Is the Overwatch 2 Battle Pass Design Broken?

since it's launch in October 2022 OverWatch 2 has exceeded 100 million users with an estimated 20 million monthly active users now many estimates today Peg the battle pass feature as generating between 30 to 60% of a shooter games Revenue however the general perception of the OverWatch 2 battle pass from its players is mixed and certainly a source of extensive discussion within its Gaming Community in our discussion today independent game developer Ted Park and Chris Cobb the CTO and co-founder of pragma who also formerly worked on meta systems at Riot nether game companies joined me to review and discuss the OverWatch 2 battle pass in depth we discuss the structure strengths and weaknesses of the current battle pass customization and player choice as well as monetization strategies and player perception of value if you have interest in battlepass you should definitely check it out stay tuned and coming at you right now

all right hey guys welcome I thought we could start with just an overview of the OverWatch 2 battle pass and Ted I know you've written this article about the Battle pass uh thank you for that but can you just break down the structure of the battle pass for our audience who maybe have not read the post and maybe also highlight some of the key differences with respect to say another popular battle pass shooter battle pass like fortnite for example yeah sure so overwatch's battle pass is pretty typical it's a linear structure where you earn XP and then you rank up and get to the next tier and the only way to unlock tiers is if you unlock the tiers before it and that's pretty much kind of what you see in most battle passes the difference between let's say like fortnite is fortnite has kind of evolved and made it so that you don't necessarily have to unlock the earlier

tiers to in order to unlock certain tiers you can kind of choose what tiers you want to unlock in whichever order okay and Chris if you were to like try to characterize maybe like even more generally maybe some of the key differences if we were to look at some of the major Shooters valerant I don't know if you worked on valerant when when you were at Riot but like valerant fortnite CS2 Marvel Rivals if you were to just kind of talk about the general key differences among some of the battle passes that you see how would you characterize that yeah I think if you zoom all the way out and just talk about the Battle pass as a structure I mean it was this kind of brilliant innovation in monetization strategies because it mixes the idea of Engagement and monetization together so it has this beautiful blend of you're inviting somebody to monetize but you're also asking them to keep coming back and playing the game and in a free-to-play ecosystem it's really critical to have a highly engaged audience who are going to show up so I think that that's kind of the you know why it's become so prevalent and so

successful I think where we've seen again some of that Evolution has been from the static linear track to this more like page-based where you know players get to choose which pieces to unlock so there's a little bit more Choice that's been added over time I think you've also can see the kind of evolution of multitrack systems so for example with valerant you've got what amounts to a battle pass but for these unlock tracks to unlock something specialized to a particular hero so you've also see this in like Call of Duties where they'll have special event based tracks that are basically mini battle passes so I think what we've seen over time is the kind of original linear structure it's still there it still works it's still effective um but over time you've seen either the addition of more choice in that path or more specialization where you've got multi-track kind of systems and you might have three different tracks that you're working on at once and that kind of gets into some of our topics later about player choice and like being able to pursue you know unlocking content you're actually interested in now I think one of the

most interesting impacts of the battle pass when you think a little bit more kind of strategically so a lot of the shooters are very gameplay oriented and especially on like I come from the mobile side where there's a lot of systems orientation whereas for a lot of HD games there's a lot of orientation in terms of the gaml but what what I thought was interesting was that it it feels like one of the big impacts of battle pass to a shooter or largely gameplay oriented game is to kind of add the metal layer to otherwise very gameplay oriented game but maybe we could also talk about for example from a player experience when you think about that impact of and kind of Ted going back to you as far as the OverWatch 2 battle pass in particular how do you think the how do you think that battle pass is different from a player perspective relative to some of these other shooter games yeah so OverWatch is primarily hero focused and one of one of the issues that come up

when you have a fear based game is people have Mains and they kind of want to acquire Cosmetics items specifically for their Mains and the problem with having kind of a linear structure where we have to make a set set amount of content for to battle pass is most likely you're just going to skip over people's Mains and that's kind of probably one of the big issues that blizzard is probably deal with right now is you know which Mains which Heroes do I focus on for this battle pass and ultimately uh you make a decision of okay we're GNA focus on these Heroes versus these Heroes and I did a bit of research on the season 13 battle pass and trying to figure out is there some sort of common Trend between the heroes that they've chosen and what I've kind of found is they did primarily focus on the heroes

that have lower uh pick rates so pretty much a majority 70 70% of the heroes uh for the battle pass they were kind of all on kind of the bottom 50% tier in terms of pick rates yeah just jumping on like so this was something that came up for League of Legends for a very long time which is the you know how much Choice do players have in terms of selection of skins and so it's a real challenging thing for a studio because you're going to spend approximately the same amount of time money resources generating content and so there's always the debate of do we just keep doubling down on the most popular stuff or do we try to like spread that out and it's an interesting Dynamic on a a battle pass because again players are kind of on a track and you know even those systems with more player choice often times it's still you have a collection of decisions to make it's not a purely free choice of like just being able to specialize on one um hero and I think there's a lot of appeal from a player experience perspective but there are mechanical challenges of a studio is

