The Overwatch devs hear your complaints about skin distribution but concede that some cosmetics need to ‘support the actual bottom-line business’

Overwatch’s skin distribution is, in one word, lopsided. With a roster of 54 heroes and counting it can be hard to ensure that every character gets their fair share of cosmetics as is, but when you add popularity into the mix it gets even harder.

As a free-to-play game, Overwatch makes the bulk of its money through cosmetics like bundles or standalone skins. Skins also take a good amount of time to prototype and create, so to ensure its efforts aren’t wasted the team needs to pick heroes based on how many players will actually buy the end product.

“Every new piece of content that we introduce to the game, whether it’s a hero or even a map, you know, means that the pool of everything that we’ve got, it is spread out a little bit,” game director Aaron Keller says in a group interview (via Kotaku). This leaves room for two kinds of heroes to get regular skins. There’s popular heroes like Ana, Genji, and Soldier 76 which are played by a large proportion of players and then there’s the fan favourites who aren’t just popular but have a dedicated playerbase who will consistently buy skins like Mercy, Kiriko, Juno, and Widowmaker.

However, Team 4 has, in recent years, made a clear effort to bulk up cosmetics for new heroes. “Constantly expanding our capacity” to create skins for characters like Anran, Freyja, and Vendetta who have all been included in recent skin collabs. And while the devs have been able to create more skins than those that just “support the actual bottom-line business”, money still needs to be made.

It’s kind of like a pay-it-forward system. By making cosmetics that will sell well, Team 4 are able to dedicate time and energy to heroes that won’t yield as much of a monetary gain. “The place that you can see that most transparently is the Mythic skins that we release,” Keller adds. “Each season we release two Mythic skins, and typically one of those is going to be for a hero that we think is actually going to really drive a lot of that support for the business. And then another one is going to be for a hero that typically hasn’t gotten either a Mythic or a lot of other skins in the recent past.”

I recognise that I’m probably in a fortunate position where my main, Ana, has always had a healthy amount of new and very cool cosmetics. But the point still stands that this is a business, so Team 4 needs to make responsible financial decisions for reasons that are at times out of their control.

“We recognize it’s important to players,” Keller says. “We want to be doing as much of it as we can, but we still always want to be doing it in a way that’s also responsible, and [lets us] know that we can continue supporting this game going forward.”