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On Billing Options and Chroma Skin Packs

Lizdeath·4/9/2015, 12:56:20 AM·2 votes·678 views

I have put a fair bit of thought into some of the complaints I have heard about billing, and I want to point to the Nintendo eShop model. Currently, you can add money to your eShop account by either buying a card in store for specific amounts, add a specific amount to your account via credit card, or when purchasing an item you have insufficient funds for, add exactly the amount necessary to purchase the item to your account.

I think a move that would be met with a lot of good publicity would be to add a top up button to shop items players have insufficient RP to purchase. Have it work like the Nintendo eShop does, where you top up with precisely the amount of RP you need. This should also reduce the number of people begging for small amounts of RP, as they may see topping up with 3 RP as more beneficial than begging for it. Because players do not see the exact calculations that go into the cost of the RP, you could easily scale the price to make it more costly to purchase very small amounts. You could also limit it to transaction types that do not place a charge per transaction, to mitigate the cost of transactions that cost you more money than you earn (like $0.01 transactions on the vast majority of credit cards). People would still buy it.

Then there are the chroma skin packs. I love the idea, I feel the price point is wrong. I would like to call them a 390 RP thing, because let's be honest, a recolour isn't that hard to do, and 3 of them is not that much more work than one. I don't think I like the idea of paying more than half the amount of a standard skin for a chroma skin pack (975 RP / 2). Since recolours aren't being produced as single skins anymore, maybe consider reducing the recolour skins to 250 RP and make the chromas cost 390. Given the amount of work a recolour is, you only have to sell about 50-100 of them to pay for the development costs of each pack. This price can be further reduced to be about selling 5 chroma packs to make back the cost if future skins are made with chroma pack development in mind.

Yes I am calling you out here.

Edit 1:

Someone on IRC suggested Character Mastery discounts for chroma skin packs of 10-20%, that's a cool idea I would be down for.

1 Comments

OneSmoothDude5/2/2015, 6:54:46 AM1 votes

You have some good suggestions. However, they are only good for you, and not for Riot. When people have leftover RP, they are way more willing to purchase more RP because they don't want to feel they have wasted their money on the already-purchased RP. Things we purchase from Riot are usually smaller in cost, and probably more frequently purchased as well. People don't mind having a couple hundred extra RP because there will likely be a new skin (or one going on sale) soon they can use it on.

There are three reasons why Nintendo has the "top off" option and Riot does not.

First, Nintendo's store items are more expensive than Riot's. If there were leftover points, the leftover amount would be larger compared to that of League's, and this might make people less willing to purchase things in the first place. "If I buy $40 of credit for a $35 game, that's $5 I just wasted. I'll just go buy the physical copy from GameStop instead."

The second quoted sentence relates to the second reason: Riot is the only avenue that sells Riot points (you can buy a RP gift card from other retailers, but they no doubt purchased it at near full price from Riot in the first place), whereas Nintendo is not the only company to buy games from. Nintendo needs to make their currency exchange as friendly as possible, because people will take their business elsewhere if there is any reason to do so.

The third reason is the ratio Riot uses to convert money to RP. It's awkward to calculate in comparison. If you have $3.00 leftover on the eShop, that's $3. You know exactly how much that is worth. But for RP, when you have 176 leftover RP, that's not as significant psychologically. You can calculate it, sure, but most people don't. They just know they have some change leftover.

Someone on IRC suggested Character Mastery discounts for chroma skin packs of 10-20%, that's a cool idea I would be down for.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but of course you would be down for that. Why wouldn't you want things cheaper? But the question is, would it be better for Riot? Riot knows people will buy these chromas even without that discount, so why would they offer them cheaper than they need to? Infinite supply + high demand = high prices.

I really like your ideas, and I hope they are implemented. But unfortunately, for the reasons listed above, I don't think they will be. :(