I’ve been playing blizzard games for nearly a decade now. Back when I was still young and impressionable I started with a name that had numbers in it and my friends said having numbers in your name is weird, so I came up with a new name. 1400 hours+ of overwatch later and I’m stuck with the name that a 16 y/o chose unless I want to pay $10. this is a service that is completely free for 99.999999% of businesses. It’s not even $1, but $10?! It feels so unreasonable that we can’t express ourselves in one of the most basic ways possible without spending money. I just want to highlight how poorly this reflects on the company. it’s hard to want to spend money for a company that wants to nickel and dime you for every little thing to the point you can’t do one of the most basic things like set your username without spending your lunch money. is this some massive source of revenue? i’ll say i’ve certainly abstained from spending more money than I otherwise would have out of pure spite for blizzard’s policies, I can’t imagine I’m the only one. I know it probably costs money to change the system and on the corporate side it probably doesn’t seem great to spend money to remove a source of money, but can’t we just have this small thing?
I can see both sides of this.
Blizzard already gives every account one free BattleTag change, so it’s not as though every change costs money. That said, I also understand why $10 feels steep for something as simple as changing your display name—especially if it’s been years and you’ve simply outgrown a name you chose as a teenager.
I think a nice compromise would be allowing one free name change every few years, or lowering the cost for additional changes. That would let players update a long-standing BattleTag without encouraging constant name changes that could make it harder to recognize friends.
I don’t think the issue is that Blizzard charges at all—it’s that the current price can feel disproportionate for what many players see as a basic account customization.