like they only have so many resources time money to to build so it's definitely an interesting Dynamic for League of Legends hero Champions that were really really popular like Teemo might have a dozen skins and then a less popular Champion would have two so it's definitely an interesting thing for you know a studio to prioritize right and so Ted what is your opinion on this as far as the decision made and how how how do you think that do you think that's the best way of doing it or what do you think I think um I I don't know kind of the decision- making that went behind the choice of Heroes um but I do I can kind of say from a players perspective I mean I kind of talk about it in the article but you know my Mains weren't actually kind of represented in the battle pass so I can see if I was a player and my Mains aren't in the battle pass I can kind of choose did it impact your decision to buy though or did you buy it anyway I mean to hon I for the article but

okay at the at the end after basically unlocking everything I still kind of felt like o like I I still kind of feel bad because I have all these new skins now for these Heroes that I don't play and it's like oh well no one's going to see these because I never really played them you know what one of the things that I think about when it comes to battle pass I mean there's there's several ways that battle passes are different in terms of like season duration the kind of rewards as well as just from a player perspective like how grindy in in terms of the uh progression some of these battle passes are and so what what do you guys like how would you characterize OverWatch in that way with respect to maybe some of the other more popular shooter game battle passes like how would you characterize that and do you think it was a good choice for OverWatch too I'd say from an XP perspective I didn't feel like it was really that grindy on average I could probably unlock like one tier of the battle pass

every day just cuz with the daily challenges it was and it was almost enough XP to kind of unlock one tier and then you know if we spread out part for about eight weeks for a season I didn't I never felt like I didn't have enough XP to C go through the entire battle pass and you also add on to that there's weekly challenges and also event challenges so you definitely have X to get through it um I think the only issue I have is one one of the daily challenges is you have to win a game and sometimes with a herob based shoer or you have to rely so much on your team winning is not always guaranteed so sometimes you might be playing a lot of matches and you just have a terrible losing streak um that that's not to say I'm the best OverWatch player either yeah I think there's some really interesting Dynamics on the grindy and it really a lot of those

properties mix together because the battle pass duration has a big effect on the player experience because I've seen four-week battle passes and the reality is whatever rate per day you're expecting players to kind of earn if they come in late there's just very little time in terms of catchup and catchup is a really challenging thing because on the one hand uh you don't want all players who miss the start of a battle pass to opt out because they don't think they can make it on the flip side if you make it too kind of easy then you're kind of losing out on that engagement ask so it's a really challenging thing to calibrate and then you also have the risk of those Quest systems like how much are they pushing players outside of their comfort zone um as far as again like winning a game is something that I guess every player is trying to pursue but you've also it's not uncommon to do things like oh play this other game mode or play this particular hero and one uh strategy we used uh for dauntless that I was really kind of proud of was this idea of if we want to ask players to do something a little outside their comfort

zone actually give them two choices so it might be play three games is the daily but then it's like wins count for two or something like that right and that way you can kind of say like you'll be rewarded extra or you'll go faster if you kind of opt into what the quest is asking you to do but if you want to grind it out slower so you can stay more in your comfort zone giving players a little optionality I think can be really beneficial because the optimizers are going to just change their play style and try to do it as fast as possible the people who just want to show up and do their thing can still participate so I think can be a really valuable way to both encourage players to try something different but not force it and so maybe I can also ask you guys a question well I'm going to ask you guys this question about for example a lot of these choices that you can make in terms of the level of grindin in terms of potentially the length of a battle pass season or how do you treat ketchup and things like that I I'd love to kind of hear what you guys think about how you would make these kinds of decisions or what do you think should go into that kind of a decision

but before that the one other question I want to ask you because I also want to ask you as far about the question of like costing of the battle pass so let me first ask an economic question then I'd like to also ask your thoughts in terms of how you would think about a lot of these specific battle pass characteristics but so this question I want to ask in terms of the value of monetary value compared to other battle passes when you think about the spend and I think you've got the the basic battle pass you've got a premium and you've got like the ultimate bundle and so I was wondering if you guys could talk about the kind of value you think players are getting for the OverWatch battle pass and then in terms of the pricing how would you guys think about that especially with respect to some of the other battle passes and other shooter games yeah I mean I'd say from a numbers perspective if you just look purely from an economical standpoint based on how they kind of price all the items I mean for the pre-own track you

