Call of Duty players are (yet again) up in arms over the exorbitant cost of a new cosmetic item. This time the community dissatisfaction stems from a Modern Warfare 3 Dune: Part Two crossover skin that will set players back $40.
The cosmetic in question is MW3 and Warzone’s Paul Atreides Feda Ykin Stealthsuit. It’s just one of many crossover cosmetics that coincide with the recent release of Dune: Part Two. But unlike the Paul Atreides and Feyd-Rautha Operator skins, getting it isn’t as simple as purchasing a bundle and unlocking it. Instead, like with past crossovers, the Stealthsuit is a special cosmetic only given to players after they buy specific bundles during the event. In this case, you’d have to get both the Paul Atreides Operator and Harkonnen Tracer Pack bundles, which cost 2,400 CoD Points (or $20) each.
“I abhor the fact that you have to spend 4800 CoD Points to unlock this skin,” writes one Reddit user in the Modern Warfare 3 subreddit. This isn’t a new complaint from fans. Call of Duty games, most recently MW3 and Warzone, have had some incredibly pricey cosmetic items. Only a couple of weeks ago, developer Activision was under fire for a Godzilla x Kong crossover item that cost $80 in bundle purchases to unlock. With the Stealthsuit, this could be another example of a “pay-to-win” cosmetic, as the community has found its greyish-brown color blends into some maps and makes you harder to track.
The standard edition of MW3 costs $69.99, so the Dune 2 Stealthsuit is over half the price of the base game, with the average bundle costing a little under a third of the base game. Of course, Warzone is free to play, but the cost of cosmetics quickly adds up if players want to collect even just a few skins. And the community thinks that the latest expensive cosmetic isn’t even worth the cost and effort to obtain it. “Funny thing is I feel like the base Paul Atreides looks much better anyways,” one Reddit user opines. I have to agree, the regular Paul Atreides Operator skin lets players run around as Timothée Chalamet, while the Stealthsuit skin puts a helmet over him, making him just look like another weird military guy. Why is the pricier skin hiding the face of Dune 2?! That‘s the money maker!
Whether it’s because the skin is ugly or the price is too high, players don’t want to purchase $40 worth of bundles to get the Dune Stealthsuit. It’s yet another example of a worrying new norm in gaming, whereby publishers seem determined to milk players for all their worth. The likes of Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, Fortnite, and more are all too willing to gouge their player base. What’s worse is that a lot of people actually buy them.
But problems arise when companies make these “optional” cosmetics pay-to-win. This is an issue CoD has already been found guilty of several times before, from the Bomb Squad and Groot skins in Warzone 2.0 to the OG nightmare, Roze’s Rook skin. If the Stealhsuit does provide a tangible advantage, as some seem to suggest, then the motivation for players to drop $40 starts to veer towards pay-to-win.
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