Overwatch Game Director Responds To Loot Box Criticism

Over­watch recent­ly began its anniver­sary event. The event made avail­able 11 leg­endary skins, 24 dance emotes, 48 voice lines, and 48 sprays. These cos­met­ic items can be obtained from loot box­es or bought with in-game cred­it. This cred­it can only be gained from loot box­es and dupli­cate items found in loot box­es. While play­ers of Over­watch have always dealt with this, many have been more vocal with their crit­i­cisms recent­ly due to the pric­ing of the anniver­sary event.

One of the most notable crit­i­cisms comes from a post on Red­dit which cal­cu­lat­ed the num­ber of in-game cred­its need­ed to obtain all the items. In short, the price for every­thing as a whole has risen great­ly while the total num­ber of items has not changed much.

• Anniver­sary: 56,475 for 108 items
• Upris­ing: 36,825 cred­its for 95 items
• Year of the Roost­er: 37,050 cred­its for 99 items
• Win­ter Won­der­land: 33,075 cred­its for 94 items
• Hal­loween Ter­ror: 31,500 cred­its for 94 items
• Sum­mer Games: 0 cred­its for 0 items (32,250 for 72 items if they were buyable)

This has lead game direc­tor Jeff Kaplan to respond on the Bliz­zard forums. There was no com­mit to take action on feed­back how­ev­er Kaplan states that he had a dis­cus­sion with oth­er devel­op­ers about it and he is lis­ten­ing to what fans are saying. 

“I just want­ed to acknowl­edge that we’ve been fol­low­ing the threads about the loot box rewards as they per­tain to the anniver­sary events, oth­er events and loot box­es in gen­er­al. The feed­back and sug­ges­tions have been help­ful to us. We had a real­ly great dis­cus­sion yes­ter­day about the feed­back we’ve been hear­ing this week. While I don’t have any imme­di­ate action items to report, I thought it was impor­tant for you to know that we are lis­ten­ing.”

Again this is not a com­mit­ment to make any changes. With that said it, in the cur­rent gam­ing cli­mate, they are like­ly to address the issue even­tu­al­ly. Bliz­zard will want to avoid a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion to Ubisoft where For Hon­or play­ers orga­nized a black out and brought neg­a­tive press to the game. There is no know­ing when changes will come how­ev­er we will be sure to write about it when it does.