spend $10 and you get $168 worth of content I mean obviously that sounds like a good return on investment but um in reality when you kind of look into the items themselves uh you can kind of see like a majority of them are just you know name cards and player icons so you kind of have to ask yourself is that really a good value for players because um actually like player icons and name cards you actually only see in the menus you don't actually see them in game you don't see other people's like icons or cards in game so the only real things you actually see are Victory poses skins some you can also see like the little charms on weapons which you only really see yourself it just makes you feel good cuz you have a little cat on your gun or something like that so I think there could be a little bit more work done to help um improve

the value of from a player perspective I think it's relatively similarly priced to to other battle passes right but but but maybe I can also ask you you've got the premium track you got Premium Plus skips which is like $20 or $22 or something like that and then you've got the ultimate bundle which is like $40 how do you view the the value amongst those three and what what do you think the split is like when when you think about most players do you think a lot of them are going for some of that like Premium Plus or or ultimate bundle so yeah I'll jump in and one thing that I think's I guess I want to call out the ultimate bundle as something a little different because they're basically adding unique content in that purchase compared to the regular battle pass track and personally I think that that creates an a weird kind of choice for a player because most of the time most games also have a store where players can buy content direct so blending that together I'm not sure how I feel about that I think players are now being being pulled in two directions at once which

is do I want these particular pieces of content and really if you separate it it's like well are those worth $30 compared to the $10 you know basic battle pass so to me there's just kind of a conflation of that particular offer skips are a really interesting property everything I've seen on them is that they generally don't perform very well but they're kind of a gravy on top kind of quality which is they definitely serve as a catch-up mechanic um but practically I don't think they're heavily engaged and what I've often times seen is they're pretty expensive you know if you think about again if you zoom out and ask what a battle pass is it is basically an opt-in subscription model right because you're buying some you're paying some amount and then you're getting this kind of content track over time as long as you keep showing up and so for me I've always championed a little bit different mindset of maybe there's a subscription and a premium subscription when the extra battle pass purchase is we'll just accelerate your progress by 10 levels at a dollar a pop to me it's just that question of how many players are engaged enough to want to be on that track of

you know grinding out a battle pass but they're not uh excited actually to go all the way through so I've never found skips to be a very compelling offer again they're probably additive they're not um really detracting but I've always questioned that approach versus either one thing is the price they could just be cheaper and again a way to think about that is what if you paid $20 instead of 10 and effectively your speed of progress through the battle pass is accelerated by 50% so you get it that much faster to me that Dynamic so maybe XP boost for example might be a different tool whereas the skips just feel like an opt out of the engagement part of it and so I've never loved it yeah yeah one way you could also think about it is it's almost like there are a few tiers of pricing for the same items right and so when you think about di direct IP purchase then you've got a sale and then you've got a battle pass so it's almost like a double price anchor right and so I I guess maybe for

that small part of the audience that's time poor money Rich so you're just trying to but but also trying to get that discount I don't know what do you think Ted do you have any specific views on on the pricing and the value for the various kinds of SKS offered for battle pass I also agree with Chris it does feel like I mean me personally I never felt like I wanted to buy the the skips because I felt like it was like oh I'm like I I just didn't value skipp like I still wanted to kind of like play the game and I didn't really want to play for the privilege of not playing the game but also from kind of like the the ultimate um bundle perspective it did kind of go back to you know back to the hero you know hero Choice dilemma which is okay like they offer two skins and it could be for Heroes that you don't really care for like I think it was like Winston or Ciro or something like that that they they offered and I I

don't mean those Heroes so I don't know if I really want to you know spend extra money just to get more skins for Heroes that I don't I don't personally play and yeah I I do think blizzard has kind of a dilemma where they also have a store so they're kind of trying to figure out you know what content do I want to put in the battle pass and what content do I want to put in the store because I assume you guys can probably put give more insight to this but I assume they do make more money from the store just because it's just you can price it you know price skins higher than the battle pass and then the people that really want those Skins are going to actually give it and just buy you know the 20 $30 $40 skin and putting that into the like battle pass if you have players that are willing to kind of pay more money for those skins does kind of feel like Miss economic Economic Opportunity maybe now going back to my other question and I'm

interested in this because we're about I'm working on a shooter game now I'm about to redesign the battle pass and so I love to hear your thoughts as far as these various characteristics of the battle pass whe whether it's the length of the battle pass how you think about the value of the Rewards or the grindin or the pricing how do you guys think if you guys were to design one or Ted from for you from a player perspective like what what goes into your mind when you think about some of those characteristics you do you guys have any strong opinions on on how you should be making decisions on those things I think at start it just kind of comes down to the game design itself OverWatch is just kind of like a unique game where it's herob based you know players have their Mains and so it's kind of hard to create a battle pass without some sorts a little bit of personalization um if if your hero was featured in a battle pass then you're

