https://twitter.com/PlayOverwatch/status/662735865496506368
Suspiciously after the backlash from their wording about all 21 heroes currently being free, and not saying anything about future heroes being free.
Reddits opinion of the pricing
Whats everyones various thoughts on paying for the base game and the possibility of paying for future heroes/maps? How do you think it will affect competitive play?
If they price heroes, I don't think it will sway the hardcore crowd, the type who would buy them all anyways, but it will hurt the casual scene. Having to wait forever to buy a new character to play is just the worst. I don't care if the game has a sixty-dollar pricetag, I would rather know that all characters, past and future, will be available for me to use after purchase.
I think this is just as telling as them not giving us an outright answer "A lot of this is... there's not like this master plan we know exactly what we want to try. Let's see the health of the game and where it's at. Let's see where the fans are at, and what they want."
They don't KNOW what they are gonna do yet, they have no plans to release or sell any more heroes but if they need to or if the fans want it, they may.
At least, thats how I read it. Mostly because i don't want it to end up like Dirty Bomb.
Exactly, so maybe I'm hopeful, maybe I'm optimistic, but from what he is saying I took "currently we don't plan on adding any more heroes unless necessary or the fans want it" which means, to me at least, there won't be any behind a paywall either.
I guess it's too early to tell at this point as a lot can change between now and spring.
Update: after watching the panel I'm genuinely convinced they are not even thinking about adding new heroes at the moment, let alone wether they will charge for them or not, but again, 3-4 months is a lot of time and a lot of things could change.
One thing that never changes: still no beta ;-;
I just don't get why developers, especially ones like fucking Blizzard feel the need to put a price tag on classes/heroes. If you're going to put a price tag on the game itself, don't put a price tag on your playable characters. You're limiting your playerbase's ability to understand and work with different and potentially more individually worthwhile play styles by forcing them to either pay or play enough to unlock via in-game currency, when they're already basically good to go with something else. Do they really need the money that badly? I'll vote "definitely not". This type of model is not only a shit (albeit sadly successful more than it's not) model, it really gives me the impression that they foresee the game dying sooner than they'd like and would rather rake in whatever cash they can to make up for it. I'm generally speaking about this model here, not necessarily specifically paying/grinding for different classes to play with.
I just started playing Dirty Bomb, and while I love it, I hate either being forced to use a very limited amount of classes simply because I refuse to pay for something that should be free already or because I haven't saved up enough in-game earned credits. It's a stupid as shit business model and I don't understand why it works. I stand fully behind Valve's model as far as TF2 goes. While I don't understand why people care so much as to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to own an unusual, or go through so much trouble and possibly money to have a fucking festive australium stattrak blackbox, I guess other than to stand out in some way or another, it's clearly indicative that people will and do care about this type of business model and are more than happy to pay for the shit they get in return.
Only now have I realized how unnecessarily long this post is, so I'm ending it here. I've had too much to drink, but not enough to get even more angry over shit business models that still somehow fucking work. I'm also not turning back on this post because fuck it.
They are clearly leaving their options open for either a future expansion(highly likely) or DLC packs down the line that include new content such as heroes/maps. It explains why they are using very specific wording when answering anything regarding payment models.
Obviously those will not come immediately after launch and will come at a reasonable time such as when the game is further into its lifespan.
I just don't see any other way they can possibly continue to support the game other than esports related stuff than doing the above. Well and balance patches are a given..
I don't think there's any need right now to presume they will sell heroes, based on the panel last night and the Q&A posted on the sub reddit they aren't even planning on making any more heroes currently, so they have no idea if they will charge for them or not(though if they do make new heroes they probably will, which I agree is a bad idea) for now instead of grabbing out pitchforks about the heroes let's go back to being salty about not having beta!
Found this pretty good comment while bored at work, a very well thought out post
Many reasons, paying for heroes mean you can't have unique heroes. If only Pharah is decent at countering Widowmaker then anyone without Pharah is at a disadvantage. So instead of making heroes that have proper hard counterpicks, they have to be homogenised so no matter what heroes you have, you're not at a disadvantage. That's why Dota heroes are always so much more interesting and seem so much more overpowered than LoL champions. They're not really OP, they just have counter picks to keep them in check. Enigma's 5 second AoE channelled stun? Yeah, a simple targeted stun and it's useless. Burst damage that can kill a hero in less than a second? BKB, dealt with. Heroes behind paywalls screws with game balance and forces characters to be boring.
Second reason is it encourages the devs to make each new hero OP for a week or two to incentivise purchases. Again, paywalls screw with the game balance.
Thirdly it encourages rushing out characters whether they're ready or not or whether the game is ready for them. A dev isn't going to wait a month between releases when they can wait a week for the money and cause anyone that's not a hardcore player to spend money because they won't have enough ingame currency for it. Causes lower quality characters and, again, screws with the balance.
Fourthly the game becomes based around microtransactions. Well sure, you could grind for hours a day to get the next hero or you could just pay $5 a fortnight to stay up to date with heroes in this "free" game. Again, paywalls screw with balance.
Tl;dr: IT SCREWS WITH THE BALANCE OF THE GAME
http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/7/9688324/overwatch-buy-to-play-blizzard-pricing-model-plans
This is probably the most defining thing about the model i've seen, and its exactly what i needed to hear. I'm going to be figuring out which version of the game i want to order now :)
BlizzCon 2015 - Overwatch interview with Jeff Kaplan and Chris Metzen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAHaQxUsf_A&feature=youtu.be
Discord