Alright, let’s talk about this whole Kiriko skins thing in Overwatch. I’ve been playing Overwatch since the first one, so when Overwatch 2 dropped, I jumped right in, obviously. New hero, Kiriko, seemed pretty neat, support role, teleporting, throwing kunai – cool stuff.
So I started playing her, getting the feel for her abilities. Then I started looking at the cosmetics, you know, the skins. That’s when things started feeling… different. Right away, you noticed the big change: the Battle Pass and the shop. No more loot boxes, everything was either grind the pass or pay up directly in the store.
My First Look at Her Skins
Kiriko launched with a few skins. Some were in that first Battle Pass, including that Mythic one, Amaterasu. Looked fancy, customizable, pretty cool tech, gotta admit. But then you looked at the shop. Skins popped up there costing quite a bit, like 20 bucks worth of coins sometimes. I remember seeing one, the Hinotori I think, and thinking, “Okay, it’s alright… but is it 20 dollars alright?” It just felt kinda… simple? Compared to legendary skins we used to get in the old days through loot boxes or just regular credits.
Then I started noticing the chatter online. Went over to the usual spots, Reddit, forums, places like that. And wow, people were really fired up about Kiriko’s skins specifically. It wasn’t just general complaining about the new monetization, though there was plenty of that too. It seemed Kiriko’s stuff really rubbed people the wrong way.
What People Were Saying
From what I gathered, digging through threads and comments, the main issues seemed to be:
- Price: This was the big one. People felt the standalone shop skins were way overpriced for what you got.
- Bundles: Often, you couldn’t just buy the skin. You had to buy a bundle with other stuff – voice lines, sprays, maybe a charm – that you didn’t necessarily want, just to get the skin. Felt like a way to inflate the price.
- Quality/Effort: Some folks felt the shop skins just weren’t that creative or detailed compared to older skins or even Kiriko’s own Battle Pass skins. Like less effort was going into the stuff they were charging premium prices for.
- Availability: The whole FOMO thing. Shop skins rotate, so it’s ‘buy now or maybe miss out forever’. Felt manipulative to some.
Playing the game myself, I kinda saw where they were coming from. I didn’t buy any of those initial expensive shop skins for her. They just didn’t grab me enough to justify the price tag. And seeing them locked behind those bundles just felt annoying. It felt less about collecting cool stuff and more about calculating if a purchase was ‘worth it’, which takes some fun out of it.
Compared to the old Overwatch… man, it’s just night and day. We used to earn loot boxes constantly. Sure, it was random, but you always felt like you were getting something. Now, earning currency is slow, and the prices are high. It created this feeling, especially around Kiriko’s launch, that the cool stuff was mostly for the whales, the big spenders.
So yeah, the “Kiriko Overwatch skins controversy”… I lived through it as a player. It wasn’t just online drama; you felt it in the game, looking at the shop, deciding what you could or couldn’t get. It felt like Blizzard was testing the waters with the new model, maybe pushing a bit too hard right out of the gate, especially with a brand new hero everyone was excited about. Hopefully, they took some of that feedback to heart. We’ll see.
