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Cowboy Bebop skins have slithered into Overwatch 2's in-game store, but you can just as easily buy the entire anime series physically for the same price as one single crossover cosmetic.
Overwatch 2 has been experimenting with crossover events for over a year now, welcoming anime One Punch Man, K-Pop Idols Le Sserafim, and corporate sibling Diablo 4 into the perennial hero shooter's always chaotic world. The latest collaborative event sees four Overwatch heroes (Ashe, Cassidy, Sombra, and Mauga) dressed up as characters from the classic anime Cowboy Bebop.
But each crossover has been met with widespread head-shaking because of overpriced cosmetics, and this event is no different since every Cowboy Bebop character skin costs 2,500 Overwatch coins, roughly equivalent to $25 or £21.
The Overwatch community, as expected, has been loudly outspoken against these monetization practices, especially when the sort-of-sequel's cosmetics cost nearly as much as the original game - which was actually deleted when its free-to-play successor launched.
$25 *PER SKIN*25 DOLLARSPER SKINTWENTY FIVE UNITED STATES DOLLARSFOR EACH OVERWATCH SKINYou could get Helldivers 2 for less than the price of two of these skins.You could buy so many whole-ass games for less than ONE of these skins.Don't let nostalgia blind you. pic.twitter.com/Dm1n5rTka5March 13, 2024
Twitter user Maple Hatenashi points out that for $25 you can instead buy, well, lots of things. Other games. The complete Cowboy Bebop series discounted on Amazon. Food - not much food in this economy, but still, food. Physical Cowboy Bebop merch that can't be deleted from existence whenever a billion-dollar company feels like it.
Annoyingly overpriced limited-time cosmetics are probably the least of Overwatch 2's current problems as the development team struggles to balance a seemingly unbalanceable roster of characters. Almost half of the characters were recently tweaked following a seismic update that gave every Damage hero a self-healing passive ability.
In semi-related news, Microsoft recently laid off almost 2,000 employees across its gaming division - including staff at the Overwatch team - to create a more "sustainable cost structure."