probably more likely to buy that battle pass than if it didn't have your hero um and and so I think you just kind of kind of think about that include you know those those conversations at the start is like what kind of game is what kind of game is your shooter and honestly if you have if it's like fortnite where you know every like character plays the same every skin plays the same then it's a little easier to design a battle pass than herob base she like OverWatch or Apex or valerant but you're you're saying for a herob based one uh because you have your specific main you would prefer some form of custom customization as far as the battle pass now I think Call of Duty mobile has some level of customization I believe I I forget but I think they do have something like that as well yeah it's a really interesting thing because if you go back to the history so like how battle passes came about you know they started actually in the mobile space and they were known as annuities and it was really a very

simple structure it was just that you would pay your $5 or $10 subscription effectively for a 30-day pass and it was just that you would get premium currency at a drip rate every day and the quality of that was effectively you're getting a discount on price to ensure that you came back each day and one of the properties of that again going back to some of those Originals it's like 2010 era you know it was just premium currency and then you could spend it however you want and I think fortnite really popularized this more content heavy track where they started providing specific pieces of content rather than just dripping the premium currency and I think that the point is well made that the game design will affect this I mean there are a lot of hero or class-based games right valerant League of Legends and a lot of them so I do think it matters though because really what you're asking yourself as a player again is how much value do I get out of this and you might have a nominal value of oh I spent 10 bucks and I got1 $70 worth of content but in practice if almost none

of that content is relevant to you as a player then it doesn't matter that the game is telling me I'm getting $150 of cool stuff if it doesn't affect me this also gets into the tiering of the content right what are the S and a tier pieces like full hero Skins are generally going to be a more premium product than all these little name plates and and little tags so I think that it's important from a game design lens to think in terms of how do I provide that Universal appeal right and again game design if if it's Counter-Strike it just doesn't matter or fortnite all pieces of content are equally relevant so that's actually pretty helpful but the things I might be considering then is if I'm class-based I might lean a little heavier towards premium content drip and really I'm just offering the chance for the player to use that currency how they want those hero specific tracks like valerant has is a powerful utility of players being able to customize the track that they're on and and but again you have to weigh that in terms of Studio resources um so I think all these come into play and the Dynamics I would be leaning into are if

you want to maximize the appeal you probably need to tailor the content of the battle Pass based on whether or not there's a chance players look at that and walk away because they're not interested about the specific pieces um I again I really do think the battle pass duration matters on two fronts one is the quality of to me one of the biggest challenges crack is how long players basically the catch-up mechanics how long are players expected to be in the battle pass to earn it and what are the chances of a player coming in late and catching up so I I think four weeks is really aggressive and short on at the same time if you go 3 months if the price is the same 10 bucks now you've spread your subscription out over you know it's really just $3 per month so I think that that's a dynamic to to way I am much more keen on a catchup mechanic like again maybe that instead of selling somebody 10 skips as the extra premium the super premium battle pass I'd rather get that 30% 50% XP bonus and that just means I get to grind it faster and if players want that on day one they can

opt into it but if they show up on time they get a kind of a discount because they know they'll have enough time so there are some qualities I would think about yeah and Chris thanks for the history lesson I I didn't know that the the origin of the battle pass I I always thought it came from DOTA but that's great to know in maybe like the the other thing that is relevant for a lot of battle passes is like some form of main Chase like the ultimate reward and I I know there's been some changes to the OverWatch 2 b pass and now it's Mystic prisms that allows you to select a Mystic s sort of cosmetic but can you guys talk about what you guys think in terms of the impact or like how how one should think about that that ultimate Chase in a battle pass and then more specifically how do you think that this is manifested in the OverWatch 2 battle pass it some of the decisions that that were made in terms of the like main reward and then the way that they've kind of changed it do you guys think

those were good choices how do you guys feel about that today I would say kind of the what the battle pass represents to me is you know a sense of progression at the end of the day and kind of anything that kind of shows off that you are progressing you know through the battle pass not just from completing tears and just seeing those tear will fill up but being able to see like a reward that kind of represents that you've actually gone through the battle pass I just feel like that's just more compelling to me as a player and from a game design perspective I think it's just it's just cool to kind of like think about okay like how do I design a reward that kind of represents that progression and I think the Mystic um prisms are just like a great way to show that because the way they work is you know you you buy like the initial skin with the tokens and then uh you want to upgrade that skin and make it look more

flashier you have to spend spend these tokens and then you kind of just threw that into the battle pass as just like a reward for every page um so yeah and and maybe for our audience who's not familiar maybe we could kind of describe the the kind of how it works right so I and you please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is the way that used to work is that you'd have to you have to grind till level 80 to get the Mythic skin then they changed it so that once you get to level 80 you get Mystic prisms and then you get to choose which Mythic cosmetic you get right well so actually now it's so there's you know Eight Pages of the battle pass and each page you get 10 Mystic prisms so and to buy the initial skin you spend 50 Mystic prisms and then if you want to upgrade it you you have have to spend another 10 Mystic

