Marvel Rivals’ latest gambit is seeing whether you’ll pay real money for colours

Colours! They exist, right? They’re all around us, everywhere you go, and as of yesterday, Marvel Rivals did something revolutionary: it made them customizable. Taking my sarcasm hat off for a moment, that means developer NetEase added in the ability to choose different colour palette options for your costumes. It’s just a small little way to add some amount of uniqueness to your version of the game’s extremely pre-established characters, really. Except, the catch is that you have to pay actual money for them.

Well, ok, to be specific you have to buy them with 600 of a new currency called Unstable Molecules. But you can’t just buy Unstable Molecules, you have to convert your Lattice into them, at a 1:1 exchange rate. How do you get Lattice? Finally, this is where you can spend your hard earned cash, by buying a 100-pack and 500-pack for about $6. Costumes themselves already go for around $20, which is one of the main ways the game makes money seeing as characters are always free, so I understand the thought process of charging for colour swaps.

Even still, you can’t help but raise an eyebrow to extraordinary heights at a developer trying to ask people to spend real money on colours. Not to mention doing so a new currency obfuscates how much these things actually cost. Such is the curse of free-to-play live service games, I suppose, but a curse I find quite agitating.

Right now the colour options are only for a few characters like Magik and Luna Snow, and I imagine more will come in the future. I do wonder if NetEase will stick to their guns or just wait for people to stop complaining about it on Twitter (the site trying to be known as X).

In any case, Season 2 kicked off just last week, with NetEase promising that new heroes will be coming to the game every single month. Sounds like overkill and too much work for a team that isn’t as big as it used to be!