Overwatch players outrage over absurdly overprice character skin

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2018/01/10/no-blizzards-overwatch-league-team-skins-are-not-overpriced/#6aee0a8b3ac7

For those that do not want to read a long article. Blizzard is charging players an absurd price of *wait for it* $5 for character skin!

When I read that, I laugh, $5 won't get you a weapon effect in PoE. Just to be objective, Overwatch is a $60 game with MTX mostly in form of lootboxes, & skin is character specific

But it makes me question, is PoE MTX price way too out of touch.

Would you prefer (in retrospective) that PoE is a paid game (like overwatch), with MTX as options, that are more reasonable priced?

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kiadaw wrote:

Would you prefer (in retrospective) that PoE is a paid game (like overwatch), with MTX as options, that are more reasonable priced?

Blizzard Entertainment releasing a highly anticipated new game, their first new IP in like 20 years, after showing with Project Titan that if a game isn't up to their standard they're willing to just pull the plug rather than release something which wouldn't be received well.

Some indie dev nobody's ever heard of releasing an ARPG with massive desync problems, poor technical performance, with nobody sure if there'd be any post-launch support.

The two wouldn't have an equal number of people throwing down $60. Path of Exile would've sold far less - and if more of GGG's revenue was front-loaded, it makes you wonder whether they'd still have been making two expansions a year (would those be sold, too?) for the game.

An ARPG called Path of Exile might've existed, and GGG could still be a single-game studio supporting it to this day. But they'd be far smaller, their budget immeasurably more modest, and the game might've only had challenge leagues with no expansions at all since launch.

The Path of Exile we play today wouldn't exist.

Some people will say they'd have been happier that way. Certainly, people who can't stand the Lab might've preferred that. People who irrationally hate the Xbox port could be happy. But I do wonder how many would still be playing. If the game never evolved, if several years later it was much the same thing - would people have gotten bored and found something else?

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kiadaw wrote:

For those that do not want to read a long article. Blizzard is charging players an absurd price of *wait for it* $5 for character skin!

When I read that, I laugh, $5 won't get you a weapon effect in PoE.

That's putting a bit of a spin on things...

To quote the article: "Fans say that the mandatory price of $5 a skin is too much, because an Overwatch squad of 6 is $30, the full price of the game on PC, a full collection of 26 skins for one team is $100, and to collect all the skins (buying in bulk with League Token bundles), one of each for every team, on every character, is $1,200. Totally, ridiculous, right??"

I like PoE just the way it is, thanks. I don't play OW so I don't really care. Blizzard however is gaining the reputation (deserved or not it's a matter of opinion) of being EA all over again.

I am perfectly happy with GGG’s chosen model. It shows that there is a way to make profit without being a [Removed by Support] to your customers (looking at you, Ubisoft), something the industry was in dire need of at the time of the game’s launch.

I’d go so far as to say that thanks to GGG, I’ve come to terms with the inevitability of Call of Duty Black Ops Zombie Apocalypse 17, because they have shown that there is an alternative way to cater to otherwise disenfranchised gamers.

Apples and Blizzard-shaped oranges.

I refused to buy skins in OW as well. I paid a solid 100 AUD for that game, it has fuck all content, matches are over the blink of an eye, and you don't even SEE your own character the vast majority of the time. So I had both financial and aesthetic reasons to not do it. To this day I'm amazed how many Overwaifu junkies pay for skins for a fucking first person shooter that is in and of itself nothing more than the leftovers of a scrapped MMO...

PoE's pricing model is absolutely fair for what it is. It's been discussed to death elsewhere, so no point doing so here.

I still like Warframe's middle ground. It has more 'pay for convenience' than PoE ever will (here it would be considered outright pay to win) but in doing so it has more money to make the game a LOT more polished than PoE will ever be. And it means that you don't have to pay for aesthetic improvements such as weapon elemental effects. DE never monetised those. On top of that, 'win' is a very flexible term in Warframe. The devs tend to give you very powerful gear here and there, so if you do sink some cash into buying weapons or frames, it's more to do things differently than to just obliterate content. It's still a much more 'player skill' based game than PoE -- you could have the best of everything and still not do as well as a seasoned gamer.

The only premium (buy to play) games I might buy skins for are those that let me see the model pretty much constantly and that I play a hell of a lot. I'll probably get some for Dissidia NT although it's looking like that game is offering a lot of customisation with in-game currency. Which is wonderful. So maybe not. The base models look pretty damn good as is.

In short, I feel that cash-based loot boxes, pay for convenience and aesthetic mtxes are perfectly fine with f2p games because that's how they chose to monetise and they typically give a lot of content 'away'. Any premium game that goes there, however, is setting off my greed alarms. IMO the only paid DLC a premium game should have is genuine content addition like new characters or areas. Those I can see as soft expansions. Anything else is just double-dipping.