It’s no secret that skins are taking over the market in terms of free-to-play gaming. Both Fortnite and Overwatch have understood this and done crossovers with popular series. It’s one thing to try and design your own original skin for a character and have people pay for it, but it’s another to have their favorite damn character available for purchase. I have not opened my wallet a single time for an original skin in Fortnite, but if they ever do a damn Code Geass crossover you best believe my wallet will open up faster than a drunk guy at 3 a.m. going through a divorce. With the new rise of skins, I wanted to see how much you guys would be willing to drop on them, if anything at all.
My first experience with a skin-focused game was League of Legends. Every item and character in the game could be bought with in-game currency and you couldn’t buy any advantages using your money that gave you or your team an edge in combat. The only thing you could buy with real money (apart from XP boosters and the like) was skins for your characters. People praised the system too. It was one of the first online games to really feel like paying was optional, and the skin rarities were pretty structured and made sense. If a skin cost more, that was because it had additional animations, character dialogue, combat effects, and sometimes even sound effects. Most skins only altered the character’s outfit and colors and thus charged less. Now let’s get into the brass tax. A normal skin back then would have run you around $10, while a legendary skin with the cool shit could be acquired for around $20. I merely bought a few skins back in the day on League and I don’t regret a single one. That was a game that I easily played for over 300 hours, without paying an entry fee, and probably only ever sinked around $50 or less into it of my own money.
What could there possibly be to regret about this purchase?
These days skins often don’t have the same care put into them as League. You can really smell the corporate greed when a game is asking for $10 bucks for a damn color change where the same thing could have been accomplished by allowing the player to use a damn color wheel. In those cases you won’t find me paying a dime. When a game DOES include a skin that actually changes a huge amount of the overall outfit, such as the new Eren Jaeger skin coming to Fortnite, I am more tempted if we are still talking about a $10 cost assuming there are no new animations or effects to come along with it. Otherwise I could maybe stomach a $15 charge IF it’s a character I truly love. So far my favorite characters from anime have been glossed over when picking who gets put into what game so my wallet has been safe. God bless.
Shit don't even look like the same game at this point.
Like it or not, this free-to-play model where skins are the main money drain appears to be here to stay. And while it’s horribly depressing when you see Activision try to squeeze out half of your life savings in micro-transactions for shitty items that don’t mix into the world of Call of Duty, or are so obviously lazy that your bones hurt, I still can’t help but appreciate this model when a game I enjoy employs it and doesn’t slack on its skins. After all when you consider the value proposition of a game like Fortnite (which I have WAY too many hours in at 200+…), that’s over 200 fucking hours of entertainment with frequent updates to keep things fresh and I’ve maybe put $20 or $30 by choice into that game? You likely won’t find that kind of value from a movie, album, restaurant, or 90% of hobbies in the world. Do you buy skins in games? What do you think is a fair price for a single skin? Does your opinion change based on how much work went into the design/effects? Load up a game, log into your account, and vow never to pay $10 to make your basic COD soldier have a blue uniform instead of a camouflage one in the comments below!
