Riot thinks that adding renewable battle pass in VALORANT would hurt the ability to fund their long-term vision

The price of VALORANT’s skin bundle has been a topic of contention between players in the community since the game launched on June 2nd.

While some players agree that paying 71$ for a skin bundle is justifiable in a free-to-play game, however, not everyone shares the same belief. For some time players have been voicing their complaints on how overpriced these skins are in VALORANT. Worse of all, unlike most other popular battle pass system that is available in the market like Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc, VALORANT’s battle pass is not re-buyable from just grinding the game.

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Since players do not receive Valorant points as they grind their battle pass, there is no way to actually renew the battle pass for the next season after you have unlocked every achievement in that particular season. Instead of Valorant points, players receive Radianite points that can be used to unlock skin recolors or additional animation, gun harms, etc.

While it is not necessary for publishers to make a battle pass that is renewable, the recent popular options from games like Fortnite have made it the new norm. That is why players were expecting Riot Games to follow on Fortnite’s footsteps on monetization.

However, as it turns out they had their own plans on how to monetize free-to-play games. As Riot Games have more than ten years of experience in monetizing free-to-play games like League of Legends, they have a vast amount of data to figure out what works and what doesn’t work with certain types of customers.

With VALORANT Riot seems to be targeting the top 1% of gamers who usually spend a lot of money on skins. As a result, they can keep the game free-to-play instead of pay-to-win for most players. Not everyone can purchase a game for 60$ every time. Therefore Riot decided to keep the price of skins high so they can cover up for gamers who can’t actually pay for the game.

Riot explains why their battle pass is not renewable

After all the complaints regarding their battle pass system, Riot’s Senior Producer, Ian Fielding, explained recently how adding renewable battle pass would actually hurt their long term vision on how these battle pass would work in the future.

According to Riot, they want their battle pass to be their highest value product considering how many skins, items you can unlock for the battle pass. Riot will also likely tweak how their battle pass would work in the future depending on player data.

However, this response received a mixed reaction from the community. As some players pointed out that they were quite happy with the price of the battle pass and skins. There are still outliers out there that believe Riot’s explanation is still not justifiable.

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Depending on how many players actually buy their battle pass, Riot will not change anything anytime soon. Therefore players will now have to speak with their wallet if they really want Riot to change how they conduct their business. Until then Riot Games will keep the same monetization model that works quite well for them.