***Update***
It took a year to find out, but we can now officially confirm Overwatch will not be free-to-play. Read up on the details here.
***Original***
Last week at BlizzCon, Blizzard announced their newest game, Overwatch, a team-based multiplayer shooter. While watching the trailer and reading the description and general overview of the game, many of us in the GameZone office wondered if it would be free-to-play or not. Honestly, we can see it going either way, and Blizzard isn't ready to reveal their business model for it just yet.
"We want it to be a fair deal," game director Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku. "We don't want people to feel ripped off."
Though Blizzard wasn't ready to talk pricing, the developer might have suggested which way they are leaning based on answers they gave to other questions.
For example, Blizzard plans to add more unique heroes over time, similar to what Riot Games does with champions in League of Legends. "We kind of see this as an infinitely expandable universe. Now I doubt it'll have, like, 800 heroes. But what we're excited about is that there's no shortage of ideas or space to explore that would risk homogenizing any of our current characters," Kaplan said. If they were to follow a model similar to LoL, Blizzard could charge in-game currency to unlock new heroes, or allow players to purchase the heroes as they are released with real cash.
There's also going to be character customization and "skins" which, like LoL, will only affect the appearance of characters — not their actual abilities. "But we really like character customization and you've seen it across other games. Probably expect something there," Kaplan teased. Again, this is another opportunity for Blizzard to charge microtransactions to buy alternative costumes/outfits for your heroes.
Just reading over Kaplan's response, Overwatch very much sounds like a game that could adopt and thrive on a free-to-play model. It has the look and feel of Team Fortress 2 (another free-to-play game), and a character approach similar to League of Legends. Adding to the possibility is the fact that Blizzard has started embracing free-to-play with games like Hearthstone.
So while we'll seemingly have to wait for Blizzard to announced official pricing details, Overwatch certainly sounds like a game built with free-to-play in mind. And that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
