I’ve never been much of a skins guy when it comes to LoL. The thought of paying double the RP that it takes to unlock a champion just to make it look different never really appealed to me. For that reason I think I own maybe 2 skins. Every once in a while an artist will post a skin concept on reddit that absolutely blows my mind. The community is so full of creative, passionate, and talented artists that it seems like a waste for some of these concept skins to never make it off the page.

I realize that skins are one of the many things that makes Riot money. They have their own talented team of artists who make some awesome skins for us to enjoy. However I think there should be a way for serious artists from the LoL community to turn their concept art into skins that everyone can enjoy. I think it would be remarkable. I’m going to propose a few very high level concepts on how the system would work.

Official Riot Skin Editor Package

A lot of the crappy custom skins that people install themselves are just poor re-colorings. After all what else can you do when you don’t really have access to any character info? To appeal to serious artists, Riot should release an official skin editor package. This would be a premium piece of software or file package that would give the artist full access to the character models and the ability to fully manipulate them. It would essentially be an editing suite that could be purchased for a decent price. The price of it would need to be steep enough to make it a serious investment for someone, a good profit for Riot, and discourage anyone not serious enough about creating skins from using it.

Project Submission

After an artist completes a skin they would need to package it according to Riot’s guidelines and submit it to them. Skins would need to pass a review in order to qualify for the next step of the process. The review process is necessary to ensure no copyright issues, inappropriate material, or potential issues in terms of gameplay. After passing the review the artist would receive a notification that their skin is being placed into the Community Sourced pool.

Selection and Promotion

To prevent the store from flooding with community created skins, Riot selects X amount of skins per month to be released into the LoL Store. If an artist’s skin is selected, they would receive a small percentage of the profit and credit for creating the skin. After a week, the skin would be removed from the store forever like the current limited edition skins are. This would prevent continued purchase of the skin and loss of profit from Riot produced skins.

Artist Benefits

Many artists do their work out of love and don’t require any income to continue doing so. The idea of creating a custom skin for a champion you love and having the community eat it up is enough for most. The small profit from the skin sale would provide incentive for the time used on creating the skin, and if an artist had multiple skins selected the profit would eventually pay off the initial cost of the software. It boils down to pride and excitement that thousand of players are enjoying something you created.

Riot’s Benefits

For a game that prides itself on response to community feedback, accepting fan submissions would be a huge + for Riot’s image. With competitive pricing on the software, Riot would also be picking up a good amount of money from package sales. Also, since only a small % of the skin sales are actually going to artist they would receive a large majority of profits from the sales. Lastly, this “crowd sourcing” would increase the amount of skins being released in the marketplace and more than Riot itself is capable of producing.

Closing Comments

Obviously this is a very general model concept and there are a ton of holes when it comes to security and logistics. It’s something the community has demanded time and time again and with some thought it’s something I could potentially see working. I already have a long list of skins I would buy based on concept art. I’d love to hear your comments, criticisms, and thoughts on whether or not this is a plausible idea. Also feel free to post your favorite concept skins from the community! Below are some of my favorites.