Selling cosmetic things is literally the best way of extracting money from this. Humans are social creatures, and clothes, real or virtual, are part of social display, some people (me for example) don't care about it, but they are exceptions, most people care deeply about using clothes for social display, and "threatening" them with not having a potentially high social status piece is a good way to make these people buy everything.

This is the whole point of the fashion industry too, every year the "collection" changes, this makes people both afraid of being "left behind", but also of missing "classics" that won't be manufactured again, also it is why fashion designers release things in "collections", idea is seduce people in buying the entire collection, not just the piece they liked.

When you are dealing with something that has an actual value, for example a base-version magic the gathering or pokemon card, the value is exactly whatever the item is useful for, the more useful it is the more people pay for it, but when you are dealing with stuff that is useful to display social status, things change, and you end with people paying ludicrous amounts of money to buy a brick written "Supreme" when the "Supreme" guys themselves are not sure why this is happening.

https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/skate-brand-supreme-se...

Or in case of game cards, people willing to pay sky high prices because the card has special art, sometimes even if the art is UGLIER than the base version, just because it is rare and a social status, things get even wilder when the social status is part of the reason the card exists in first place (for example cards that were manufactured to be given to judges or championship winners)

Why would a fortnite skin become high status? Aren’t they all available in unlimited quantity for a fairly standard price? That sounds like the opposite of scarcity. If something is popular then it will be the most common and thus the least interesting.

Surely you’re not saying people buy skins because they might turn out to be unpopular and thus cool to wear…

I’m sure there’s a niche culture around always buying the absolute latest piece, but that’s not the fear of missing out and would exist even if everything was always available?

the supply is unlimited, but the number of skins "in the wild" is limited by price. apparently the most expensive Fortnite skins cost hundreds of dollars. not everyone (or more realistically, their parents) can afford to drop that on a digital texture.

"popular" can mean "widely desired", not necessarily "owned by many people".

Google suggests fortnite skins cost at most $20

With a few niche edge cases where you need a specific phone to acquire them as a promo for the hardware.

Introducing artificial scarcity on digital goods seems incredibly anti-consumer. Consider a different scenario where someone wants the skin both now and later (for whatever reason - value is driven by the desire of the purchaser), but doesn't have the financial wherewithal to purchase frivolous things at a whim. In that scenario the consumer has to make a choice between purchasing an artificially scarce good or making a good personal financial choice.

From a neutral party standpoint (i.e. I neither want to purchase the skins, nor do I benefit financially from their purchase, nor do I wish to ban their sale outright), it seems obvious that a fungible, non-exhaustible digital good (with it's near-0 maintenance cost) should be restricted from exclusive periods of sale. There is no reason for it, other than to take advantage of human brain chemistry to drive a specific type of sale by producing artificial demand.

That seems like an unlikely edge case given these are probably pretty cheap?

I think it is absolutely an issue if you are a kid or you are living paycheck to paycheck. There is a social/prestige aspect to skins and game rewards that shouldn't be underrated, and that type of business model is always targeting 'whales', i.e. people with a phenotypic disposition to getting carried away and spending a huge amount. I don't think it's right to let companies deploy manipulative business models or collect obscene rents - it always winds up hurting the most vulnerable people. Further, nothing of value is created by that model - it's simply another rent collection tactic to force people to pay up when it's best for the company.

At least with physical goods there is an overhead to keeping old SKUs in the catalog. A digital skin is a metadata blob in a database, which can't be deleted anyways, since anyone who paid for access to that metadata needs it to exist.

So why wouldn’t this social prestige effect exist if skins were released at the same rate but were permanently available?

It would still exist. The difference is the artificial scarcity is gone, so customers aren't under time pressure to purchase them. They are free to do so as they are reasonably able to afford it.

If it’s a social prestige thing then you’re likely to want the latest fashion though. So… the time pressure is still there, because the value of yesterday’s fashion quickly falls.

If we assume you are correct, then the makers of these games shouldn't care if we ban exclusive distribution periods, since the results should be exactly the same.

I’m not arguing it doesn’t work. I’m arguing it’s not predatory.

Devil’s advocate, which seems likely to me, is that having a small catalog that is frequently updated is a lot easier to make a sale on for its simplicity and expectation of finding something novel every time you look.

100 options is overwhelming. 5 is easier for the consumer. And if 95% of people who would ever buy your new skin will do so within a week of its release, it makes sense to just ship a new catalog next week and never bother with the old one again.

What if scarcity is where the value is derived?

meh. selling cosmetic-only items is a pretty good way to fund a low/zero purchase price game imo. no one is priced out of the core experience, and the people that really care pay for everyone else to play.

This is a textbook example of abusing FOMO (fear of missing out). It's real and Epic does it exactly because of this effect on people.

If you're not completely convinced by some cosmetic item you might say "I don't know whether I really want this so I'll just wait and maybe buy it later". But if it's time-limited, in this case without indication whether it'll ever be on sale again, you cannot wait and decide later. It's deliberate time pressure on the decision.

In what universe would you want an aesthetic item later more than you do now? Fear of missing out seems to be more experiential or with regards to items that may turn out to be have more utility in the future in my opinion.

Do you really know whether you like an album after listening to a song once? Enough to buy it? Maybe, maybe not. What if you had to decide today, and might never be able to listen to that album again if you don't buy it? You might regret it later...

That's the kind of manipulation we see in some games. I don't think this should be considered normal. The same applies to Nintendo's Switch games that were only available for purchase for a short time after release, with Nintendo not saying whether those games will ever be available again [0]. We all know that a lot of people bought those games just in case, and that's the intention.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/1/22307522/mario-limited-tim...

The outdated mess of buying music aside… no? I don’t think so. It’s pretty much never once happened that I thought “I wish I had bought that” aside from literal investments which is a different beast entirely. Most unowned things have less appeal to you when they’re no longer new and shiny.

Well, Fortnite doesn't let you customise your appearance at all without buying skins. If you want your character to match your gender, you have to buy a skin. If you want your character to look even slightly good, you have to buy a skin. And then buy a new one in two weeks because you had no idea that they'd give you a better option later and you didn't know how scarce the current week's was.

Ok but how is this different from buying clothes in irl? You usually can’t find the same clothes n months later in the same store.

Fast fashion retailers are similar indeed, but they have vastly larger selections and slower cycle times by comparison. Dozens of different items in each category versus a total number of items I can count on my hands. The item selection changing daily rather than seasonally (monthly?).

Ok but the you don’t buy fast fashion because you’re worried about not being able to buy it later, you buy it because it’s hot now.