Overwatch 2’s OWL skin sale is one last hurrah for its golden era

Overwatch 2’s OWL skin sale is one last hurrah for the game’s golden era, as many of its in-game landmarks celebrating its best moments are disappearing.

The Overwatch League started with a bang and ended as a commercial failure, but what it never failed to do was give fans some of the best moments.

Be it watching Shanghai Dragons go 0-42 to becoming Overwatch 1’s last champions, seeing legendary names like supertf and JJoNak grace the servers, or seeing SF Shock earn their back-to-back rings.

Blizzard frequently celebrated these moments, releasing skins and cosmetics to memorialize players and teams.

However, for such a long time many of these skins were exclusive. You could really only get them when they were released or during a rare opportunity when the devs put up its archives for sale.

Brielfy, however, players can quickly buy them all freely, but they’re all going away by the end of the sale, and that’s a shame.

Do you know what I see when I look at LA Gladiator’s Widowmaker skin? I see Surefour taking the heads off London Spitfire on Kings Row in The Great Bamboozle.

Do you know what I see when I look at Midas Roadhog? I see Super proving to everyone that he wasn’t just a Reinhardt one trick, becoming one of the greatest main tanks to ever touch the game by picking up Roadhog.

Do you know what I see when I look at Lucio’s Contenders skin? I see Ajax screwing up his Sound Barrier so many times it has become a callout for when players mess up their ults.

Despite essentially being moneymakers for Blizzard, these cosmetics are important in-game landmarks of Overwatch’s golden era.

During the days of CSGO, Valve frequently added graffiti to memorialize infamous or insane plays throughout different maps. Overwatch did the same with these exclusive skins.

Fleta’s insane 2020 season was commemorated with his own MVP Echo skin, while Shu’s ballsy flank in the 2021 Countdown Cup got him a special sticker. OWL may have died but these skins live on to tell the tales of the esports’ golden era.

However, in 2023, it was quite clear Blizzard was slowly stopping commemorative OWL skins, considering how long it took Dallas Fuel to get their champs skin and the lack of a cosmetic for OWL’s final champions, Florida Mayhem.

Despite it all, perhaps if Blizzard ever starts caring about its competitive scene once again, with OWCS already having its own memes and personalities, we could have these in-game landmarks once again.