The Overwatch 2 skin grind is so bad that players are turning to World of Warcraft gold farming

Overwatch 2 sombra emp animation blizzard image — (Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Overwatch 2 is so stingy with its coins that players have found converting World of Warcraft gold to WoW tokens to be a much faster way of unlocking cosmetics in the free-to-play hero shooter.

You can get a handful of Overwatch Coins, the game's real-money currency, by doing weekly challenges. There are diminishing returns on those challenges, but doing all 11 every week will get you a total of 60 Overwatch Coins. That's the equivalent of $0.60. Yes, 60 US cents. The battle pass is $10, and many skins are $20. It's a long, long grind to get anything from playing the game.

The exact math on how much you can earn in WoW is beyond the scope of this story - and varies wildly depending on your time investment - but there are big chunks of the playerbase that pay their subscription fees exclusively through in-game gold. That's $15 a month through gameplay, which isn't a lot, but it is substantially better than the $2.40 you'd get from four weeks of completing challenges in Overwatch 2.

World of Warcraft players spend their gold on the auction house for WoW Tokens, which you can redeem either for 30 days of game time or $15 for your Battle.net account. That means you can indirectly spend WoW gold for items in pretty much any Blizzard game, including Overwatch 2 - a fact that's turned into a bit of a talking point among fans.

It's not exactly a fair comparison, given that Overwatch 2 is completely free-to-play and World of Warcraft still requires a monthly subscription, plus expansion purchases to keep up with the current content. With that in mind, it's not so weird that WoW gives a little extra back to its players. The comparison starts to measure up a little closer when you consider that even the paid Overwatch 2 battle pass doesn't offer any coins back to players, however.

The real dark secret, of course, is that if you're treating these games as jobs, you'll find them miserable as both games and jobs - $15 a month doesn't quite reach the US minimum wage, after all. But it does highlight just how poorly-received Overwatch 2's monetization has been.

Overwatch 2's Halloween event has similarly been disappointing on the pricing front, but it does paint a good picture for PvE.

TOPICS

CATEGORIES

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.