Tianyu Zhu

Overwatch 2, the new hero shooter from Activision, has been the center of attention lately, and mostly not in a good way. The community has yet to catch a break as controversy has surrounded the game’s slowing stream of content and its launch queue times.

Recently, the monetization of the new free-to-play model has been heavily criticized for how expensive it is, with some in Reddit gaming communities comparing Overwatch 2’s problems to that of Halo Infinite, which was similarly expensive, as well as launch problems.

Overwatch 2’s monetization is different from that in Overwatch 1 in almost every single way.

For starters, the price tag on the game itself has been completely removed. At launch, OW1 cost $40, then went down to $20 in January of 2019. By contrast, OW2 has gone completely free.

If this was the only change, then there wouldn’t be much of a controversy, but  the price tags for the skin-to-premium-currency conversion as well as the newly implemented battle pass have caused a stir.

In Overwatch 1, loot boxes were the primary source of monetization. While it is a heavily criticized practice in the gaming industry, many people on Reddit have compared it to the new forms of monetization and concluded that it was better than what they have now.

Players on an Overwatch fandom site argue that with the loot box system, it was possible for a player to be able to unlock skins very rapidly while also saving up free currency from obtaining duplicates to unlock skins that they wanted, just by playing the game and leveling up. 

But with the new battle pass and premium currency system, players who don’t buy the premium battle pass would need to either need to spend around 8 months grinding the premium currency called “Overwatch Coins” to purchase one legendary skin or pay $20 dollars to directly buy one. One reddit post that reached over thirty thousand upvotes highlighted this, showing how big the backlash was against these inflated prices.

There is also the gameplay-related problem of attaching the newest hero to the battle pass system. Where the premium battle pass can unlock the newest character, which is Kiriko as of this moment, the free battle pass would require players to go up to level 55 in order to unlock it.

One user on the Overwatch subreddit calculated that players would need to spend around two and a half weeks of playing for more than an hour in order to unlock the new hero, which in the first game, would have been given to you for free on the day it was released.

The overall community sentiment around these changes have been mostly negative, largely owing to the egregious price tags and time sinks. But how Activision Blizzard will react to fan sentiment is still unknown.