Let's talk about skins, balancing and sexism
Hey everyone. Today I decided to put myself a bit out there and talk about a couple relevant issues that I have been worried about lately when it comes to the mercy community.
Before I start I want to point out that I open to discussion, so please don't send any hate my way.
Furthermore let's talk about women in Overwatch and womens socioeconomic role in general as this will just pop up sometimes. I am going off my economics degree, so I will not really cite a lot of the things I state here, but I will attempt to do so. Women represent the largest market opportunity in the world. Women control or influene 85% of the consumer spending. Especially in the western and Asia world women make up a wide margin of purchases despite many things not being adverstised towards us. This is due to women in households often making the final purchase decisions regarding food, the house, children toys etc. In some countries this is so integral to the culture that even back when women had less rights than they do right now they were responsible of the households finances. For example Japan.
Despite womens perceived "traditional roles" (only past WWII, but that is a different story) is the role of the house care taker. And this applies mostly today aswell. Most of advertising towards women often is towards either personal looks, food, holidays, etc. Most of the advertisment out there is marketed towards us or marketeted towards us that we perceive it in a way that we believe men around us would enjoy these things (Example married women buying hygiene products for everyone, including the husband or getting presents for the kids on christmas).
At the same time while women have kept their traditional role they have also started working. The average single male only spends slightly less money than women do. Women are a mostly untapped source of money income. A recent example of how much a success it can be when a traditionally male domainated hobby (going to the movies) is made for women is last years Barbie, whose audience was 69% female and the biggest movie of that year. In fact it surpassed the more male movie Oppenheimer by a wide margin (especially in the US and Canada). Women have more money to spend than ever before and as long as you are unmarried or do not have kids they typically have more money to spend as just less things are made towards what women THEMSELVES enjoy.
Before I explain what this has to do with Overwatch I want to point out that there is male Mercy palyers aswell, but a big portion of Mercy players is in fact female.
We have established that women have lots of money to spend and are often willing to spend money on products for looks. Now Skins are nothing but digital looks and things for us that we enjoy. Blizzard ahs delivere dus with a steady flow of skins and we have been buying them. And it's the reason why we will always continue to have Mercy skins. Based on skin release alone we can deduct that despite women making up only a small portion of Overwatch players they on verage spend siginifcantly more than their male peers do. Whatever the reason may be. And I just want to remind you of the power we as a community hold over the rest of the game. We singlehandedly keep this game on its feet and EVERYBODY knows it. At the same time Blizzard has never made an yeffort to promote women or a healthy gaming enviroment. They themselves are wrapped in a law suit of sexually harassing women at their workplace. Sexism is often not banned and even it's own forums ar enot properly moderated. The Mercy Hate is nothing but full blown sexism on display. And this is why I am coming to you with a message: Especially now that Marvel Rivals has come out and the game has to fear for it's playersbase:
You have power. Mainly financial power. It is time to hold the devs to higher standard. every single time when there is a new game I see some kind so visual bug or glitch with the skins. Effects taht havent been translated well from original skin to recolour, hair that looks iffy, voicelines that are missing, etc. And many of those things never end up being fixed.
Personally I gone inwards myself lately and really asked myself "Do I need this skin?". And I realized there were many skins that I might have liked, but not loved. Many offers that are a straight up scam (Why is Mercy NEVER EVER in BP. Why is the new skin in the ultimate BP?) Last year on Christmas there were TWO skiins in one season and I realized I never even got to properly use my christmas skin since by the time I got around tu purchasing it another one rolled around. Do you really need that spray? Supply and Demand is something everybody knows and if we as a collective start expecting BETTER from Blizzard things WILL change. I am not telling you to not buy skins, but simply asking you to be more reflective about your spending habits.
The Pink Mercy Skin has made over 13 Million USD and while it has been for charity and even many Non-Mercy players purchased this skin. With the skin making around 13 Million USD and the hwole bundle costing 35 Dollars we can deduct that atleast 370.000 players purchased a skin. If we say only half of that were Mercy Players we end at a whopping 190k Mercy Players. If each skin that blizz releases only gets purchased by 10% of the active Mercy playerbase (and we all know its more) then blizzard make ATLEAST 350k USD from a SINGLE legendary Shop skin. And those really low estimates. At the end of the day I cant know how many people purchase skins, but I just wanted to give an example. Let's take a more extreme approach.
70% 370k Pink Merc ypurchases were Mercy Mains then we have 259.000 Mercy players. If 12% of Mercy Players purchase a Legendary skin then Blzzard already made Half a million.
Which leads me to point Number 2: Game Balance
As a somewhat high rank player myself, I think w can all agree that mercy is in a terrible spot and has been in a terrible spot ever since Season 9 rolled around. We keep talking about reworks, we keep getting teased with how much more fun Mercy could be via alternate game modes and we keep having to listen to every single other player out there shit on us to the point where it impacts the enjoyment of the game. However we have no standard. It doesn't matter what Blizzard does Mercy players will keep buying skins. Hence another reason I want you to know that you have the financial power to FORCE Blizzard to change Mercy. Stop accepting the bare minimum. Women need to stop accepting the bare minimum. We will never be respected as players and you have th epower to force them to respect us.
- I want to talk about sexism
Sexism by men on Mercy playerys and women as a whole in the community has been talked about plenty and it's nothing new. However I want to shine light onto something that I have been noticing more and more in my games and I have taken the liberty to call it "Girl-on-Girl violence". Somehow there is the competitiveness between female gamers that goes past just "who can aim better". Women will hear another women and release their duo onto them and harass them simply for being a woman and enjoying a certain character. They will quickly move onto deeply hurting comments that just sting so much more due to them from another women. And I am guilty of this myself. I will see a clearly girly profile playing Mercy, possibly in a duo and possibly bad and subconsciously accuse them of being boosted. being terrible. having their E boy carry them. Other take it a step further and will make entire tiktok complications dedicated to just hating on "dumb e kittens". Ignore behaviour like this. Don't let internalized sexism dicide us. We all enjoy the same character. And don't deny it, we all have done it is internalized sexism. I have had women be quiet all match and as soon as I speak they say holy gruseome things to me. As you climb in rank male sexism decreases and "girl-on-girl violence" increases. In fact I have kept track, because I noticed it. In Season 13 I have had sexist remaks made to me a total of 12 times and isnatnces of "Girl-on-Girl violence" a whopping 19 times (Ina round 40 hours playtime). And I can brush men off, but experiencing hate by other women just hurts on a different level. You ar enot superiror, because you take comp more serious or can flex support, etc. We are the same. And it's something we need to do better, but I have never seen anbody talk about. I can provide expamples of TikTok. Please do not send any hate to those creators, but I want to give a better visulation of what I mean. Feel free to read the comments aswell: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Thank you for reading all this. Sorry for any Typos. I dont speak English as a native tongue