prisms right so so now it's not as binary they've kind of like made it a little bit more Progressive and so what what do you guys think about this choice I mean what was the impact of this change do you guys like it do you guys not like it yeah I mean I'll just jump I I really do think it's excellent as a more generic premium currency that then players get to choose what they allocated to so I think it does come to help address some of the stuff Ted is Raising about the frustration of hair based content not fitting so I think it's an excellent structure I know Studios have played with a lot of different mechanisms I've seen really interesting results so for example I've seen battle passes only put the kind of s tier the really premium thing at the very end and the problem again is if players aren't sure they're going to make it it really dissuades them from purchasing on the flip side you might see front loading the premium content just for unlocking effectively you're getting a free prize as part of your battle pass unlock but then you also have a CH a challenge there with engagement which is like if there's only B tier content at the end of the chase

then players just pay for it and they don't necessarily keep showing up which again in a free-to-play game so what I the patterns I've seen that have been successful are maybe you get a a tier content unlock uh at the outset and that has some kind of upgrade potential for S tier at the end which is like you're kind of giving them a nice reward at the beginning and also incentivizing them to go and this structure feels like another evolution of that which I I really am impressed by because again it gives players choice and it's kind of encouraging them to get to the end and ensuring that that prize at the end is universally you know valuable for players as opposed to what if it's just for a particular hero and again a bunch of players just opt out okay so if you if you guys see me launch a game that copies this and you'll know where it came from it's good pattern yeah Chris brings up a good point which is sometimes you just don't really care about the upgrades you just kind of care about like getting the initial skin

because I mean honestly even though it gets a little bit more flasher I mean some depending on what kind of player you are you don't really care about that and the nice thing is you can kind of go like complete the battle pass like halfway and you can get a Mystic skin and then it's kind of up to a player it's like okay do I want to keep grinding out the battle pass or am I good with this Mystic skin and I feel like I don't feel as much pressure to completely as much yeah that touches on we've touched around it but again the the question of grinding right which kind of started with that but I wanted to loop back around there because I think so I've tried to coin a term like I call it the golden ratio but it is the relationship between how much money you spend and how much time it takes to earn that same amount of content so an example uh you know when Star Wars Battlefront 2 came out they were just got absolutely panned as far as it being so extremely grindy it might cost you 40 hours of game playay time in

order to earn something that was being sold for $10 or $20 and at that ratio players are just like you're asking me to just spend a huge amount of time and one way to think about that is how much are players getting paid in content for their time and I think you have to I I'd say that's the most critical battle pass balance um feature uh because when people when you're too stingy then you're just um punishing players don't feel like they're it's worth their time and on the other hand if you're too generous which is probably less common but it's happened players just get in and out and they're like great I spent three hours I got everything I wanted and now I'm I don't have any impulse so you know numbers around a dollar per hour in that on that order $130 is is a number that I think makes good sense players feel like okay if you go back to like a Hearthstone it's like if I can earn about a pack an hour roughly that's a pretty compelling they're like okay I'm going to play for an hour and grind it and DA's are your tool to to calibrate this cuz you don't want it to

be a dollar per hour indefinitely because a player grinds for 12 hours in a single day and suddenly they've got all the content so you use Quest systems to kind of regulate that but it's a really important factor and I'd say when you're too stingy players just feel betrayed they feel like it's too expensive they don't want it's too grindy and I'd say like a Legends of Renta really struggled with the fact that they were so generous in giving you the Universal card unlocks instead of opening a pack that players were able to Target their deck and earn it so fast that they just stopped caring about continuing to accumulate content so you have to you have to balance that and I think it matters a ton I'm coming from the mobile side so for me loot boxes are just a natural part of life but when we're talking about OverWatch 2 blizzard is in reintroducing loot boxes as a reward for some of the tiers in the battle pass do you guys have any thoughts on this and since you know you guys are more on the the HD side yeah you you'd have a much stronger perspective than than I would for

sure yeah it's kind of funny that Chris brings up on Battlefront too because I believe their their issue was everything was gated behind loot boxes and it took forever to unlock things so it's kind of interesting that OverWatch is going back to reintroducing loot boxes and um from what I've seen as players are actually excited about it and I think it it kind of goes you know goes back to kind of the content drip is like how much content are players um getting and one of the one of the issues I have I've seen people kind of raise is the content drip is really slow because like I mentioned before you know in a battle pass sometimes you're working super hard to get to the next tier but then you unlock a player icon and you're just like oh this kind of just feels more like a waste but how it kind of worked in OverWatch one was every time you leveled up you'd get a loot box and that

