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LoR can make a profit. The issue is most champions (over half) have exactly 1 skin. After 5 years of the game. And no animated or frame breaks.
LoR can make a profit. The issue is most champions (over half) have exactly 1 skin. After 5 years of the game. And no animated or frame breaks.
If solving game monetization problems was as simple as "Just add more skins", I assure you that Riot of all people would have done it.
It's 2 parts: more skins and more players. They got more players. Still, most champions have exactly 1 skin to their name.
I'll rephrase. If solving game monetization problems was as simple as "just add more skins and just get more players" then the game would have done that.
Each skin has a total development cost, which includes both the creation of the art assets (not just the artist but also the time spent by the art director and so on) and the time spent implementing it into the game (getting it in the store, writing the descriptive text, testing to make sure it works, etc). They aren't free.
If a skin is producing less money than it costs to develop, it's not worth making that skin. Simply making more skins also doesn't linearly incease profitability. Each skin only appeals to a small fraction of the player base, since even people willing to spend on skins don't care about all skins for all champions. This is why some champions have more skins than others, because they are more popular.
Most game teams don't have a fixed budget. If you can show that "we have a machine that turns every $1000 invested in hiring new artists into $1300" then you can keep getting more funds as long as the machine keeps printing money. But it actually has to produce more than it costs.
You have way too much faith in Riot and this team. They refused to add animated skins because "too much RAM, it won run on a old phones" meanwhile the game doesn't even run on Mac. They refused to make things that would've easily helped, and refused to even try for the silliest reasons.
The number of potential LoR players that own a mac that they want to use for gaming, while NOT owning a smartphone, tablet, or pc is not big enough to be worth dedicating resources and dealing with the added ongoing development/maintainence annoyances of supporting both.
Mac isn't exactly the "gaming computer" brand. There's a reason for that. By contrast, there are a LOT of LoR players that play on Mobile.
You've imagined some hypothetical numbers with %s of paying users, average revenue per paying user, macbook-user-conversion and similar... Why are you so convinced the numbers you're imagining are correct?
Riot wanted cosmetics to fund LoR. Originally you couldn't even buy cards. If the strategy was working and they just needed to make more skins, seems like they'd just have made more skins.
I can't speak for the current team or share inside info, but with what's public you should have enough info to question your assumptions.
Hello former Rioter Dan Felder, who was highly involved in monetizing LoR. I didn't read your name at first
I was using the Mac thing as a comparison to the "RAM on old phones" cope they made when we begged for animated skins. Obviously old phones make up a small margin of players too.
Yes my numbers are hypothetical: I'm not convinced they're correct. I'm convinced they're lower than the correct numbers.
I've since learned even $1.3m isn't enough to run the game, at least not without a lean team. Though, the profit of skins should be quadratic. Even a little more spending and players should blow up profits.
I know you have NDA, but can you give me a rough idea of how far off I am?
I see how you could feel disrespected since you were involved in the economy and monetization of the game. That's my bad. I wouldn't have said that to you personally if I had noticed at first. I'm bitter. I had so many goals and ambitions tied to the game, and it's the only CCG I thoroughly enjoyed. I put so much time and energy into the game, so I feel burned by the failure.
I want to hope for the future. I have to be certain it could've been done better and still can be. And to do that, I have to show the past was mishandled, or misinterpreted at the very least.
I don't want to be a hater, but it's the only way I can think to hold out hope for the game I love(d).
Hello former Rioter Dan Felder, who was highly involved in monetizing LoR. I didn't read your name at first.
No worries. I came into the project after the PvP economy was already in place. I was heavily involved with designing the PvE monetization strategy, but I'm not on the team anymore. I'm only speaking for myself.
I've since learned even $1.3m isn't enough to run the game, at least not without a lean team[...] I know you have NDA, but can you give me a rough idea of how far off I am?
Just going to talk in some game development generalities here, because people do underestimate how expensive high quality games are to make.
A decent ballpark estimate for Total compensation for a typical game dev in LA (not specifically Riot, just in general), factoring in salary, stock, bonuses, healthcare, other benefits, and licenses/equipment etc, is ~$15k per month, or $180k per year.
This can go up or down significantly but it's a decent estimate number for a ballpark. Benefits, bonuses, equipment and more cost a lot more than people think. Seniors are often going to be high above that number as well in terms of total compensation.
At the $180k per year estimate though, 1.3 Million would cover a little more than 7 people. A game like LoR would need a design team, engineering team, concept artists, fx artists, ui/ux, producers, QA, product, etc. You're probably aware of multiple designers working on LoR currently if you've read some of the posts. The game used to have a lot more people working on it too.
In terms of your specific calculations, I can't speak to the details but Eric Shen did publicly say that boards are the best-selling cosmetic category and that a single month of the new TPOC bundles was comparable to like... A year of board sales from 2022. Two months of TPOC bundles was outdoing about a year of 2022 card sales. That should give you an idea.
I see how you could feel disrespected since you were involved in the economy and monetization of the game. That's my bad. I wouldn't have said that to you personally if I had noticed at first.
Thanks. I wasn't a lead until 2022, so I wasn't involved in the original monetization discussions for the game. If "just make more skins" was an easy path, it would have been a way easier to pitch than supporting a new PvE mode with an untested monetization model. Would have made my job much more chill. :)
I want to hope for the future. I have to be certain it could've been done better and still can be. And to do that, I have to show the past was mishandled, or misinterpreted at the very least.
Understandable. A major part of my job was evaluating previous approaches with new data and seeing if we could do something better.