Phrasemaker

Marvel Rivals, the hero shooter that blends Overwatch-style chaos with MCU-brand marketing muscle, just dropped a new cosmetic feature: recolorable skins. But in typical live-service fashion, the announcement came with a catch — and not a small one.

In a tweet that reads like it was ghostwritten by a finance goblin in the Baxter Building, Marvel Rivals introduced “Customized Color Costumes,” which will cost players 600 Unstable Molecules per recolor. Those molecules? They’re tied to another in-game currency called Lattice, exchanged at a 1:1 rate. You can’t recolor a costume unless you already own the base version, and only a handful of skins will support this feature at launch. The studio promises more options to earn Unstable Molecules in Season 3, but for now, it’s another paid cosmetic system bolted onto a game already stacked with multiple currencies and a growing pile of monetization layers.

The community reaction has been… less than ecstatic.

“Accursed Richards charging us for his molecules. Doom would have given them out for free!” one fan quipped, clearly channeling their inner Latverian revolutionary. Others cut straight to the heart of the issue: “Why not just make them worth units? Makes zero sense to add another currency. This is some crappy mobile game crap right here,” wrote one Redditor, summing up the mood with the kind of bluntness that would make Logan proud.

The price itself has also raised eyebrows. “1:1 from Lattice pretty damn pricey tho,” one player noted, while another observed, “Okay. So this is what people meant when they said watch out for Netease I guess… We have like 3 currencies already, enough.”

Fans weren’t just annoyed about the cost — they were exhausted by the sheer proliferation of in-game economies. “Chrono, lattice, blue stuff, doesn’t exchange token count? So it’ll be 5 lol,” one comment read, painting a picture of a system that feels more like a financial planning app than a superhero game. Another deadpanned, “At this point we’ll have dabloons and smackaroos by season 5.”

Still, some responses were more resigned than enraged. “Just as expected,” one user said. “Don’t know why people were expecting it to be free or only cost 200 when recolors of base skins already cost 600. It’s literally just chromas.”

This isn’t just about skin tones or animation flair — it’s about a creeping sense that Marvel Rivals is leaning hard into the most frustrating tendencies of modern free-to-play design. You start with a flashy new feature, then quietly tether it to yet another form of virtual currency, locking it behind layers of grinding or spending, and call it progress. And sure, it’s all optional. Until it isn’t.

As one particularly salty Redditor put it, “Lattice?? They really don’t want us farming the currency to get free battle passes. F*** that noise.”

In the end, it’s not about whether these color swaps are cool (they are) or whether players want more ways to personalize their heroes (they do). It’s about how many hoops Marvel Rivals wants them to jump through to get there — and how many wallets they’re willing to poke along the way.

Welcome to the color war.