was exciting for players because even though you know you could open up a loot box and it's just nothing at least you had kind of like a chance to get a super cool skin for your main there's always a kind of sense of you could get something cool um and I think that's kind of what blizzard is trying to bring back that sense because with the battle pass it's you know when you're able to kind of see the rewards and see what exactly what you're going to get in the next tier then it's kind of like it's a little less compelling for you to want to go through the battle pass or even just buy the battle pass in the first place yeah like imagine two or three of the higher tier items are just not interesting to you and suddenly now it's like the next interesting reward is 20 levels away right I think as a player that can be really discouraging yeah I mean I have pretty mixed thoughts around loot boxes I think that obviously they're a really contentious topic and I mean I would say the the anticipation

reward cycle of getting a present of of a surprise is something we all understand and obviously on the kind of negative side of that you can get into gambling addiction properties and and things that are problematic on the flip side is this idea of you know even going back to single player RPGs from 30 years ago there's still the like open the the treasure chest in the dungeon and hopefully you get some cool weapons so I think that those have always been a part of games and I think the the consideration in terms of how effective a loot box system is has something to do with again there's always the price you know and what's going to what's it going to cost and what's in there I I think where things really get off rails or when you start selling power I mean some games just Embrace that and that's just part of the ecosystem and so players know what to expect but I know games like League of Legends that was kind of the a core tenant they were like we're not doing you can't sell power and by staying cosmetic only it allows a loot box system to stay very opt in it's like some players they can show up and be uccessful playing the game and for Shooters I think that that's very

relevant is you know kind of preserving the competitive Integrity so I think sticking with Cosmetics the other question gets back to one of usefulness is like there's the hope I get something great but you're still kind of I always liking it to would you go to the store and buy you know a box and then open it up and be like I hope it's a shirt and I hope it fits me so there's still that Dynamic but I I think that if it's calibrated to Cosmetics if it's upped in I think it can be useful on the flip side I've always appreciated the model of just a store like you know it's a nice to say I spent $10 I got a cool skin right and maybe the other question I can ask is about IP and so the more popular shooter games integrate seasonal I you know sort of Ip based themes as part of the battle pass and so how important do you think that is when you're whether you're doing the the Marvel or the anime or the ninja whatever integration is part of the

battle pass how important is that IP integration to help sell the battle pass how much of an impact do you have do you think it's required at this point for maybe perhaps for the bigger games or do you think it it would work just as well without it I I can speak to this from a personal level I'm actually the first battle pass I've ever bought was when uh fortnite had the marble collab a couple months ago and I just kind of looked at the Battle pass I was like oh look at all these cool cool skins based on marel IP I was like okay let me let me try this out so I do I do think from a p's perspective there is that benefit now obviously you kind of need familiar with the IP so I know OverWatch had the my hero Academia collab in their store and that's only really appealing to anime fans which I'm sure the overlap between OverWatch fans and anime fans is huge but I do think it's kind of like a good

way to kind of get people into the door I mean look at marble Rivals like and how big that is right now I mean that's you can't really say that the interest for my rivals was not because of Marvel right and feel like Mar Marvel was the whole appeal but maybe to your point Ted maybe the point is like by using kind of like very specific IP what you're trying to do is you're trying to convert some of your base audience that normally would not have bought a battle pass but now because they have this specific IP that they do have an affinity with they'll at least try it and hopefully once they try the battle pass then they'll like oh actually this is kind of a cool thing and then they'll like start to convert for future battle passes maybe that's the way that it works I I know what do you think Chris yeah I think I mean you could probably separate kind of battle pass theming from kind of Ip license deals because I think we all understand the properties of like an IP license Arrangement is again it's an invitation of trying to cross over you

know a fandom from one property to another so I think there's appeal there and obviously it just gets into dollars and cents and you know being able to to negotiate that where it gets into themes CU let's just ignore IP license deals for a moment and just talk about like a pirate theme or a anime them you know just a more generic theme for the game I think it kind of gets back to that same question of choice because you know I've I've seen data kind of behind the scenes on a couple projects that I've worked on in games I've worked on where we saw a real difference in adoption of the battle Pass based on the theme if it was a popular theme that people were excited about they they joined in so it's a tough one because the more opinionated you are in your content choices the more excitement you're going to get from the audience that enjoys that but the higher risk that some part of the population opts out I will say that like you know fortnite did not feel very strategic early on I mean it just felt like a shotgun of any kind of all kinds of just crazy wild stuff obviously that got more systematic over time and they started doing these massive IP crossovers um but

