TL;DR: Read italic part

This is a tweet response by Sean Marino (VALORANT Associate Art Director) to a tweet regarding the new skins not having a finisher or additional FX. I consider it important as it gives a lot of insight.

^(Maybe this should be stickied or added to the wiki, as I think it's important, else at least it's a post I can reference in the future.)

I want to use this as an educating moment and also give a bit of insight into how the whole development process works for skins. Our team is incredibly passionate and pours their heart into everything we do, be it "top tier" or not. We've seen players left a bit unsatisfied when a skinline that really resonates with them falls short with regard to features, effects, and variants, and imagine for a second how much it pains us as both developers and players to release something we know could be more. The fact of the matter is, anything, and everything, can always be more. We have to make tradeoffs. We all wanted an alien abduction finisher for G.U.N, some cool fiery effects for Tigris, be able to pet your dragon Frenzy and have it nip at your finger because he's just a youngin and doesn't know any better yet. This team has amazing ideas and is capable of bringing those ideas to life for players. If we poured 150% into everything, the team would burn out, the skins would take a lot longer to release, and everything would be insanely expensive. Nobody wins in that world. We sometimes do push on the things that we think will be the most meaningful for players.

Gaia's Vengeance was delayed an entire year so that we could add effects, audio, and colored variants. It became a meme on the team that it would never release because we kept pushing it back to add more. Originally we wanted Protocol to release in 2021, and adding new features to the gun proved to be more difficult than we anticipated. And for some skins, we get a decent way into production on them and realize we just weren't hitting the mark, and have to start over. We are a "small" team committed to excellence. Sure we can hire more people, but that doesn't always solve the problem. There is no formula for how we make skins. It's not just slap a camo on a gun and call it a day, or select a simple color from a wheel. If it was that easy, every other game would be doing it, and I truly believe that VALORANT sets itself apart from the industry by offering some of the best cosmetic content out there.

This team is not just "designers," but artists, QA, producers, engineers, marketing, strategy, audio & more - people who go to work every day to make sure that what we're doing is the best we can for players. I'd love to see the conversation for things like this turn from "this bundle is sucks" into "this skin has so much potential, but would be excellent if.." - or "this bundle isn’t really for me, and here's why." It's ok in the end if a skin is not for you (speaking to the collective "you"), and we understand when you want more out of what we've given. What would be even more delightful is for those in this community who have a platform and an influence on the larger player base to also reinforce this kind of conversation. We always listen, we always take the feedback, and we always try to improve. As Rioters and VALORANT developers we choose to engage with the community in these discussions because it's important to have that connection to talk about things instead of ignoring them, and to make sure that every decision we make is one that benefits you first, not us.

Source: https://twitter.com/oniram177/status/1506773213619326976

So next time you complain maybe give your own opinion with insight. Not every person can afford or pay the same amount. Of course this sub isn't the majority nor are the people who scream loudest. Constructive criticism is way more beneficial to us as well as to them.

The new Endeavor bundle is like 30$ for a whole bundle (ok it has no melee but still), the Tigris one is one of the best skins for their tier/price and possibly some of the higher tiers. Some people prefer the default sounds but want a finisher, more like the Champions Vandal. It's beautiful that people are so diverse and they all like different colors/skins and that's clearly visible with skins in general, some really like something and some don't like that same thing.

Anyways, I wanna using this post to once again say I'm very grateful for all of the team's great work and I really enjoy the diversity of the skins. So thanks u/oniram177, u/Riot_Preeti and the rest of the team for all you do for the game!

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PS: I'm super happy a dev could elaborate as I had a prepared response for the last few times people complained about a skin my comment would be:

I think the process needs a lot more work, creativeness, time, coordination, etc. than is given devs credit for.

Just from the top of my head, if the skin has something new, you need: concept artists, process managers, programmers for in game things that affect the skin & shaders, then you have people making the models & variations, animations to weapons and agents, kill banners, finishers, new audio (from shots to finishers to reloads, pullouts, inspects, and kills), testers, recordings showing how the skin is, pricing, marketing (bundle promo video/bundle artwork etc.). This same work, with some overlap, needs to be done for the melee and the other guns in the bundle. You also usually have a gun buddy, a title, and a banner in the bundle.

But now I can reference something from a dev.