User blog comment:ZanaLyrander/Thoughts on Legacy Skins/@comment-5873779-20130801134520

a car isnt a very good example, because cars are a big investment and people dont browse through car dealerships every day, where as the LoL shop is accessed alot more frequently BUT ANYWAY.

virtual, ingame items are one of the very few things where limited time sales do work. Others would include food products, or collectors items, such as trading cards. this is because they are cheap (most retired skins were priced at 520 when avaliable) people frequently go to news agents and supermarkets, and both appeal to the consumer.

The other reason is that riot have sort of trapped them in a position where 520 skins arnt really purchased unless the player has leftover RP and doenst plan on buying anymore. This is because RP is only avaliable in large bundles, and if you could buy 520 RP by itself it would not be a fair price due to their non-linear price scaling system (i mean how you get the 'bonus RP'). this means it would be more beneficial to buy the current packages anyway.

so in summary, RIOT probably is doing the better financial thing here, because the other option would be to make major changes to their RP pricing, which would in turn probably mean changes need to be made to champion and skin pricing which would turn the community on its head and result in a tsunami of complaints about people sobbbing 'my skin is less valuable now, i want a refund' or 'i just got enough had enough for a skin, and now you made it more expensive, i want it for the original price'. so yeah, enough said on that point.

It's just the lack of people buying 520 skins due to the way their RP pricing works and they decided to make the right decision to turn the skins to limited time skins rather than make major revamps to the pricing sceme that would just result in amking people angry. A wise decision i think.

(ignore my lack of writing structure, i never payed attention in english class)