Terrible comparison. Unlocking stuff in a game naturally can be fun as it gives you stuff to look forward to. Pushing your car to work is not fun, at all.

The way I see it is the support that Blizzard provides for their games is legendary, just look up when the last Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 patches came out and remember those games are about 15 years old, and then there's the small detail that all future maps and heroes will be free, supporting games costs money so they have to make that back somehow.

If they were a company that simply abandoned their game after release I might agree with you, but they do not.

This isn't like most pay to win things though. This is cosmetic. It doesn't unbalance the gameplay, unless you have some form of color blindness. What about double xp times?

Yeah, if Overwatch played like Clash Royale, pay-to-win and not fun without money after a short period of time, I'd totally be on board with what you're saying, but no.

It's far more like a hybrid of DOTA's randomized chests and TF2's hats - they're random, but also completely unnecessary to play and enjoy the full game, completely unnecessary for competition, and all about enhancing a long-term experience via customization. With the characters they've got and their huge variations in design, someone who's going to play Overwatch enough that how their character is dressed actually matters to them has probably already gotten their money's worth.

Heck, they could have made this free-to-play with only one rotating character as the free one, but the whole game is based on swapping out characters to fit your situational awareness as a match proceeds. At a risk of having less players and no whales, they didn't do that, because it would actually affect the gameplay and make it essentially pay-to-win with flexibility as the transaction.

Do I wish I could just unlock everything with achievements, the way secrets used to work in the 16-bit era? Of course I do! I also know that isn't really possible - creating these unique assets is way more time-intensive than making Big Head Mode in NBA Jam or something.

(Re: the article: Garden Warfare and Uncharted 4 are both really cool in their own ways, but GW isn't deep enough mechanically to survive long-term, which costs more money because you need the best designers to do that, and UC4's multiplayer is a quick way to extend your enjoyment of a much-better single player campaign. These aren't good comparisons. Look more toward what CoD, Counterstrike, and TF2 have to offer.)

Yes Blizzard is willing to give away free DLC and accept [optional] micro-transactions on cosmetics because that is how they will fund further development (AKA the free DLC). Mod support and map editors would split the community which is bad for online communities. Lack of splitscreen doesn't happen very often because 9.9 times out of 10, people are playing from their houses (LAN parties aren't as commonplace anymore).

As for the technology, I do not understand why these things need to be utilized and I do not understand what kind of argument you are trying to make, if any.