Lol. After all these years they’re thinking of rolling back the 5v5 changes. To quote someone from Reddit:
PVE was dropped, heroes are free again, and now 6v6 is back. Blizzard spent the last couple of years turning overwatch 2 back into Overwatch 1.
Edit: See also the developer’s blog post about this, which goes into great detail explaining their decisions over the year and how we got here. Really worth a read if you are (or were) an OW player.
What macrotransactions? The game is free and the only this that’s monetized is cosmetics.
Non-essential and predatory are not mutually exclusive, especially given Blizzard’s history of player manipulation. They have perfected the science of making you want someone that you don’t need.
Did you play the OG, you could get basically everything for free. All it cost was time. OW2 is just an enshittified update
Yeah I realize that looks dumb now. I was thinking of microtransactions that affect gameplay. You know, the important kind.
Microtransactions don’t have to affect gameplay any more. The video games industry has successfully sold this narrative (“Please ignore cosmetic microtransactions mkay?!”) while also raising a whole new generation of gamers that value ingame cosmetics to a social-interactions-affecting degree.
There’s a reason kids laugh at one another over default skins in Fortnite or lack of cash in Roblox and so on.
Plus just as importantly, they normalize mtx on an industry level, making selling of other types of monetization easier in the future.
There is still literal story content behind a paywall. Just load the game and see for yourself.
You have to buy the battlepass to use the newest characters. And the cosmetics used to be free.
They monetized competitive gameplay elements and cosmetics that were supposed to come with the $60 I spent. Both of these are microtransactions.
They actually changed that a while back, new heroes aren’t in the battlepass any more, everyone gets them for free. I don’t know how that works with the “new player experience” where you needed to win games to unlock the base heroes on a new account though.