What other Blizzard titles relied on a single time purchase and loot boxes for their payment scheme? Wasn’t WoW subscription based WITH paid expansions? StarCraft and Diablo definitely had paid expansions.
Maybe the argument could be made for Hearthstone or HotS but I won’t consider them Blizzard’s flagship titles either.
Not picking up a pitchfork and joining the mob is now white knighting? Get the fuck outta here with that shit.
I’m not here to defend Blizzard, frankly fuck them and their mismanagement of a great IP, but people are definitely blowing Overwatch’s failure out of proportion and just hopping on a bandwagon.
I’m making assumptions but I don’t think it’s asinine to assume that they would rather run their service with a constant steady income from a subscription model rather than a one time purchase over the period of half a decade. It would have been one thing if they released paid expansions to the base game every few years but they never did that.
It also doesn’t matter if the company as a whole is profitable if Overwatch itself isn’t. They aren’t Kirkland with the food court hotdogs or rotisserie chickens, as in trying to use Overwatch to pull people into their other games even though it’s a net negative for them to continue to support.
And 7 years after the fact, how is your one time $40 purchase still paying to keep the servers running?
I don’t like the monetary scheme that Blizzard settled on for OW2, I’m never paying $25 for a skin, but the $10 battle pass every 2 months is reasonable in my opinion.
If that battle pass contained all of that season’s cosmetic content and followed a FOMOless scheme more similar to Halo MCC or Deep Rock Galactic, I think most people wouldn’t complain but clearly we have whales that are willing to dump stupid amounts of cash on singular skins.
You can’t grow if you can’t admit to yourself that you’re wrong some of the time.
(งツ)ว
But actually not free as in free beer. Someone is paying to sustain these instances.
Edit: this is the 2nd time I’ve seen the phrase “free as in free beer” today and decided to look it up because I hadn’t really taken notice of it before. I retract my statement and apologize. You used it perfectly and TIL, so thank you.
You must not have read that first sentence.
That was always my understanding of it.
I thought it was when an article was posted, nobody bothered to read it and then went straight to the comments with their opinions on the subject.
The real horror is that the extra portion ends up on my plate and I still somehow manage to finish all of it!