It’s also not cheap to get a skin for one of the older characters in Blizzard’s first-person shooter, as the current price has been raised to ridiculous levels.

Genji Oni’s skin appeared in Heroes of the Storm back in the day, and it appeared in Overwatch about a year later. You could either get it for free from loot boxes, or you could buy it from the store for about 1000 OW coins. A few years have passed since then, and the first paid part of Overwatch has been replaced by a second free-to-play part, and Microsoft (who owns Activision Blizzard King) has brought this old skin back into their game in a very greedy way.

Now, the Blizzard Gear Shop is running a promotion until September 16th where you can get the Genji Oni skin for free if you buy items for at least $75. However, this promotion is only available to US and UK users over the age of 18, and Blizzard is only giving out a maximum of five hundred of these activation codes, so the previously much more popular skin might become a pretty rare item with this promotion.

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There are other ways to get this skin, as it requires 1500 silver coins in Overwatch 2. You can get that in the Premium Battle Pass if you reach level 55. The skin is a legendary rarity (we wonder why, we wonder why…?), but it’s still ridiculous since you could get it for free in the first Overwatch. In any case, this is another knot Blizzard has tied, as you can only get the skin from the Blizzard Gear Shop if you spend a lot of money, and you can only get this cosmetic item if you reach a certain amount.

While it’s understandable that a free-to-play game needs more monetization, sometimes they go overboard. That’s probably what happened here, given the history of the skin.

Source: PCGamer, Blizzard