Yeah, so I think a lot of this is cultural.
A lot of traditional PC/console studios like Respawn have lived their entire lives as midsize studios with no plans to scale their expansion. They've been in the industry for a long time and like the way they are. Being attached to (or owned by) a major publisher also contributes to this. They're ultimately unequipped to handle a major success because when they get product growth, they're incapable or unprepared to scale to the size of their product.
When Riot or Epic hit it big, their viewpoint was "we're gonna get as big as the product needs."
When I was at Riot, we scaled from 200 to 2000 employees. A friend joined Epic right before Fortnite BR released and gave me a similar sentiment to how they handled growth.
Generally, companies like Respawn think "we're gonna handle as best we can." They're obviously hiring people, but they're not expanding in the way they should if they actually wanted to truly scale the product.
Yea, I can see that and I've greatly respected how they've decided to handle expansion of the game and issues like crunch. Very much so.
It's just...when you compare Apex skins (before this event) to similarly priced cosmetics and skins in other games...there's just sort of a standard that they hadn't been meeting. Real talk: 90% of $20 Apex skins would have been no more than $10 skins in any established MTX-based economy game.
But again, they really did step up their quality for this event. If I could have bought a couple of the skins for this event directly, I very well might have. That Lifeline skin continues to whisper to me, but not so much that I'm willing to buy loot boxes to get it. And that's a bit frustrating. At least in a game like Dota 2, I could wait for an item to appear on the Steam Marketplace if I don't want to play the RNG game. And in League this wouldn't have been an issue at all because there is next to nothing that can't be bought directly and at a reasonable price. And this is all before even discussing the Heirloom being locked behind buying
at least 22 loot boxes, knowing full well that players can only earn 2 boxes. There's only so much spinning that can be done on that one. It almost makes having that Heriloom a badge of infamy.
I continue to hope for the best for them, but this is one aspect of the game that I am genuinely surprised they've been so slow at grasping and maximizing. They're not the first I've experienced this with, though. The last one with Frontier Developments and Elite: Dangerous. The Elite Dangerous store is now quite packed with cosmetics, but it took almost 2 years of me and the rest of the community begging them on their forums to step up their cosmetic game before they finally did and they started making really good money from it. Before they were only bringing in money from releasing expansions.
They just need to know that for $20 the stuff really does need to look *a cut above*...and it hasn't really measured up. You know, I think this would have all gone better for them if all of their skins up to now had been $5-$10 (because again, that's where they feel they should be just based on how they look and how many recycled effects they have across classes), then later introduced a $20 tier that looked like they were 2x the work (or at least 2x as cool). And of course, offered SOME OF (not all of) these event skins for direct purchase at that higher price point if desired. Ideally ranging from $10-$20. I think a lot of this controversy wouldn't have happened. IDK.