I know this will likely be an unpopular opinion but the loot box system isn’t necessary and with certain countries outright banning loot boxes its more than believable that for legal reasons they wouldn’t add them back in.
What we could have is a currency earning system and the buying direct would just be a shortcut (they would still make a ton of money because of whales).
I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but with how short quickplay games are most of the time it would add up over time. Then put some special coin earning bonuses in for events etc and when looking at the industry, this way there would be a free way to get skins or this model will just be purely predatory but it wouldn’t be quick either so it would incentivise the shop as well. It would be convenience.
Honestly, I know it would be a grind but it would be better than what we currently have and it would incentivise playing just like the old game just without loot boxes. You would still have something to work towards. I mean we really don’t have much to work towards unless you have the battle pass and even then the battle pass rewards are meagre and bad in my opinion.
I would like this idea but let’s be realistic. Overwatch 2 is giving 60 coins in 1 week for doing grindy challenges. They wouldn’t even give 1 coin for 10 win streak.
Of course it was better in terms of rewards but its hyperbolic and unrealistic to try and get them to return it given the legal climate and how willing whales are to spend money. Got to work with what we’ve got. No amount of protest will cause them to revert the system.
It’s a good idea. However, they are pretty married into this BP now… Most likely the coins would need to be earned by progressing the BP tree, or after you complete it, maybe earn 5-10 ever few lvls or so…
To be honest, it also sounds like a bad idea… but I think at this time, the community is asking for ANYTHING…
And you are not right. By protesting we have chances that they will change something. Remember that Microsoft will do a fusion with Blizzard so I hope that good changes are coming.
It’s still better to protest and show your dissapointment than buy battle pass or any skin cuz by that you will show them that their decisions are good.
As far as I understood the ban, it was on monetizing lootboxes, as in, charging people for undisclosed contents and effectively circumventing gambling regulations in those countries.
From what I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with offering free prize packs that give you a random bobbin, since the intrinsic value (zero) is the same as what you paid for it (also zero). I’m not sure if they’d be able to offer them as a premium battlepass perk, since that is a paid format and may run afoul of the same gambling regulations.
What you’re not happy with your 60 weekly coins? I mean come on thats one free skin every eight months :P. /S nah they are not gonna give you anything, they are hard in for the short term cash grab. They gotta boost up those revenue numbers prior to the MSFT buyout.
Well that is the point of my suggestion. This would be for everyone whether they have the BP or not. Most free to play games have some form of trickle system so they can easily justify the shop to the players which gets people to willingly buy more anyway.
They are only banned if you can buy them with real money. Also you can get around it by doing what valve did and showing people what is in their lootbox before they open it but you cannot open another loot box until that one is opened.
More than the legal climate, they weren’t making money with the lootbox model anymore. Everyone who played semi-regularly had most of the skins they wanted and any regular play had most of the skins. I think most of the late day OW1 revenue came from selling smurf accounts. It was an unsustainable model. The playerbase was shrinking. The game wasn’t getting updates.
I remember so so many “lootboxes are bad and gambling and too expensive” posts from years ago on these very forums. When I would defend them as being essentially like buying packs of baseball cards, people praised fortnite’s BP and shop where you could see what you were getting. Funny how times change things.
Nope. It wasn’t sustainable. It was a huge dollar franchise 2016-2018 (making more than Warcraft) but by the end it had dropped precipitously in revenue. Wasn’t even listed as one of Activision Blizzard’s top franchises anymore on . 2019, 2020, and 2021, it was lumped in with THPS and Diablo as “Other Games” - in 20201 in total accounting for less than 10% of revenue. It used to be listed with the big boys like Warcraft and COD, but dropped into the "other games’ categories. Not to mention that Blizzard’s total revenues and monthly active users were at an all time low in Q1 2022.
I remember that document and, while I agree that OW made less than other franchises, that document was weird
In the same way that Overwatch was bundled with other games, CoD was bundled with Candy Crush which is essentially the biggest game in the world.
And even though the bundle that included OW was around 10% of profit, that was around a billion gross and around half a billion after subtracting taxes, fees, etc.
Additionally, pretty much all the games in that bundle were on life support or not updated…and they still made half a billion dollars together
EDIT: Additionally, that bundle saw a profit increase even with a dwindling player base
That is a huge drop off from where they were. It wasn’t sustainable. They were still cranking out skins. Why were they making just a fraction of what they were. People weren’t buying lootboxes because they had so much in game currency. This incentivized them not wanting to crack down on smurfs in OW1 too as it was another game sale that added to the revenue.
Also that other games bundle total revenue decreased every year according to the Activision Blizzard 2021 Annual Report. Where are you getting your data from?
While it is a drop off, saying a profit of half a billons isnt sustainable for products in a keep-the-light-on mode is a bit of a hot take imo
We’ve literally had three years of people complaining about a content drought. A few skins a year in exchange for half a billion in profit seems fine
I have no idea what the exact lootbox numbers were, so I have no idea how many people of the active playerbase bought them
There was an article someone posted in another thread that linked to blizzards financial pages: I got the document from there. There were around a hundred pages of financials, but I’ll see if I can find it or at least the thread