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.

Source link