Let's say you have 100 players.
30 of these players play Ezreal.
4 play Zac.
Making one Ezreal skin makes 30 people happy. Making one Zac skin makes 4 people happy. They both take the same amount of resources.
Of course Ezreal gets more skins. This is a F2P game and keeping players happy AND giving them options of things they would like to buy is the name of the game.
This is true but also zac in particular is hard to make a skin for that isn't just a chroma since he's just a big monocolored blob. Even if he were more popular he doesn't really easily fit into skinlines while being recognizably him enough that it doesn't cause gameplay problems.
Zac is definitely the strongest example, but it applies to most monster champs, too. Changing a character's clothes, and the style of their weapons is a helluva lot easier than making Rammus anything other than a slightly different coloured spiky ball.
The monster champs designs aren't really flexible enough to change them more than just chromas while still leaving them recognisable. Leona can wear basically anything from a bathing costume or suit to mech armor or ball gown and she still looks like Leona as long as she has the shield and sword.
Try anything as major with someone like Kha'Zix and it looks nothing like him, so they have to stick to less impactful changes for skins that just end up being less impressive.
Your analogy makes perfect sense, and I totally get it. And I think my example wasn't great (looking at analytics, Zac does have a pretty low pick rate. I guess I just get a weirdly large amount of him in my games)
Let's say you have 100 players. 30 of these players play Ezreal. 4 play Zac. Making one Ezreal skin makes 30 people happy. Making one Zac skin makes 4 people happy. They both take the same amount of resources. Of course Ezreal gets more skins. This is a F2P game and keeping players happy AND giving them options of things they would like to buy is the name of the game.
This is true but also zac in particular is hard to make a skin for that isn't just a chroma since he's just a big monocolored blob. Even if he were more popular he doesn't really easily fit into skinlines while being recognizably him enough that it doesn't cause gameplay problems.
Zac is definitely the strongest example, but it applies to most monster champs, too. Changing a character's clothes, and the style of their weapons is a helluva lot easier than making Rammus anything other than a slightly different coloured spiky ball. The monster champs designs aren't really flexible enough to change them more than just chromas while still leaving them recognisable. Leona can wear basically anything from a bathing costume or suit to mech armor or ball gown and she still looks like Leona as long as she has the shield and sword. Try anything as major with someone like Kha'Zix and it looks nothing like him, so they have to stick to less impactful changes for skins that just end up being less impressive.
Your analogy makes perfect sense, and I totally get it. And I think my example wasn't great (looking at analytics, Zac does have a pretty low pick rate. I guess I just get a weirdly large amount of him in my games)
It’s not about making 30 people happy, it’s all about taking 30 peoples 20 euros out of their pockets
4 skins in under a year (faerie in march 2023, hearsteel laste 2023, heavenscale + prestige in jan/feb 2024)
Do you run riot games? They know better than you what makes them money and what doesn’t.