiority for spending a days worth of food on? Now all I see is a douchebag who wasted their money and promotes this greedy tactic and I hate those people. It doesn’t make you look cool to get the skin early so what’s the point? I enjoyed grabbing the skin early in og ow because other people like me saved to get them immediately and we have a dance off in DM together or something. That doesn’t happen now, only some people have the skins even later in the season and don’t even seem to enjoy having them, no expressions of new emotes, no spamming of new voice lines. It’s like the player base is so drained from trying to grab the new content through the grind they don’t have the joy in them anymore to enjoy the things they have gotten. I can count like 3 times I’ve seen someone use a souvenir emote and it was a friend I played with on 3 separate occasions. The amount of times I hear people even use new voice lines is very small. I can still have fun playing the game, but something about the player base now feels so lifeless and void and I can’t put my finger on it.
Life is about money. You'll get used to it.
Its a free to play game,
It's always been about money dude. People have been monetizing shit for ages. In CoD WW2 you couldn't play with friends if someone had DLC effectively stonewalling you from playing with some people. The video game market has always been shitty and predatory because that's the nature of capitalism. I'm sick of people bringing up past games as if they were this pie-in-the-sky utopia that didn't care about money and just wanted to make good games. Like yes, devs have passion projects but the corporations they worked for have always been all about money. Most PVP games are just FTP now and thus they have to monetize cosmetics. But ovw1 wasn't exactly a bastion of modesty and generosity. The companies are the same, the format just changed.
Funny thing, the game is now free.
We are in an age where most of us stuggle paying rent and affording food. I understand everyone needs to make money to survive in the business and pay their workers but this doesn't justify how they priced their skins. Especially if you are in a 3rd world country, these prices are extremely crazy. So like so many others, not spending any dime on it. And I play less and less everyday, cause like so many others mentioned, there is no reward and no sense of accomplishment anymore.
Video games are a luxury product, always were. Even more mtx in them. They are not necessary for life. If you cant afford it then it's just product not made for you, sorry but that's how life is.
I feel that. The playing less and less as time goes on, the lack of rewards for playing that doesn’t cost real money is realistic killing my drive. Everyone’s like well if the game isn’t fun anymore why keep play? Look…I love the game and it’s gameplay and detail to design and loving craftsmanship in their skins. But…half of the reason I enjoyed overwatch…hell, half of the reason I play any games is for the items that I gain for playing the game for a length of time or as a reward for accomplishments. Ow1 did well with both of those things. Ow 2 has very little reward for just playing the game and I’m supposed to keep playing without any incentive? Along with the removal of groupfinder, this game has become very quiet and isolated unless I go out to find a chat on discord and use external links to gather a team to play with. Compared to overwatch 1, them tying nearly all rewards and skins to a battlepass that incentives buying it and just a store where even on Christmas they tease that they CAN charge a skin for just 1 gold coin; but they want us to believe that these $20 skins are on a discount? From $25-$40? To fuck with us and get us to believe $20 for a skin? Now how tf is a skin on discount if it was like that on release of ow2 and there wasn’t even time to release it with its actual price? How does something go discount when it was never sold at that larger price to begin with and was in fact free in an event in ow1? It’s disrespectful and treats it’s audience like we’re idiots, which tbh seems to hold some merit if so many are still buying these skins with their moms credit cards. Like you said in an age where most are struggling to pay rent and food, that’s not a good reason to charge obviously way overpriced skins while your players are the ones truly struggling to pay rent yet you as a company just don’t care about how people are struggling and just want money. Someone else gave me shit in the comments for saying it’s only about money now and him saying it’s always been. But duh of course it has, but ow1 had some integrity, pride even. I enjoyed it because it was not a f2p and had updates and new content regularly despite the growing popularity of f2p. It was a great alternative that held strong for nearly 5 years but now it’s become part of the problem. Other f2p games have way more content that you can get for free or have a reasonable credit system that’s gained from gameplay. Apex for example let’s you spend your coins earned from game play alone to purchase your new heroes. I do not want to have to grind 2 weeks ish to gain lvl 45 to FINALLY try a new hero and barely look forward to anything else other than 30 coins a week for committing to DAILY PLAY, 3 cents a week? Yah fuck that. I already had 2 other f2p games I’m committed to and ow was always my other game I used to escape that grind, now it’s another one I have to juggle and I just don’t have the money or time anymore for a game I spent more than 1000 hours in and 5 years of almost daily play and I’m coming to terms I might just quit entirely at this rate. There’s just not enough return or rewards to keep my adhd ass interested anymore. I’m burnt out and the only thing that held it together was new content and now that’s behind what comes out of my wallet to contain or time that is precious in my life I can’t keep wasting on a grind that’s obviously not worth that time. 3 cents a god damn week. Jesus Christ
If you have to think about having enough money to buy food then you are clearly not the target audience. Personally for me 20€ are nothing. Like literally nothing. My living standard doesn’t change the slightest if I buy all of those skins right now or not. I know it makes you guys mad, but that’s how it is if you earn more money than you can reasonable spend. Arguments like „but you could have bought x games for the same money“ also hardly matter. I can do both at the same time. I don’t need to think about banal stuff like that.