there I do appreciate the fact that early on there was just massive quantities of skins all over the place and there's you know the banana skin and there's just all sorts of weird stuff so I I guess I don't know what the answer is but I do think volume has an effect if some if there's something for everyone I think that that can be useful and it's just a question of like yeah I don't know I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't know that it's required to have a theme okay but I do think that there's it's a c it's a trade-off it's really I have heard that the marel Skins sell the most in fortnite compared to all the other skins so there is that yeah again IP crossovers I mean that's if you're a worldwide multi-billion dollar property then that will always be true that's why I wanted to separate the IP licensing because like if you can go after a property that is massive then you're of course going to bring that in so that is really about business cloud like is your game you know draw enough attention to be bble to land those deals I think that there's no doubt about the Strategic

importance of that so there there are a lot of these shooter games they have these different characteristics as we mentioned different kinds of rewards and and different kinds of features so when you compare the OverWatch 2 battle pass to fortnite to Marvel rivals or any of these other battle passes and the other shooter games what what do you think are any specific lessons or Inspirations that we can take from some of those other battle passes that could potentially be applied to help improve the OverWatch to battle pass anything you guys can think of I think it goes back to tier unlocks fortnite and Marvel riales they have it so that you collect the currency every time you level up and then you can use that currency to kind of buy whatever tier you want to and obviously you got to kind of gate gate the the later later Pages just cuz you know you don't want someone to just go all the way to the end of the battle pass and be like all right I'm going to unlock the reward right now I have a

question about that actually sorry to jump in but I've haven't stayed up with kind of the latest Innovations on the page based and the unlock based patterns but is it the case that you're allowed to kind of move to the next page without unlocking the entirety of the the pager on so I believe for fortnite you do have to kind of unlock some of the some of the tiers beforehand before you can go to next page um but I I was just checking out Marvel Rivals this morning just to you know refresh myself but Marvel Rivals is it's just gated by how much of the battle uh battle pass currency you have so if you want to let's say unlock page five or something like that there's like a threshold of currency that you have to earn before beforehand so it'll say like oh you need like a thousand more currency total currency earned okay yeah call that out because I think the original version of the page based unlock for fortnite basically required that you filled out

the entire page and for me that was very much a false choice because it was like sure you could get the like one thing you wanted at the beginning of your grind for that page but originally you still had to fill out the rest of the page I I much prefer the idea of basically a soft gating which is maybe you have to unlock seven out of 10 pieces of a page so that you can kind of opt out of the few things you don't want or just doing like your total earned amount it is a interesting idea so I definitely think if you can offer players real Choice again as a studio you still just have to weigh the cost of if you're but paying to produce content that isn't going to be you know utilized obviously hopefully you're learning as a studio but I definitely like the idea of offering some choice but you it's hard to go extreme on that like imagine there was one battle pass per hero it's like well that would be wonderful for every player turns out to produce that much content every eight weeks or whatever is probably impossible so that's kind of the trade-off but I love the idea of giving players more choice and I also think calibrating the custom content or you know hero specific

content versus like premium currency I really like the Mystic mechanism because it'll again you're giving players a currency that then they get to go choose how they want to use it maybe we could just end on one last question which is and and certainly when we think about kind of design choices for a battle pass you might have to balance like Revenue goals versus player experience but with respect to like maybe some of the changes that have um already been made in the OverWatch to two battle pass whether it's like um you know they used to lock Heroes behind tier 55 now free uh we've already discussed the changes they've made with u Mythic prison prisms maybe some of these changes or some design changes that you think you would make to help optimize battle pass like what would you guys anything come to mind any major changes you would make I had a couple ideas some of them might be a little controversial but um uh one was one idea

I had was you know if you let's say you know you don't like kind of reward that you got because it's not for your hero I was thinking potentially you could kind of trade that trade that in for currency and you can kind use that currency for other rewards in the store and I just I I do think it's kind of going back to you know being able to get stuff for your hero and I think it's it's not the best solution but at least it it is kind of you know it kind of gives players the opportunity like to kind of choose where or not it's like oh I do want to get this skin or I want to kind of like trade it in for something that I might potentially value more the other the other suggestion that can also be a little controversial is if you could kind of generate battle passes based on kind of all the content that you've already put into the game so it's kind of essentially like a loot box and

but instead of you know just having like a chance for it you know when you get a loot box you kind of just pull together like all the content that you already have in the game and you kind of generate a battle pass for it and that could be tailored to whatever whatever the player's preferences are um so sort of kind of just taking the algorithm that they already have for like the for you section of the store and just turning that into a battle pass but yeah I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on that yeah I think it's definitely you know a not uncommon strategy to let you kind of I always use the term dust but you know break down the piece of content you got I I know again Hearthstone I think popularized this idea League of Legends loot system they came up with allowed you to basically cash in the skin cards you didn't want for currency and there was some trade right it's like maybe you'd had to trade in five rare skins worth of skins you would have otherwise unlocked in order to lock the one rare skin that you wanted so I think that there I could totally imagine that being a tool and

