Overwatch’s Pink Mercy skin raises a whopping $12.3M for breast cancer research, Blizzard says

Step one: Bring back Pink Mercy. Step two: The Breast Cancer Research Foundation profits.

It turns out a lot of you still wanted to buy Pink Mercy. The skin, which Blizzard Entertainment has only ever brought to the game twice and whose proceeds go towards the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, raised another eye-watering amount for a good cause in its second run.

Today, Blizzard announced in a blog that the second run of Pink Mercy, along with its rose gold variant, raised $12.3 million for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. According to the blog, that’s “the second-largest corporate donation” the foundation has ever received—trailing only the original run of Pink Mercy in the original Overwatch, which raised $12.7 million.

In a world of microtransactions and questionable ethics of developer tactics around pricing skins and battle passes, the Pink Mercy skin genuinely seems like a fundamentally good cause and use of gaming cosmetics. The rarity of the skin undoubtedly meant many gamers were buying it just to have a rare skin and weren’t necessarily thinking about their money being donated to breast cancer research, but that certainly didn’t hurt the effort, either. In fact, it might be the most effective fundraising microtransaction tactic we’ve ever seen out of a video game.

Blizzard says the Breast Cancer Research Foundation will share more in the future about what the money raised by the most recent run of Pink Mercy will go to fund. The 2018 skin sale money went towards AI mammogram analysis to help improve diagnosis, predictive models, treatments to delay tumor formation, and more tools to help predict patient risk of breast cancer. With the new run nearly matching 2018, we’ll hopefully see major gains in even more areas of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.