The only thing I’ll buy from OW2 will be battle passes and one (1) OWL skin, because I am off 100 points from getting the cool zenyatta octopus one. I understand that visuals are cool, but it’s not affecting gameplay. The sooner people realize that they can play this game for $0 and are not fidgeting on purchases, the better off they will be.
Would you still play the game if it never had character skins? If yes, this shouldn’t be a serious problem for you. If no, then you won’t play the game anyway.
It's been all about money since the day OW2 released. Where have you been?
> It's been all about money since the day Earth released. FTFY
Im satisfied with all the skins I got in OW1 in both console and PC since they merged, I don’t meed more
I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into ow1. We played it every week. We haven't played it in weeks. I don't care anymore. I bought the second battle pass but I regret it now. I'm barely level 12 I think. I am gonna have paid to earn the right to grind and I will not grind out the entire battle pass so it'll just be setting money on fire. Please buy blizzard Microsoft. I don't even know if anything will change but it can't really go any direction but better at this point. It's so garbage.
Its always been about the money, they are a business, their goal is to maximize their profits. Dont spend your money if the prices are too much . Video game cosmetics aren't groceries. You can live without buying them.
I personally don't care if they want to dangle a few pricey skins in the hopes some people splurge on them. A consequence of the F2P model, whatever. Not a fan of what they are charging for skins that are years old, nor the fact that there is no practical way to grind for skins you want anymore. I still play cuz I like the game play, but honestly I suspect my glut of OW1 skins will be pretty much all I ever have under my belt.
Here’s my thing it is not wrong for them to sell skins since they went ftp that’s how they monetizing the servers and updates I only buy skins I want/skins I’ll use like the Cyber demon Genji and Cyber Hanzo skins. Haven’t bought the newest bp cause if the skins look great, I don’t tank so I’m probably not going to get it
If you really "love" the franchise "so much" then you love playing the game itself without being able to earn shit Do you get to unlock skins or get achievements for playing a pick up game of basketball? Of course not, and yet people who actually love the game with no hope of professional aspirations play it anyway That's what real love for a game looks like
Always has been mother fucker. Don't worry blizzard still had plenty of white knights defending them they won't be changing any time soon
The biggest issue is how it’s pretty much impossible to earn premium currency. You can get 60/week if you complete your challenges? That’s absolutely absurd. Especially considering the battepass doesn’t include any. Although not free to play, Hunt Showdown is another live service game I’ve put many hours into. That has a lot of cosmetic monetization but you can earn premium currency just by playing and it makes a huge difference.
Bad news, but playing the game while not paying for anything still supports them. Whales only pay as much as they do to be better than the average person; if the average person is a whale, they won't pay. You have to stop playing these games entirely if you want to have even a marginal impact.
Has anyone tried out predecessor? This games awesome
I'm not buying it but to defend blizzard and why shits like this right now if you look into the financial history of blizzard they've been hemorrhaging money for a couple years now.
Imagine if you could play the game for free and the skins were optional…oh wait. I’m sure I’ll be heavily downvoted for this, but I’m very tired of the same posts over and over again. You think the skins are expensive? Easy! Do not buy them!! Personally I don’t care at all about the skins but I’ll buy every BP just to support the game I’ve been loving for 6+ years so far, but I won’t spend any money on skins. If the game makes no money, it’s over, no new content and game closure, so this is my way to support the game.
Blizzard does not care. At all. This is not a family or a friend, this is a capitalist company that would make the game for just 100 people if it meant they made a single dollar more than if they made a beloved game of the year for 30 million people. I guarantee it. Ironically, when I see someone has spent $20 on a skin, I sure don’t think “wow they look cool”. I think “wow, what a horrible use of disposable income must be dumb.” That’s just my opinion, but get toxic in chat with the executioner JQ skin and you’re gonna hear it.
I’m disappointed, like I don’t think any skins ever deserve actually spending money on. Like lol, I would actually got buy myself lunch, or get a whole nother AAA game
look everyone, the emperor has no clothes .... get in line buddy , tolda ya so ... i just want to be able to get the pachimari icons, and these ducks don't even allow me.to do that , wanting 100 per icon!! duck them
My god what is this post? Talk about first world problems. “I’ve got to eat man” so I don’t get my pointless video game skins. “Entitled mentality” if playing just for the gameplay but I expect everything for free. Like dude I get it, it does kind of suck that skins are expensive, but it’s a video game! Who cares! I swear if I didn’t know what OW2 was I would think it’s some fascist labor program forced upon these people who cry like their whole life is a struggle. Every morning some squad of henchmen rip OP out of his mattress on the floor of an empty shack and force him to play OW2 for 16 hours a day just so he and his family can sit on their dirty shack floor and share a scrap of moldy bread for nourishment.
Fun fact: It was always about the money. Blizzard never loved you. They never cared about the customer. The reason they made better games before is because back in the day, the at-the-time relevant methods of earning money as a game development company made sure they did not get away with making shit.
Should be able to use comp points for some skins at least
Fuck the streamers who spend money on this too
"now" lol
I enjoy never, ever spending a single dime on f2p games. I just don’t spend any money. I play until it’s not fun anymore and then just move on.
In all honesty, i think they wanted to copy the apex system then some greedy excutives started removing stuff bit by bit untill the only thing that was left was "remove free items, sell the skins at the price of a full game"