$10 for a skin to a throwaway afterthought game huh? Haha, silly Blizzard, you aren’t Riot and you don’t have anything remotely close to LoL with HS, get this sad money grab out of here.
But then again, when you are clinging to a top 20 grossing spot on the iPhone list with your freshly released mobile game (anyone have the finger stamina to find HS on the iPad chart?), you do need to get desperate, and this is desperation 101 right out of the SOE/Turbine playbook. Oh how far once-mighty Blizzard has fallen.
Free-to-Play, ALL THE WAY!
Hardcore Casual 
It really burns you to think about how many people are going to buy it, doesn’t it?
I am curios, especially to compare it to LoL where I swear 50% of all the people I play with have a skin (so likely have a bunch), but ultimately I see this more as a cash-grab than anything else. If the game was doing amazing (top 5ish), I don’t think this gets rolled out, or at least not like this (straight cash shop with no other option).
I gotta say, I have long been extremely impressed in how LoL managed to persuade the sort of people who you wouldn’t THINK would be interested in cosmetic skins to spend money on them.
I only know a few LoL players personally – and they’re the sort of serious gamers who you wouldn’t think would “waste” money on something with no gameplay effect. I’d expect their LoL-spending to be buying every champion or some such. But no, they do happily buy cosmetic skins.
I think a large part of that is if you are even semi-serious about LoL, you get enough LP to buy champs, so you don’t need RP to do it.
The other factor is a lot of the skins are just awesome, and when you see others with them its motivation to pick it up, especially for a champ you play often.
Finally the fact that LoL is perhaps the least-aggressive F2P game about asking for money plays into it too. I never feel the need to spend, or ever see LoL asking me to do so. I just see top-notch fluff almost every game, and when you have invested countless hours, throwing down $20 or so every so often feels pretty painless.
I spend a lot of money in Dota 2 (aka about £5 a month). I have 1200 hours in the game now, it’s nice to think I can give something back.
This has been one of the most persistent and reasonable asked-for additions in the forums since launch, imo. Maybe I’m biased because I was asking for more female heroes. The dwarf is a good choice to test the waters though.
This (alternate heroes) has been asked for, for a long time now.However, the general feeling is that it’s too expensive for ONE hero. It would be fine if it gave you an entire ‘pack’ of alternate skins.
But 10$ for a single hero is nuts.
Especially because (unless I missed it) you can’t buy it with gold, right?
To be honest, if you go for the LoL model, paying for skins with in game currency would be too much. I still don;t understand why someone would pay cash for a silly outfit, but whatever, at least you get a model, unique animations and stuff. Plus you get the troll value when you kill someone as a barbarian in a pink tutu.
But 10$ for a portrait and 6 e-motes? What the actual fuck? Maybe 2$, mayyybeeeee….
It’s 10 bucks for all 9 not just one but either way it’s ridiculous that they are promoting skins like this rather than making new heroes.
Is it? $10 for all 9 isn’t horrible, but that’s not how I read the announcement.
Yeah I might have misread….even more ridiculous now.