Ubisoft is figuring out this live-services thing as it goes along with games like Rainbow Six: Siege. It knows it wants to run the tactical shooter as a platform on PC and consoles, but it is still figuring out the sweet spot for pricing on a lot of its digital goods. The latest evidence of this is that the company has raised the prices for its latest seasonal weapon skins that launched today.
With the launch of Siege’s Operation Chimera update today, Ubisoft added The Rusty Trigger and The Ancestral Southwest weapon skins to the Siege store. Players can buy these skins for 27,000 renown or 660 credits. Renown is the in-game currency you earn at the end of each match. Credits are the premium currency you get through spending real-world money. Both of those prices are slightly up from the last round of seasonal skins that Ubisoft sold for 25,000 renown and 600 credits.
Now, Ubisoft has typically released more than two seasonal skins at a time, so maybe it’s treating these as more valuable. But it does seem like the publisher picked this new pricing structure for a reason. The company sells credits in packs, but the lowest denomination you can get is 600 credits for $5.
You can see the problem.
If I have zero credits and want one of the specific skins, I’ll need to spend a minimum of $10 to have enough. To get both skins, I’ll need a minimum of $15. Now, I can still use those credits for other items, but I may not want them.
The goal here is to get players to spend more money on average. That’s not a surprise because that’s the goal of everything that is games-as-a-service. And thankfully, these are cosmetic-only items, but that doesn’t mean players don’t find this sort of pricing trick offensive.