overwatch logoBlizzard’s Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are free-to-play titles. They rely on microtransactions in order to generate revenue, like paying for new heroes, costumes, booster packs, expansions, and more. However with Overwatch, Blizzard has decided to opt to go back to their roots.

This means that for those who aren’t fans of microtransactions and the free-to-play model, you will be pleased to learn that you just need to pay for the game once and you’re good to go. So why is that? Blizzard has supposedly been making a small fortune from Hearthstone just by selling expansions and booster packs, so why not apply that model to Overwatch?

Speaking to Polygon in an interview during BlizzCon 2015, the game’s director Jeff Kaplan explained that this was because of one of the core features of Overwatch, which is hero-switching mid-match. By introducing a free-to-play model, the developers felt that the game would not have been fully realized had it been that way.

According to Kaplan, “A lot of the free-to-play models that we were exploring involved people not having access to enough heroes to make those team compositions actually viable. We really didn’t want to change the core gameplay and limit it in some way just to make the game free-to-play.”

He also adds, “What you see is what you get; here’s the game, here’s the 21 heroes, we think they’re amazing, we think the the gameplay’s fantastic. That traditional [business] model removed some of that stress of, if [one player] needs to be Roadhog and [one] needs to be Junkrat, [the team can do that]. They’re all going to be available to you — have it all.” As it stands, Overwatch is currently available for pre-purchase.

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