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How does riot choose which champs get skins?

HaIlMonitor·9/27/2017, 1:09:32 AM·2 votes·904 views

I have heard it has to do with popularity but is that always true? The reason I even am bothered by some of the ways they do things is I play lots of rengar and he only has 2 skins (3 if you count the SSW one but I don't because riot didn't choose to make it for him a player did), and he has chromas for arguably the wrong skin because it usually seems more people play with Night Hunter then Headhunter.

But then we have gnar. Who came out exaclty one day before two years after the good ol' ADC killin' Hellcat. Who currently has 3 skins (4 with snowday) , and one in PBE, Chromas (twice as many colors then rengar). Why is this? I don't see how he is easier to make skins for, and he actually seems to be less popular overall sense he came out then Rengar (currently he is played more though).

The sad thing is I am not even compairing the two to one of the Weeb or posterboy champs, but what are your thoughts?

5 Comments

Avarist9/27/2017, 1:22:02 AM2 votes

I mean the answer is probably more complex than a lot of people would immediately assume.

If the art team comes up with some amazing concept pieces that might be pushed ahead of other things. If a VGU is upcoming perhaps theyll be allocated to work on skins for that character. Maybe the marketting team has realised that a specific character sells a ton of merch or is generally very well received by the community so they want more skins made of that character.

Honestly nobody except for a riot employee has a clue, but we can safely assume skins are chosen in a variety of ways, everything from community ideas blowing up / being paid homage to (See Beekeeper singed, pool party ziggs, etc) to decisions based on internal sales data about specific characters. I would bet a lot of money that Riot has does studies into what kinds of character archetypes have the most sales, what type of themes have the most sales, what time of year skins being sold at have the most sales... So on so forth.

Tl;dr - They throw darts at a board with all the characters pictures on them, except half of the characters are replaced with Ahri and Annie.

Jazzy Jesus9/28/2017, 6:47:48 AM1 votes

I tend not to truly care about it until they've been out for a while with no more than their release skin and maybe 1 or 2 more.

The skins I REALLY have a problem with, though, are the LCS sets. Not that I dislike the skins themselves (in fact I like most of them). There are 2 things that ACTUALLY bother me about them:

Some of the champs that have an LCS skin have MORE than one.
A few of the teams that have their own skins have only had 1 or 2 sets of 5 released, while a couple of teams coughcoughSKTT1cough have had closer to 5 full sets done for them. Not sure whether or not it's just based off of who wins or performs well in Worlds, but to me it seems like a bit of unfair favoritism on Riot's part.