[2019] I wish Riot would explore more skin lines rather than recycle the same themes every year

Hey this is my first post on reddit so be gentle.

...but to add context I work as part of the team that sets the strategy for how League of Legends monetizes which includes skins. We create predictions on how skins will perform before we make a skinline which includes the playrate of certain champions as well as a multitude of other factors. Even accounting for those factors Papaercraft didn't do great. Personally, I'm pretty sad about it as I think they're utterly gorgeous.

I'm not sure what our plans our for next year regarding Papercraft but either way its a really tough choice. Ultimately, we aim to make things for you folks the players and not ourselves so its always a battle between really wanting to believe in a skinline like Papercraft and weighing it out vs. the feedback and engagement we get.

Hey Folks. My name is Bellissimoh and I’m the Product Lead for Personalization on League. Wanted to take a second to talk about thematics broadly as there’s a lot of great conversation going on here.

1. Thematic Distribution - In any given year we try to have a mix of established thematics that we know players like and newly developed thematics that we take a risk on and hope players enjoy.

2. Thematic Selection - There’s a lot that goes into this process nowadays. We survey players and try to understand which thematics are the most desired. We also look at how well previous releases did in terms of players purchasing, using in game, and also perceived quality via surveys to skin owners. As someone mentioned earlier, if players don’t show up for a skin line, it hurts the chances of us making more champions in that line. We want to make things that you guys love, or spend time discovering new thematics you might love rather than continuing to spend time on thematics that only a narrow slice of players like.

3. Global Resonance - Different regions have different tastes and skins sometimes have strong differences in performance and perceived quality in different regions. Great example is Brolaf. Did fairly well in North America but almost every other country just didn’t get it or think it was an exciting fantasy. As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to make thematics that a majority of players like. sh*t I think you guys can even see just in this subreddit that people can have very different tastes even though we share the same culture, media, influences, etc. This means that sometimes we have to make or chose thematics that cater to a subset of players best we can. Demacia Vice is a solid example of this. Not everyone likes the 80s, but we hope that those that do REALLY loved those skins.

4. Thematic Development - Were constantly trying to cook up new thematics with the goal of surprising and delighting you guys with sometime fresh. In the example of Papercraft, we started from the idea of trying to do something bold technically in-game. For Battle Academia, we saw in a variety of player surveys that interest in anime had a huge overlap with League players. The thematic development process isn’t just concerting some champs and calling it a day though. We have a multi-disciplinary team that takes time to try and imagine what each skin thematics world might be like in order to give our thematics and more importantly our champions depth in these new realities. It’s this work that gets reflected in things like the champion skin bios, their VO in the case of legendaries, or in CG / gameplay trailers.

Long story short. We tryin. You can expect to see some subset of known thematics every year, but know that we’re working hard on building new worlds and thematics that we hope you all enjoy.

Historically we would do a spread of concepts and and then pick a few champions we thought were the best fit.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Dunk master Ivern is an example where we think we could have done a better job of understanding what Ivern mains wanted before selecting that thematic.

Today we do a lot more. We survey mains of a champ and try to understand what thematics interest them as an example.

Our goal moving forward is to work harder to understand what players want for any given champion and do our best to really deliver, particularly for mains of any given champ.

All that being said, everyone still likes different things, and we’re not going to be able to please everyone all of the time, but know we’re trying to do our best. :)

We definitely that that into account. We absolutely see that some thematics perform well on some champions or even classes (tank, mage, etc) than others.

Notes on your Bard suggestion but can’t make any promises. :)

I thought what Killroy was after was something along the lines of "If papercraft was made for more popular champions it would've sold better so Riot should look to try this on more popular champions and see how it does."

I was trying to say that we control for a lot of factors including the popularity of the champion when we measure performance. Unfortunately, Papercraft didn't meet those standards even when accounting for for popularity. Alternatively, its likely Papercraft would've performed poorly regardless of the champion we put it on vs. the champion popularity.

If the question was "Why don't we test new skinlines on popular champs to begin with?" I would say it mostly has to do with risk. If we create a theme no one wants and the skin does very poorly - that's not only a huge hit to our revenue but also means far more players didn't get something they would've wanted instead. To me that's kindof a lose-lose for everyone involved.

So this year we wanted to expand the SG universe a bit and introduce an evil force / villain. Zoe is the ultimate evil power in the SG universe and even has the power to corrupt other Star Guardians. (In this case, Xayah and Rakan)

When we have ideas or concepts like this that change or alter the core of a thematic, we usually test and do player labs where we collect feedback from players in different regions. In this case most players really dug the direction we were going with our villains so we decided to trick forward.

Glad to hear you like it. Excited to hear everyone’s feedback once all the skins are released and folks get to experience them for themselves. :)

Appreciate the credit but we can always be better. ;)

Pyjama guardians were definitely beloved by a lot of players. Know we’re not in the business of making promises until we know something will happen for players, but your feedback is noted. :)

There will be more variants in the future. :)