The Overwatch 2 Microsoft Rewards scheme grants players free OW coins for every search they make on the company’s dedicated search engine, Bing. It turns out that, for many players, this nets them more coins than actively playing through the FPS game, adding fuel to the ever-growing fire that is the OW2 microtransaction debate.
Ever since Overwatch 2 finally released in September 2022, there’s been a debate around the game’s distinct lack of free rewards and rather lofty microtransactions.
By making the multiplayer game live-service in order to compete with the likes of Respawn’s Apex Legends or Riot Games’ Valorant, Blizzard chose to do away with the controversial loot box system and replace it with battle passes and optional purchases, but this in many ways has just caused more problems.
One player has highlighted this yet again, taking to Reddit to show off how many coins they’ve managed to accrue using the Microsoft Rewards system, which grants points for using Bing as a search engine, or Microsoft Edge as a browser. These points can be transformed into free rewards for participating games – one of which is Overwatch 2.
“I’ve earned more Overwatch coins in three weeks of Microsoft Rewards than completing all 143 weeklies across 13 weeks of Overwatch 2,” they write. When you complete all of the weeklies, you get 60 coins, meaning you get 540 coins per season going on the Overwatch 2 season 2 model. The player has managed to accrue 800 using the Microsoft Rewards scheme, meaning it’s by far easier to use this system than actually grind for the coins.
After all, you get 20 points for using Microsoft Edge, and five for searching on Bing. 1,800 points nets you 200 coins – so you can do the maths (I can’t, I’m a history graduate).
This is a double-edged sword. While it’s great that you can acquire the Microsoft Rewards coins on top of your weekly ones to amass a pretty decent sum, it also shows that the in-game rewards are pretty miserly. After all, there are 11 weekly challenges per seven days; that’s a lot of grinding for not much of a reward.
We may see this adjusted when we come into Overwatch 2 season 3, which is set to kick off in February of 2023. If you’re looking to snag all of the weekly coins in order to claim some new cosmetics, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got all of the best Overwatch 2 settings in place to annihilate the competition. It’s also worth giving our Overwatch 2 tier list a glance to make sure you’re running the best Overwatch 2 characters – after all, it makes completing those challenges easier, right?