Skins for popular champions fund skins for unpopular champions

By your own description, the more popular skins fund the less popular ones. Okay, maybe funding isn't the right word, but they definitely allow for the artists and developers to also create skins for lesser popular champions as well as the tenth Lux skin of the year.

The primary purpose of Riot is to make money for Tencent, and maybe their secondary purpose is to create a game that's fun for a lot of people. What's probably happening is for each skin line they have projections for how much each skin is going to make. After they have all the major money earning skins planned out, then they can tack on whatever the fuck they feel like. And what's wrong with that? They're a company. And let's be honest, they're really not as money grabby as some other big names (before I get responses pointing out Prestige/eternals, remember these are completely optional).

The unpopular skins may not sell at a strict loss in the sense that the wages paid to the artists/developers are more than the total revenue, but they may lose money because those people could be devoting more resources to skins that can may much more money. Riot has a limited number of resources and the skin process is much more complicated than just "artist uploads picture of skin on summoner's rift". Why don't they just hire more people to create more skins? Probably because over the years they've found the sweet spot for the number of skins to release and releasing more skins at a time may actually lead to less revenue.

Personally, I have absolutely no problem with the ratio of popular and unpopular skins they release because they make a large portion of the playerbase happy (excluding all the redditors that want only Ornn/Skarner skins, of course) and they keep profits high. And before you ask, yes I am a Riot shill /s.

/r/leagueoflegends Thread Parent