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Kiriko is the first new Hero available in Overwatch 2, and there’s no doubt fans are eager to check out everything and anything the character has to offer. The thing is, snagging absolutely everything up for grabs for Kiriko is going to take a lot of time…and a lot of money.

While Overwatch 2 is a free-to-play game, it’s loaded to the gills with microtransactions. Now these purchases won’t net you any in-game advantages over your opponents, but they do offer all sorts of unique customization options. Not surprisingly, Kiriko has a ton of paid content tied to her, and if you want to grab it all for free, you’ll have to put in a ton of work.

Kiriko’s non-seasonal unlocks add up to 15,600 coins in total, and are as follows:

  • 5 skins: 2200 coins
  • 3 emotes: 1500 coins
  • 5 souvenirs: 2500 coins
  • 5 weapon charms: 3500 coins
  • 2 victory poses: 600 coins
  • 9 voice lines: 900 coins
  • 10 sprays: 1000 coins
  • 2 highlight intros: 1400 coins

As it stands right now, if you complete all 11 of the weekly challenges, you’ll receive 60 coins. After you crunch the numbers a bit more, you’ll see that it’ll take 260 weeks to earn enough coins to obtain all the unlocks for Kiriko. This obviously doesn’t include items that come as Twitch drops and achievements, which would certainly add to the time.

As you can understand, quite a few people are miffed with this setup, as it pretty much leaves paying for the content as the only viable option. Hopefully Blizzard hears these early complaints and tweaks their approach.

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Comments (5)

Most Upvoted

mereel

This is the new reality for basically all future games from the remaining major publishers. $60 or even $70 isn’t nearly enough money to recoup the costs for modern AAA game development.
Games would need to cost $120 to $150 each to be reliably profitable. Of course, we gamers would never pay those kinds of prices, so… this is what we get. Even retail games from the store have much of the regular content sold back to the player piecemeal.

Retro gaming (pre-DLC era) for the win. Seriously there are hundreds, thousands of awesome retro games that you’ve never tried. Pick an aged classic and pretend it’s brand new. Play it all the way through. Turns out those games are still fun, high quality, and totally complete.

sligeach_eire

1+ y ago

That's ridiculous. Blizzard deserves all the negative press they get and are getting.


mereel

1+ y ago

This is the new reality for basically all future games from the remaining major publishers. $60 or even $70 isn’t nearly enough money to recoup the costs for modern AAA game development.
Games would need to cost $120 to $150 each to be reliably profitable. Of course, we gamers would never pay those kinds of prices, so… this is what we get. Even retail games from the store have much of the regular content sold back to the player piecemeal.

Retro gaming (pre-DLC era) for the win. Seriously there are hundreds, thousands of awesome retro games that you’ve never tried. Pick an aged classic and pretend it’s brand new. Play it all the way through. Turns out those games are still fun, high quality, and totally complete.


mamba909

1+ y ago

@mereel

I'd like to add support indie games as well since a lot of them are advancing/refining the concepts established during the pre-DLC era.


sligeach_eire

1+ y ago

@mereel

That's complete nonsense. The game industry has never been in a healthier position, there's never been more developers and publishers. And there would be more, but those at the top are trying to monopolize the game industry, it's happening in every entertainment medium. *Cough* Disney.

There's all sorts of pricing strategies, there's every size of company and game. Tonnes of YouTubers have covered this myth that games should be more than $60 nowadays. Jim Sterling probably covers it best and with the profanity it deserves. I'm sorry, are the likes of Nintendo in danger of going bankrupt or are they posting record profits?

And here's another point. If these new next generation games should be $70, then by the same token, shouldn't re-releases and ports of old games be less than $60? More often than not, they aren't. Why? The same reason there's season passes, micro transactions, deluxe editions, basic content that used to be the norm for games, e.g. difficulty settings, deliberately withheld to charge for as DLC. Greed!


kilroy

1+ y ago

This is the cost of being free to play and crossbuy. You all can thank Millennials and Gen Z for helping to set this trend. You can also thank people's hatred for loot boxes, since that did not make a return; countries making laws essentially banning loot boxes means companies need to figure out different ways to create steady streams of money. At the very least, this time frame wouldn't be so egregious if the game cost $40 like with OW1.

Look at Heroes of the Storm, another free to play game by Blizzard. That has one of the most consumer-friendly ecosystems I've ever seen, but Blizzard abandoned the game, fans theorizing because it wasn't making them money because everyone figured out you could unlock everything in a very reasonable amount of time (easily less than a year for all heroes, guessing two years for all skins for all ~90 heroes).