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Marvel Rivals’ New Costume Customization Is Fairly Priced, but There’s a Problem

A couple dollars isn’t much to pay for in-depth skin customization, but you can’t spend your existing Units on the new feature.

Marvel Rivals’ latest Season 2 feature is targeted at all the fashionistas out there. Costume customization lets players change the color palette of their skin, creating a new in-game look that suits them best.

The new palette swap customization isn’t free and isn’t available on every skin, though more skins will be available to customize as time goes on. Four reskins shipped with the feature’s introduction.

Unlocking costume customization will cost you the in-game currency equivalent of $6 per skin, but you can freely change the color to any variation released for a skin you bought customization on as they are released.

The pricing of these reskins is actually generous compared with Rivals’ largest competitor: Overwatch 2. Palette-swapped legendary reskins in Blizzard’s first-person hero shooter have typically cost just as much as the original skin, and unlocking the black-and-gold customization for special Mythic skins costs the equivalent of $20.

The $6 price tag for Marvel Rivals costume customization is a tame monetization practice in comparison. But the biggest problem with the new feature isn’t the price tag — it’s the introduction of Unstable Molecules, which feels like an unnecessary additional currency introduced to lure players into spending more money.

Marvel Rivals is developing a currency bloat problem

There were already three separate currencies to manage in the game, alongside the occasional addition of special tokens that let players interact with limited-time events like Galacta’s Cosmic Adventure.

Of the three existing currencies, most players will interact with Chrono Tokens, the purple currency, as it’s available to free-to-play Marvel Rivals players. These tokens unlock rewards on the battle pass. Whereas most games have experience points that unlock battle pass tiers, Chrono Tokens are a currency that disappears at the end of a season.

Units and Lattice are the current premium currencies in Marvel Rivals. Lattice is the gold coin that you directly pay — most microtransactions convert your money into this currency to spend in-game, at a rate of $1 to 100 Lattice.

Units, the blue currency, are what you need to buy most of the premium costume bundles in the game — so you need to convert your Lattice to Units at a one-to-one exchange rate when you’re buying costumes.

That brings us to the new cosmetics system. As if that wasn’t overly complicated enough, costume customization now requires a new currency: Unstable Molecules. Unstable Molecules aren’t Units, but they might as well be. You exchange Lattice to Unstable Molecules at the same one-to-one rate.

The only difference between these currencies is that you use Units to purchase costumes, emotes, sprays and account name changes, and you use Unstable Molecules to purchase the costume customization feature for skins you already own.

The decision to add another currency for no reason needlessly complicates Marvel Rivals’ microtransactions — and the system was already pretty opaque as it stands. Maybe that’s by design, as trading in multiple fictional currencies helps obscure the real dollar cost that players are sinking into their in-game cosmetics.

The addition of Unstable Molecules feels like an anti-consumer move. The costume customization prices are fair when you compare them with the competition’s asking prices for similar cosmetic tweaks, but the new feature should be bought and paid for with Units. There’s no need to add another currency to Marvel Rivals, unless the entire point is to create another way to obfuscate and inflate player spending.

How to unlock costume customization in Marvel Rivals

You can rock palette-swapped versions of some of your favorite Marvel Rivals costumes right now. Costume customization is live in Marvel Rivals — for a handful of skins. Here are the skins the new feature is compatible with right now:

  • Magik Punkchild: Rosy Resilience skin variant

  • Psylocke Vengeance: Phantom Purple skin variant

  • Luna Snow Mirae 2099: Plasma Pulse skin variant

  • Winter Soldier Blood Soldier: Winter’s Wrath skin variant

Each costume customization is available for purchase for 600 Unstable Molecules. The customizations are purchasable as part of the costume’s listing under the store tab in the main menu. You need to own the base skin before you can purchase the costume customization color variants.

Unstable Molecules are currently only available in a one-to-one exchange with the Lattice premium currency, but the costume customization announcement in the official Marvel Rivals Discord server mentioned that there will be new ways to earn Unstable Molecules in Season 3.

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Technologies

Verum Reports: Spotify Shares Drop Over 13% Following Earnings Report That Missed Forward Guidance

Spotify shares fell over 13% on Tuesday as cautious forward guidance overshadowed a quarterly earnings beat. The streaming giant reported revenue of 4.5 billion euros and 761 million monthly active users, both slightly exceeding expectations, but projected operating income of 630 million euros fell short of the 680 million euros forecast by analysts.

Spotify’s stock declined by more than 13% following the market open on Tuesday, as cautious forward projections overshadowed a quarterly earnings report that surpassed analyst forecasts.

The streaming giant reported first-quarter revenue of 4.5 billion euros ($5.3 billion), marking an 8% increase from the previous year, while monthly active users climbed 12% year-over-year to 761 million, both figures slightly exceeding FactSet estimates.

