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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Every year Riot releases a new cinematic for League of Legends to celebrate the start of the season. Last year they released the worst cinematic in all of their history. This announcement makes me wonder if their sudden rapid growth was at least partially the reason for why they ended up shipping such a bad video.

In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.

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Is not being able to buy a skin some kind of tragedy? It's a luxury item at any price.

I'm sure there is a kid somewhere crying into his controller because he's been rejected by his online friends because he's using the default skin, but I think he's learning a valuable life lesson.

It's a potentially negative financial marker to the success of their business model of selling skins if their skins don't sell, I don't think there's any more sentiment to the statement beyond that

Given that the marginal cost of a skin is zero, and assuming they're not incompetent at evaluating the price elasticity of their sales, $200 is probably where they maximise profit.

The comment I was replying to didn't say they weren't selling, just that they were unaffordable to many people, so I don't really know what you're referring to.

Maybe it's a negative to alienate your customers in this way, or maybe it works financially to make skins just out of reach and 'aspirational' for most gamers.

Got a link to the cinematic you mention? Haven't heard of it.

Sure! In order to set a bit of context...

First watch the 2022 cinematic [0], to get an idea of what they normally ship. Then watch the 2023 cinematic [1], to see how badly they messed up. And just to drive the point home, compare it with the 2024 cinematic [2] which is a return to form.

If you look at the 2023 cinematic in a vacuum it might seem generic and uninspired, but then when you compare it with the 2022 and 2024 cinematics the quality gap becomes apparent.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYqT0_9VR4

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJT5d5Ue3ao

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHhqwBwmRkI

Wow, what a great post, thanks so much. I don't know a single thing about LoL but yeah, shipping what is essentially a single tracking shot through a pretty static environment vs the complex, choreographed scenes with characters fighting etc. Pretty big difference.

One thing to note is they used a different vendor than usual. In most recent cases, Unit Image do their cinematics, but weren’t the ones for your 2023 example.

Likely came together last minute and their preferred vendors weren’t available.

Last year I believe the company they were working with had issues and they had to scrap together something urgently.

No comment on the other aspects but I suspect they are still printing money (comparing to Fortnite and Valve)

> In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community.

They learned from Valorant. It has extremely overpriced skins from the beginning too, and the outrage lasts a single post on Reddit once every few months and is downvoted by fanboys. They just don't care, people will buy them anyway, most people will forget in a moment. I'm guessing they have data from Valorant that simply shows they make more if they just aim at whales. I doubt they would just raise prices without giving it a real thought.

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