User blog comment:ZanaLyrander/Thoughts on Legacy Skins/@comment-5077844-20130729163243/@comment-5331854-20130730095304

@ ZanaLyrander

"I completely agree, they handle the whole free-to-play model much, much better than most game developers, and paying never feels mandatory (which ironically enough, actually makes people feel more comfortable actually paying for stuff)"

That's the secret to get money in the video game industry: Create fairness. Create quality. It's quite surprising that a single game-company like Riot is the best example in the whole industry for this simple lesson: Give quality and fairness, get money and brand attachment. The same lesson could be learned if you compare Capcom and Namco, especially Street Fighter X Tekken vs. Tekken Tag Tournament 2. For those who don't know:

Street Fighter X Tekken is a decent fighting game, but they made extremely stupid decisions even from a business point-of-view: On-Disc DLC (meaning they actively held back content to let the customer pay more money on Day One), 10+ characters being DLC, a massive amount of costumes being DLC and even some of the best gems (you just need to know that they influence gameplay) are only avaible with money.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2, on the other hand, gives you patches. Not only for balancing (though it's not that common), but also for giving new characters and stages, including those you get from the Pre-Order if you can wait 3 months after release (which means the rooster is complete for a long time now). No costs involved (Namco even stated that "characters and stages are an essential experience for fighting games, so paying for them would be unfair". Last time I checked in the European PSN-Store, no DLCs for this game.

You may guess which company I'm more inclined to support.

But back to the actual topic: Humans want what they can't have, so storing away skins into the vault makes us want these skins. Riot knows that. And they know how to make good deals. I bought the "Good Night, Sweet Skins"-bundle because I had my eyes on Muse Sona for a while and this bundle costs 50 RP less than the skin itself. It felt good to buy the bundle. When items are getting rare and you feel like you can make a good deal, you will feel great (you can learn more about this psychological effect by watching "The JC Penney effect" from Extra Credits on Penny Arcade). As you said, never needing to pay for getting an advantage makes people more comfortable about paying for skins, especially if these skins are "endangered". It helps that here are regular, seasonal and release sales for skins, thou.

It's not about actually making the deal, but about making it feel good to make the deal. The options for Riot are limited if they don't want to go pay-to-win (and they never will, they're smart folks), so they go with sales and putting skins in the vault, sometimes opening it when people are most willing to spend money (usually December because of Christmas and people getting a Christmas allowance). Standard business methods for a non-standard business model like Riot.