Pleas developers of overwatch, pleas listen to your community, listen to Stylosa, listen to your real fans. and STOP! stop doing this c! this is crazy, and not working, your skins are expansive, we get nothing for just playing the game anymore, and ppl are not playing (so not buying) the game anymore because your prices, and events are just not what they used to be! its ridiculous! and pleas make Overwatch 2 better then Overwatch 1!! not the other way around! Stop being so financially focused! and greedy! YOUR LOSING YOUR PLAYERS AND FANS! the monetization is ruining your game! and its just sad
Just as many of the “real fans” know it is a necessary evil to keep this IP alive.
They will never “stop being so financially focused”. The are shareholder owned. The shareholders don’t care about you and I, they care about the bottom line and dividend yields.
Prices are easy to solve… don’t pay, don’t play. Look at Warzone 2, delaying Season 2 to make more changes as people are dropping it like a stone.
Luckily. OW isn’t losing players or fans. So many new players coming in. It is good to see. Some old players, who have lost interest over the years will fade away, that is to be expected. That is why Aaron did those interviews recently explaining what is coming over the rest of this year.
2 new supports and PvE coming in 2023 to name 2 headline points.
OP You’re not wrong, Blizzard is messing this game up badly.
Even one of Overwatch VAs is expressing her concern over their questionable actions, especially with their Chinese fanbase.
I would advise everyone hold off on buying the battle pass and wait to see what the PVE is, Had they release it like a actual game, I would have been all in the online seasonal stuff as long as it’s added to base game. I’m at this point now where I would be lying to myself and to anyone if I said OW2 is worth the money especially since as it is now, everything we’ve paid for will be taken away. So if they want to sells skins so hard the give us a offline playable base game to keep them in.
Its simple, just dont buy stuff. The prices are way too high for a downgraded version of ow 1. Ow1 owners got nothing as a gift for owning the original game. So i play the game , but i refuse to buy anything because the prices are absurdly high.
I bought blizzard balance trough gold in WoW. But i am not even going to spent free balance on absurdly high prices like this. i think the worst thing is, even new heros are locked behind a battepass lvl 55. So the main reason people might return makes you either buy a battlepass or you got to pointlesssly grind for weeks.
A skin is a digital good. It has ONE production cost, only one, and given the skill of many 3D artists I know it can’t cost more than 6000 usd to create a skin. But even if it would be double that, with 20 million active players and $20 price tag that would mean you try to cover the production cost with only 0.0030% of the players (around 600 people), making the remaining potential purchases from all 19.999.400 players to be used on development of maps, balance, support and server upkeep costs, everything and then the remainder is profit.
I don’t know the exact figures, but with my experience working in programming, I’m about 80% sure, that they would make millions of pure profit even by selling the skins for $1. pricing these skins for $20 is nothing but greed, it doesn’t benefit the developers, its not going to the artists creating those skins, $19 of each skin lines the pockets of the higher ups that never even seen a line of code or did a brush stroke on a texture.
GTA Online is the proof that you don’t need to be stingy with rewards for active players to make bank. You can easily earn the price of a car in the game in a week and yet they still make close to 1 billion every year from Sharkcard sales alone. Compared to that Overwatch 2 makes you work 8 months for a single skin of the same value as that car from gta.
You can say “oh you don’t need that digital car, its not what the game is about, its about bad-guys shooting eachother” but people LOVE to grind, they love to work hard towards nice rewards, earn nice ingame goods.
And if someone’s response to that is “well just work harder at your dayjob and you will stop being poor, and you can buy what you want in the game” I say they didn’t work a single day in their life if they think that’s how it works.
The costs of things is another issue (they are too expensive).
The concept of a BP and the base of the monetisation is needed to keep the IP alive (which I agree is a bit sad to see, but it is what it is).
As I said, price points are another conversation entirely, and one purely opinion based.
I’d get rid of things. GTA Online gives you a lot of things, but you can’t do anything without paying. There is a weapon that costs the player to fire… The shark cards to do that are like £15.
I am not against monotization either, I like to support a good game, I purchased multiple lootboxes in OW1 despite that I didn’t really need them.
But its also important that there needs to be balance between the micro-transactions and the progression that said micro-transactions helps you to bypass.
8 months for a single skin is absolutely unacceptable by any game progression standards.
Remember that comment EA made when the Star Wars Battlefront controversy was going on.
“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different *” *-insert any digital ingame good here.
That game was BASHED for locking the content behind $2000 paywall or 4000 hours of gameplay.
So damned right I will keep bashing Blizzard for putting content behind a $10000 paywall or 1 million+ hours of gameplay (400 years with lets say 8 hours daily gaming)
Locking things behind a grind that exceeds the LIFESPAN of the players that can play the game is absolutely insane and the people who came up with it deserve prison time
They’ve already said they will be looking at more ways to earn coins in seasons 3 & 4, so I won’t judge it till then.
As for now. This was predictable, give the amount of people who bought the Watch Point pack. A LOT of players haven’t paid for a BP yet, so they need to balance the books. Once those credits are gone, they will be able to have more ways to earn things.
Star Wars Battlefront, FIFA, and others are a disgrace. But what OW has is just a time sink. Now, if you are like me and have other responsibilities and can’t grind the game every day… It is going to take longer. But, sadly for people like me… We are not the target audience for the game anymore.
I think the basis of what they are trying to do with the system is fine. The price points will annoy people, and the proof will be in the pudding. If it isn’t working and making enough $$$, the prices will change. If it is doing ok, nothing will change.
OW2 are definitelly losing a lot of players. The Twitch viewership is indicative of how many players are playing the game to a good extent. The game has already lost 4/5 of viewership (went from 100-120k to 21k watchers) within just some months which is quite a drastic change. OW1 had about the same viewership in its last year that OW2 has right now and OW2 are still a quite new game. It wouldn’t shock me that the players who still play the game and watch it on Twitch are mainly the ones who played OW1.
With all the issues in the game like monetization it really seems as if Blizzard will kill off the audience that are still playing the game at a faster rate if it doesn’t get improved quite fast. Good news are that 1500 legacy coins and 500 OW2 will be added to the BP in season 3 which is a great step in the right direction if it happens. Hopefully Blizzard adresses the OW2 store skin prices issues too later and lowers them down.
The only thing I buy is the BP. I got coins from the Watchpoint pack that I bought before the launch of OW2. The issue for me not buying the BP are that I really like the cosmetics in it and it’s limited time only sadly. However I think it’s great that people refuses to especially buy the store skins to show that they are not happy with the prices. In season 3 they will add 500 OW2 coins and 1500 legacy coins to the BP which is a great step forward from blizzard. It’s not perfect but at least it’s a step in the right direction. The store skins for my knowledge will still be the same prices which is really sad. It’s extremely rare to see players using any OW2 store skins since no one buys them because of their prices. Probably 1 out of maybe 30 games that I see a player having one. Compared to Fortnite and Fall Guys were you see players in all games have new store cosmetics.
I don’t think Blizzard earns enough money from the store skins and I think it’s great. Hopefully they learn a lesson and lower down the prices to reasonable prices. Earning a key to unlock 1 optional OW2 store skin through the BP would also be pretty good.
They are actually lowering the ow1 era legendary skin prices to 1500 (from 1900).
It’s the right direction to go towards at least, especially with the ability to earn the old credits and using those to unlock the old skins.
The new skins will likely continue to only be available with the new currency though, but they have to make profit somehow i suppose.
