Would you pay $1,000 for Pink Mercy?
Blizzard announced that it would be bringing Pink Mercy back to Overwatch 2 a couple of weeks ago, but since then, we've seen quite a fallout in the community, with some devastated about the skin's return while others couldn't be happier.
Pink Mercy is one of Overwatch 2's rarest skins. Originally sold as part of a charity drive for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the skin was only on sale for a short time, after which Blizzard said it would not be brought back. There are plenty of other skins that are hard to get—Lego Bastion was part of a short-lived collab with the Lego company, while Winston's Blizzcon Noire Skin was only around for a year before being canned. However, none of these other rare skins are as sought after by Overwatch 2 players because they aren't Mercy, and, well, they aren't pink.
There are a couple of websites that sell accounts (which is not allowed under Blizzard's TOS, if you're wondering), and if you look at one of the popular ones, you can see a few that are over $1,000 and a fair few in triple digits, all of which have access to Pink Mercy. Believe it or not, those prices are down significantly from where they were just a few weeks ago: Before Blizzard announced that it would be bringing the Mercy skin back in aid of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation again, almost every account was worth thousands of dollars. But now, as the Pink Mercy skin will no longer be as rare as it once was, we've seen a drop from thousands of dollars for one of these accounts to hundreds. This is still a ridiculous amount of money to pay for an Overwatch account, but apparently it's been quite a blow to black-market sellers, nevertheless.
But there are plenty of other players who are absolutely elated at the return of the skin. "I feel like a mob boss laughing in my executive chair watching the black market just completely crumble," one player says in a Reddit thread.
For the longest time, there was strange rhetoric attached to the skin as some players argued that you weren't a proper Mercy main if you didn't have it. "Gatekeeping a normal skin is already shameful af, but the people who were saying that Pink [Mercy] needs to stay limited to show who was and wasn't a noob were a whole different kind of scumbag sack of shit because it was a charity skin," another player says. Luckily, you don't see the same kind of rhetoric around Pink Mercy anymore, as most players know it's not the best opinion to share around, and also now because it won't be as rare as it used to be.
We don't know yet how much money these new Pink Mercy skins will raise (back in 2018, it raised nearly $13 million), but based on other metrics, it seems pretty popular. Yesterday, the day after Pink Mercy was added to the shop, Overwatch 2 rocketed up to the fourth spot on Steam's best-selling charts: "This is the raw power of a Mercy skin," one player tweeted.
As 100% of the proceeds of the Pink Mercy skin and the Pink Mercy skin bundle will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, it's reassuring to know the uptake has seemingly been quite successful. And while it may not be for everyone, especially if you don't play much Mercy, it is certainly a great cause, so here's hoping Blizzard manages to raise even more money this time around.
