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Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

The harsh reality of it is popular champions help fund the games balance, production, events, networking, servers, ESports, splash art, champions and more with consistent skins.

I know a lot of you get frustrated when some champions are left year after year without skins. Champions like Swain are not slotted for skins because they have updates coming in the future. Sometimes these updates get pushed back based on the priority of them. While Swain is on the radar at the moment, his priority has been pretty low for a period of time. This pushes back the overall production for future skins as well. Unfortunately, sometimes it's years but production and design take time.

What about Urgot and Yorick though?! What about other champions that have been reworked or have had VU's?

While they may have been reworked and have the right foundation for skins now, they technically did get skins, they got VGU updates, new models, new textures etc. This still takes the production time of the skin and rigging team. It takes an investment cost to update these skins and all the updated skins are free if you had owned them prior on completion. Riot benefits very little from these updates besides possible future sales from this champion and polishing the game further. It's like someone pimping out your car you used for years for free. Look at Crabgot, the skin was an absolute joke and now it is hands down one of the best and affordable skins in the entire game. Warwick is a great example as well, he technically got a handful of new skins all at once. While the premises were old they all came out fantastic!

Yeah but this champion got a skin every year for the past 8 years!

Correct, some champions are going to get a lot of skins because they consistently sell. This is just smart from a business standpoint. It has nothing to do with greed but to do with efficiency and being able to allocate resources for improvement. These skins need to be created in order to help those champions that need kit and VGU updates as they create the initial investment cost. The money flow helps you reinvest in new and fun projects, content, events, etc. Let's take Yorick again for example. Yorick currently has a .98% pick rate in Platinum+ and a drastically lower pick rate in other elos. This means after his rework and kit update you will see Yorick once out of 100 games with the possibility of not at all! Let's round his pick rate to 1% for the time being. Ahri on the other hand has a pick rate of 7% in platinum plus and sits around 7% for other elos as well. This means Ahri as a champion is 7xs more popular than Yorick. You will see 7 Ahris out of every 100 games.

For Riot it is in their best interest to create and market a skin towards the Ahri audience because it has the potential to sell 7xs more just based on the popularity of pick rates. Behind the scenes they have even more statistics on champions purchased, skins bought on champs vs play rates etc. It is significantly more valuable to make a skin for this champion. On top of that, Yorick takes more effort in his skins because he needs models for his cage, Maiden, and minions. So the effort is significantly more for a statistically lower pay off.

But that's just greedy! They are marketing to make the most money!"

You can be convinced it's greed all you want but lets look at what Riot gives you at legitimately no cost to you but an actual cost to them. They have to invest into these productions, designs, networking, balances, foundations, etc. First up being champions. You can get every champion in this game for free, if you play a lot this is easily achievable without spending a dime. Yes, it takes a while but it is easy and gives you a form of self progression as you play. This is going to be even more achievable because your IP will not be going to Runes, etc. Champion production takes an incredibly long time and pulls resources from ALL TYPES OF TEAMS.

Splash Arts are something people never consider as an investment cost, or all art in general for that matter. I am going to take a shot in the dark and say one splash art takes 80+ hours to make from concept to delivery. Let's say the average Riot artist gets paid roughly $56,000, a decent California salary in the working world. If they work 48 weeks in the year saying time off for sick days, personal, holidays, meetings, team building, training w/e. Then each week it costs Riot $1166 to have them draw and concept a piece. That means each splash takes about two weeks at roughly $1166, so the final total of that splash is $2332 to have it drawn up and made from start to finish. You would need to sell 200, 1350 RP skins, just to recoup that. Just for the splash art. Since Cosmic Dawn Rakan is a fairly new skin and skins are hard to track with how many are owned and used, if you use Elophant you can see it has 417 tracked copies at the moment. Using this number, the splash was recouped for Riot but imagine the rest of the hours for that skin. The 3D modelers, the riggers, the texture artists, the vfx artists. This skin probably has a loss currently monetization wise in the regards that number is accurate. It's expensive and that money needs to come from somewhere in order to fund skins for ALL CHAMPIONS.

Events are fairly new but that system had to be designed. The infrastructure, all the programming and the fact it gives you free things for playing! The funding has to come from somewhere. This also goes hand and hand with the loot system. If you play the game, and are honorable you get access to *FREE CHAMPIONS AND SKINS.* This is Riot's main source of revenue and they are letting you dip into the pot just by being awesome.

Networking, Servers, Map Skins, Ranked Rewards, New Rune System, Balance, ESports, and the small things. All of these things are part of the game no one takes into consideration they all cost money. They cost money to maintain the game, deliver products and give you a fun experience, either with content or just consistency. The game is always changing and people are always working. There is a lot of little things that upfront people do not see a cost to or even consider to be a substantial cost. This is one of the largest if not THE LARGEST game in the entire world. Everything they do needs funding and consistency of obtaining that funding, helps you by supporting the game you love. This is just the tip of the iceberg but after this point it will turn into rambling.

Yeah but I am still mad my champion hasn't gotten a skin and feels forgotten.

This is unfortunate but as the game grows some things may take a while, hell forever, it does suck and Riot is probably deeply sorry about that. The thing is shitting on champions and skins that get made every year is not the way to go about it. Those skins help support create the consistent revenue flow to possibly one day have a skin made for your favorite champion. The more skins that are made with high quality and a consistent player base in mind, the more the game can be funded and grow. I have bee playing this game since Season 3 and honestly Riot has absolutely killed it this year. They have been listening to players and really delivering high quality content. Yes, there are some exceptions like when Cactopus gets to touch a computer, but; they are gamers, a lot play their game and aspire to create cool consistent content.

TL;DR Popular champions create consistent revenue and skins every year for them to help pay for a lot of things that are required to make this game and invest in future skins.

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