again maybe it's like when you hit the unlock button it's like do you want the skin or do you want this much of the premium currency right and give players that choice I think could be a valuable mechanism just the idea of giving somebody and then being like here put it through the grinder there's just a little bit of like loss of version that I think kicks in of player like well what if I want to play that hero you know later so I think that's interesting but yeah if I zoom out I'd probably be considering core questions are how long you know I think four weeks is too little 3 months might be a little long I think weeks is a reasonable length of time thinking in terms of how demanding are you of players again in that hours per dollar of content or hours per unlock right and really thinking through okay I think they should be unlocking a battle pass tier once every hour and a half of gameplay or some number that is sane if it's too aggressive they feel betrayed it's too generous they'll just kind of dip out really quickly um I personally believe that unlocks uh the skips are just not a compelling structure I think selling XP boost is a more interesting one um there's this

other property that I think comes into play when you have quests that unlock Battle pass progress and the question is one of gating so this is another thing again Battlefront 2 was not the only game to do this they just felt like they adopted almost every player upsetting policy but they had this thing where they would hardgate your progress based on game modes so if you had one game mode that was your main they would let you get a little bit of progress and then they would just cut you off for the day and I think that there's a really easy solution to that which is just reduce the drip the XP Drip by 90% um you know you can make it so that you don't make much progress but the difference between zero and something I think is large so there's a question of if I've filled out my dailies and what weeklys I can right now can I still slow drip progress and I think it's an important question ask personally I prefer letting players slowly earn small amounts and it doesn't have to have too big an impact on the overall balance and then lastly it is the content design being conscientious that the more

tailored and specific the content is the more binary a players's opinion about it is going to be and so um I think either you should give players a way to opt out of to specific content or you can lean harder on the premium currency as a mechanism um to kind of balance between those two things I think players did have an issue with the battle pass in terms of there weren't there wasn't enough premium currency that was given um and I I know like I know fortnite's actually pretty generous with their premium currency in terms of in the battle pass like I think you have enough you have enough to buy the next battle pass and on top of it you can also buy uh like a a skin from the store um yeah that's a really profound choice is the question of can you infinite a battle pass because if the premium currency drop is sufficiently large than players who complete it um to me that just leans harder on the progression sorry the retention side of the battle pass balance so again going back to those annuities which did predate the Dota 2

you know Dota 2 might have popularized the again content track but these annuities were really the the heart of that and that they came at least five years before the Dota 2 battle pass the those original ones were basically subscriptions you had to pay hard currency dollars like you know you had to actually transact and so you would drip premium currency but the currency could not be used to repurchase the next battle pass so the original one was very much a you give us $5 we'll give you $50 of Premium currency I think it's an interesting choice to make you could require players always buy into the battle pass or you could go the fortnite route the real question if you go the fortnite route is are there still compelling ways for players to continue monetizing in the game one argument is well as long as they stick around long enough they will eventually monetize but another thing to consider with fortnite is the Content Volume was so large there was always something interesting and compelling I think a lot of smaller shops have really struggled to keep up with that volume and there's the question of like is are there other things to spend money on if you could infinite the battle pass and

there was just nothing else there for players to buy I would worry a little bit that your monetization might might drop down um if players burn through the the battle pass very quickly then they will there there's no longer a progression track for them so having some kind of longtail Chase on a battle pass I think can be really interesting and again it doesn't have to be ultra generous it could be a small drip of Premium currency it could be the soft you know game currency consumable sometimes but I think it's valuable to have it sucks when it's a player just they're your most engaged player if they burn through the battle pass fastest and if there's nothing there for them at the end I think that's and then on the premium currency for OverWatch too it's like 60 you can get a Max of 60 a week over nine weeks like 540 for the season and it costs a thousand so you you can kind of make up a little over half right is that is that right for over much to so that's that's only for the premium but you also get you also get premium

currency from the free free uh free tier so but I believe it I believe it adds up to basically you can buy another um B yeah so it's similar to the fortnite model they're just they're just a little less generous because I think they do want to buy a skin I I think it's an important choice to make and I I could see it going either way um obviously the fortnite path was very successful but I would argue that the extreme volume of content that they had available really enabled a lot more monetization opportunities so I personally find it an interesting trade-off to make my my gut I kind of prefer that like pay the actual dollars amount the one quality to that structure again going all the way back to those original um passes is it was the same as if you'd spent $50 on the curreny in other words you really had $50 worth of

Premium currency to spend in the game which is different than when you're unlocking 50 skins and tags and name tags and little bells and whistles because again they might tell you you're getting $170 worth of content but if there's only two skins in the battle pass then I'm like well really I'm spending 10 to get $30 worth content so I think that that trade is a really interesting Dynamic okay well guys those are all the questions I could think about for battle pass so thank you thank you so much for all of your insights and yeah for our audience we'll catch you next time thanks guys all right [Music]