Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
I'm curious to know the layoffs by game. It would be surprising if League of Legends retains all of its game design/balance team, and it'd also be surprising if Valorant lays off any employees.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.