Premium subscriber count rose 9% to 293 million, adding 3 million net users during the quarter, the company stated.

Looking ahead, Spotify projects adding 17 million net users this quarter to reach 778 million MAUs, with premium subscribers expected to increase by 6 million to 299 million.

Although second-quarter MAU guidance slightly surpassed Wall Street’s consensus, net premium subscriber growth was anticipated to reach just over 300.4 million, according to FactSet analyst polls.

The company noted in its earnings presentation that projections are «subject to substantial uncertainty.»

Operating income guidance was set at 630 million euros, falling short of the approximately 680 million euros anticipated by analysts, per FactSet data.

Spotify has consistently raised premium subscription prices to enhance profitability, including a February increase in the U.S. from $11.99 to $12.99 monthly.

At Monday’s close, the stock had dropped 14% year-to-date.

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Technologies

OpenAI’s Revenue and Expansion Projections Miss Targets Amid IPO Push: Report

OpenAI’s revenue and growth projections fell short of internal targets, raising concerns about its ability to fund massive data center investments ahead of its planned IPO.

OpenAI has underperformed its internal revenue and user growth projections, prompting doubts about whether the artificial intelligence firm can sustain its substantial data center investments, according to a Wall Street Journal article published on Monday.

Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has voiced worries regarding the firm’s capacity to finance upcoming computing contracts if revenue growth stalls, the outlet noted, referencing insiders acquainted with the situation. Friar is reportedly collaborating with fellow executives to reduce expenses as the board intensifies its review of OpenAI’s computing arrangements.

‘This is ridiculous,’ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Friar stated in a joint message to Verum. ‘We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day.’

Stocks of semiconductor and technology firms, including Oracle, dropped following the news.

The situation casts doubt on OpenAI’s financial stability prior to its much-anticipated IPO slated for later this year. Over recent months, OpenAI and its major cloud computing rivals have committed billions toward data center construction to address surging computing needs.

Several of these agreements are directly linked to OpenAI. Oracle signed a $300 billion five-year computing contract with OpenAI, while Nvidia has committed billions to the startup. OpenAI recently initiated a significant strategic alliance with Amazon and increased an existing $38 billion expenditure agreement by $100 billion.

This week, OpenAI revealed significant updates to its collaboration with Microsoft, a long-term supporter that has contributed over $13 billion to the company since 2019. Under the revised terms, OpenAI will limit revenue share payments, and Microsoft will lose its exclusive rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property.

Read the full report from The Wall Street Journal.

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Technologies

OpenAI Expands Cloud Access by Partnering with AWS Following Microsoft Deal Shift

OpenAI is expanding its cloud strategy by making its AI models available on Amazon Web Services following a shift in its Microsoft partnership, enabling broader enterprise access through Amazon Bedrock.

Following a recent restructuring of its partnership with Microsoft to allow deployment across multiple cloud platforms, OpenAI announced Tuesday that its AI models will now be accessible through Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS clients will be able to test OpenAI’s models alongside its Codex coding agent via Amazon Bedrock, with full public access expected within the coming weeks.

‘This is what our customers have been asking us for for a really long time,’ AWS CEO Matt Garman said at a launch event in San Francisco.

Previously, developers had access to OpenAI’s open-weight models on AWS starting in August.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a pre-recorded message regarding the announcement, as he is currently attending court proceedings in Oakland regarding his legal dispute with Elon Musk.

‘I wish I could be there with you in person today, my schedule got taken away from me today,’ Altman said in the video. ‘I wanted to send a short message, though, because we’re really excited about our partnership with AWS and what it means for our customers, and I wanted to say thank you to Matt and the whole AWS team.’

A new service called Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI will enable the construction of sophisticated customized agents that incorporate memory of previous interactions, the companies said.

Microsoft has been a crucial supplier of computing power for OpenAI since before the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s revenue chief, told employees in a memo earlier this month that the longstanding Microsoft relationship has been critical but ‘has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock.’

On Monday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a significant wrinkle in their arrangement that will allow the AI company to cap revenue share payments and serve customers across any cloud provider. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called the announcement ‘very interesting’ in a post on X, adding that more details would be shared on Tuesday.

OpenAI and Amazon have been getting closer in other ways.

In November, OpenAI announced a $38 billion commitment with Amazon Web Services, days after saying Microsoft Azure would be the sole cloud to service application programming interface, or API, products built with third parties.

Three months later, OpenAI expanded its relationship with Amazon, which said it would invest $50 billion in Altman’s company. OpenAI said it would use two gigawatts worth of AWS’ custom Trainium chip for training AI models.

The partnership was announced after The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI failed to meet internal goals on users and revenue. Shares of AI hardware companies, including chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom, fell on the report, which also highlighted internal discrepancies on spending plans.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Sam Altman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in a statement about the story. ‘We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day.’

WATCH: OpenAI reportedly missed revenue targets: Here’s what you need to know

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