The good thing about loot boxes was you could unlock everything. I have unlocked almost every skin for every character so I don’t have a reason to buy store skins, but the point is you could unlock anything for free with patience.
Blizzard knows this and they chose to be greedy with battle passes and they didn’t even add loot boxes in the battle passes.
because you already paid Blizz for the game lol
This was “good”, but also bad in so many ways. People weren’t buying the game in any real numbers, no one was buying lootboxes (why would you). It just wasn’t making any money anymore.
Lootboxes were also made illegal in a few key markets (promoting gambling to children…), and many other governments are looking at following, including the US (although this will probably be a slow process).
So why would you stick with a model that was limited in profitability, that could be shut down at any moment.
Yeah the prices suck, and battle passes are all rubbish… but it is a proven model that works.
Overwatch 2 is expensive if you plan on buying skins for your main but the quality of the game is the same. The only real difference I noticed is that they’re releasing new characters and maps at a faster rate again.
Or they knew loot boxes posed serious legal and financial impact to their products and choose something with more profitability, less legislative liability and longer sustainability.
Apex and Counter-Strike seem to be just fine. Also every gacha game known to man.
Moving to a battle pass is fine. The problem is companies like blizzard use it as an excuse to nickel and dime their playerbase with extreme prices and very little way to earn premium currency for free. Companies need to stop treating customers like piggy banks.
I agree to a certain extent.
The writing’s on the wall that to some measure loot boxes are due on the chopping block more than they have been. When that is going to occur is anyone’s guess.
As for financial return, it’s clear they weren’t working as well as Blizz would’ve hoped. That’s certainly on them (lack of content) as well as game related.
I prefer loot boxes, and actually advocated for them back in the day when we got our first whiff of monetized skins. Everyone thought people like us, who called out the OWL skins and promo purchases as a testbed for the monetization we have now, were crazy but alas here we are.