Monetization in Heroes of the Storm

Despite myself, I've actually been enjoying HotS quite a bit. It's nowhere near the complexity of a game like WoW, but it has that Smash-Bros-style elegance that makes it fun to play multiple games.

Now, I'm on the record as someone who detests microtransaction-based free-to-play models, as I think the games' makers are incentivized to make the game frustrating in order to get you to pour money into them. HotS (and to be fair, this could be true of other MOBAs as well) does certainly want you to pour money into it - and frankly, the prices on a lot of the options are kind of absurd - but what I appreciate is that unlocking characters is all doable with in-game gold. It will take you a while to grind said gold, and I think the number of matches you'd have to play to unlock every character is enormous, but at least the option is there.

It is a bit of a frustration-feature, but with the hero rotation (and actually a feature in the store that lets you test out heroes as well as skins, though this only lets you play versus a simple AI,) you get to see which heroes call out to you and then worry about purchasing those. And there's never a sense that buying stuff will make progression faster - except for the stimpak, which explicitly does that - so once you find a hero you like, you can usually grind out what you want from there.

Cosmetic things appear to be largely money-based, but if I find myself with more than a passing interest in the game, I might toss them a chunk of change for the "Crown Prince Arthas" variant - after all, it's not that I'm opposed to paying people to play the game they've made. Really, my beef with F2P is that these games often get you to pay more than you would normally for a similar game by just having you pay in quick bursts. I believe there is a giant bundle you can buy that unlocks everything (or at least a ton of things,) but it's over a hundred dollars - and that's the discount, buying-in-bulk price! (EDIT: Actually, my bad. The big Nexus Bundle is discounted at about 40 bucks, which isn't so bad.)

Anyway, the reason it's not so bad is that the only thing that really alters gameplay - control of characters - is all available for gold.