Headlines everywhere are savaging Overwatch 2’s high prices, but how exactly does the game compare to other major games? Let’s look at Call of Duty, another Activision-Blizzard FPS that’s supposedly more greedy, considering it’s got a battle pass and a pricey microtransaction shop on top of the games coming with premium pricetags, too. An average Call of Duty bundle will cost you around $20. Inside that bundle, you’ll usually get a skin, which may come with special effects, alongside a few weapons (that also may come with special effects), and then usually you’ll get some more minor cosmetics, like intros, finishing moves, highlights, charms, sprays, and emblems. You’ll be free to use the weapons you get without the skin you get, and you’ll be able to change attachments around on these weapons, too. As far as the battle pass goes, it costs you $10, and if you finish it, you’ll get enough currency to buy the next one. New weapons are free unlocks not usually too deep into the battle pass, while those who finish the battle pass usually get a cool-looking skin. Now, how about Overwatch 2? Well, the game’s free-to-play, for one. Then, you have a battle pass and an in-game microtransaction shop, just like Call of Duty. An average bundle will cost you around $20 to $25, which is similar to Call of Duty, if slightly more expensive. Inside a bundle, you’ll get a skin and a weapon skin (without special effects), alongside other minor cosmetics, like weapon charms, highlight intros, icons, and name cards. You can only use that skin for the hero you buy it for, and you can only use the weapon skin when you’ve got the actual skin equipped, meaning you can’t mix and match weapons and skins. The battle pass also costs you $10, but you don’t get currency for completing it. Heroes are unlocked as free tiers on the battle pass, and you have to get as far into the battle pass as you do with weapons in Call of Duty, though new heroes in Overwatch are much more important to have than new guns in Call of Duty, usually. You can get currency from completing weekly challenges in Overwatch, but it’s a very slow process, and you can’t get more than one battle pass worth of currency from these challenges every few seasons, depending on how good you are about completing challenges. The layout of the battle pass in Overwatch is pretty similar to Call of Duty in that you’ll get a couple of cool things, like the final tier skin, but like Call of Duty, generally, what you’re getting from the battle pass isn’t as cool as what you’ll be able to buy. Altogether, in Overwatch, you’re spending the same or more for much less than you are in Call of Duty, while the battle pass system in Call of Duty is generally a lot more generous than the one in Overwatch. That being said, Call of Duty isn’t considered a particularly generous game when it comes to its monetization, so Overwatch being clearly less generous than Call of Duty goes to show you the extent of the problems with Overwatch 2’s monetization. You can call it greed, which is fair to an extent no doubt, but many will say in response, “Sure, but how does increasing prices make a company more money when fewer people will be buying?” There’s actually a lot going on there. In part, Blizzard will be able to make more money by selling skins for tons of cash than they would otherwise because it takes a lot fewer people to make lots of money selling expensive skins. A few people buying $20 skins is better than a bunch of people buying $5 skins. However, there’s another big part to this, too. In business, there’s a concept called conversion. In video games, conversion is when you get a free player to make a purchase and become a paid player. In games, when you’re able to convert someone, no matter how small the purchase you’re first able to convince them to make, the likelihood of that player making another purchase goes way up. Blizzard is focusing on conversion with Overwatch 2. The company wants to get you in the door with a purchase, like a battle pass or launch edition bundle, and then all Blizzard has to do is get a few of the folks who already have an increased chance of buying something else to buy a skin. Since they only need to sell a few skins when the skins are expensive, this works out. So, not only is selling a few $20 skins better than selling a bunch of $5 skins, Blizzard’s giving the game away for free and pushing customers to make a purchase. Once you do, Blizzard’s business model revolves around getting just a few out of the overall playerbase to buy skins, and once that happens, Blizzard ends up making more money than if they sold cheap skins en masse to lots of the playerbase. To help that along, the way Overwatch 2 is set up is such that there’s no real way to get skins outside of buying them. Sure, you can get a couple from the battle pass, but you’re already going to be paying for that if you want the most out of it. Outside of the battle pass though, there isn’t any other meaningful way to get skins from the game for free.
