POE2 Cosmetics Disappointingly Expensive

Every time the prices for PoE mtx annoy me, I go look at Star Citizen and instantly feel better lol. It's barely even a game.

I agree that this model is largely reliant on capturing whales to dump $1000's into, but there's definitely gotta be a happy medium between big price tags to attract whales via exclusivity and cheap prices for people who don't want to spend money. Willing to bet if they found that middle ground for pricing it would increase their revenue significantly. A handful of whales scooping up everything in the store will yield far less than ~200k average people buying an armor set or two every league. The whales are still going to buy everything regardless. Not to mention they're already raking it in with stash tabs.

At the end of the day I'm not super invested in the conversation. There's a lot of cool stuff in the store, but if I don't like the price I simply don't buy the item... IMO cosmetics in an isometric game where you don't really see a whole lot of your character aren't worth the investment to me. The only time I really "see" my character is in the login screen. It's not like some games where there's a whole "fashion" aspect to the game that people bite into. Maybe if the skins were customizable and able to be piece-mealed together I would care about them more.

I'm more apt to spend money on hideout items, portals, etc etc since I see a lot more of that during gameplay.

Not trying to necro a thread, it just came up in my second google search of "what is the lowest discount poe armour packs have gotten?", and I just wanted to chip in because the OP specifically mentions the early access price.

The prices for skins are where they make their money. PoE1 is F2P, and PoE2 is going to be F2P when full release is out. They charge for beta access because the hype for the game was huge and so why not get a little cash inflow for people that want to play a beta. It is a trend that didn't start with GGG (Blizzard has done it for their last expansion and are doing it again for their next one). People can wait for the full release and play for free.

The skins model isn't exclusive to GGG. How do you think Fortnite and LoL, two of the biggest games in the world, make money?

So yes, $84 is a lot for a skin but since they routinely discount skins on rotation you can generally expect that to get down to $60 at some point (the discounts I see generally sit around 25% for the packs when on "sale") and considering a game you can easily put over 500 hours into is F2P, that kind of price for a badass skin that you'll be using from then on isn't really completely unreasonable by itself. On top of that, the "ultra badass" premium skins are that $84 price tag, while the vast overwhelming majority are at the $42 price point.

Personally though, I think it is all the stash tabs that are the scam. If skins stay at their 42/84 price points but to get a reasonable tab selection costs something like 300-400 points then you're already just paying for the game with just the stupid tabs.

I think with stash tab prices the way they are, $20 being the price point for skins is much more fair.