[2019] Riot Blaustoise on Twitter: Data on the visual appeal of skins by region

I don’t know where I mentioned anything about marketing. This data wasn’t used to inform skins, it was used to explain my reasoning the other day.

Hey reddit, love ya, how’s it going?

Context for this is the other day I said (1) that I personally liked the skins and (2) that I hypothesized they’re more resonant with Chinese players.

This data/discussion was NOT to demonstrate Riot’s reasoning for the theme/execution of the IG skins, it was to explain MY reasoning for that hypothesis. Also the title of this post is "visual appeal of skins by region" - it's actually just the visual appeal of the base champions, which is largely splash art, somewhat in game model, and is also influenced a degree by skins, fanart, all sorts of things.

The goal of sharing this was to show that there are pretty substantial differences in visual appeal and resonance by region. When I saw the IG skins, I had this information in the back of my mind, thus I thought “huh this aligns with some of my perceptions of what Chinese players find appealing”

Also to be clear (1) Chinese players and IG fans may not find the IG skins appealing (2) the skins could be better with more facial or hair/eye variation (for NA, CN, or players in any region)! This is not sentiment about the skins, and China or other regions may have similar complaints as North America players RE the execution of some aspects of the skins.

But I felt here was another case of potential regional (cultural rather) bias slipping in that was especially juicy to jump in on given that the IG skins are more specifically intended to honor the club and the winning region than be more globally appealing.

Always happy to discuss more.

I don’t think I’ve said “we make conventionally attractive characters because people like those characters”, but I agree with the spirit of your comment! I also think we’ve been improving in this area but still have plenty of room to grow.

I actually talked about this phenomenon in my GDC talk RE champion data. If you made the “Avengers” of League of Legends champs, and just picked the most played champions, you’d end up with a lot of overlap of themes and not much diversity.

So a lot of it comes down to goals. Are you trying to find the most popular champions? Or in your case are you trying to make a champion that’s most popular? OR are you selecting champions that will have the most appeal to the most players, and making champions that give your overall roster something for everyone?

Framing around the latter goals helps explain why champions like Bard, Illaoi, Ornn, etc, are just as valuable as Kai’Sa, Xayah, etc. it’s not also about making what is “conventionally attractive”, but deepening our roster so it has more for everyone.

Great callout RE wording. We have a pretty fantastic localization team, and I can also confirm that other questions around visuals shiw this trend too (“this champion’s visuals fit their overall theme” “this champion has unique visual”, etc) I forgot the full list, I’m just on my phone rn but there’s a set of questions RE visuals for champions.