Overwatch & # 39; Pink Mercy & # 39; raises $ 12 million for breast cancer research – TechCrunch



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It can sometimes be difficult to break through the community of players, but the occasional charity event demonstrates not only the enormity of the industry but also its diversity and its willingness to pay for a good cause. Today, Blizzard has announced that an Overwatch charity campaign has raised $ 12.7 million for breast cancer research in just two weeks.

Overwatch is a shooting game of ### ############################################################################### The extremely popular team that made a splash not only thanks to its inclusive character design gameplay. This sensitivity to the growing demography of the game led them to design this charity campaign in May.

Players could for a limited time purchase a special "skin," or 3D model, for the Mercy character – she is the most powerful healer in the lineup So the choice is logical, even if the sculptural blonde is not exactly their most interesting job. (A Pink Genji would probably look cool, but he would probably make more people to play him – an unfortunate result.)

Special skins are highly sought after, and although many can be obtained through boxes of loot in the game, they can also be purchased. In this case, the price was set at $ 15, rather high for a skin but obviously it did not discourage players, who paid thousands for the t-shirts and t-shirts associated.

I asked for a breakdown, but a little napkin math gives a basic idea of ​​the volume. The press release announcing the figure of $ 12.7 million indicates that "thousands" of t-shirts were sold at $ 30 each; Usually if it is 10,000 or more, they say so, so we will use 10K as an estimate. That's $ 300,000 in shirts, so the remaining $ 12.4 million is somewhere north of 820,000 paid for Pink Mercy skin.

Think about it! In two weeks, more than three quarters of a million people have paid $ 15 each for a virtual object. Pretty good. Moreover, all this goes to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. They had a big novelty:

And this is by no means the only big charity gaming event. Games Done Quick regularly raises millions of dollars, and the kid game Penny's Arcade became so big that it had to be spun like his own thing. He has just announced a series of grants for the financing of equipment and pediatric hospital staff, by the way.

This event went pretty well so that we could expect other causes – I asked Blizzard for details before and will update if I hear it.

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