Dressing Up for the Grocery Store
The Cosmetics-Only Trap
Six months ago, The Bazaar launched their open beta with marketing notes you’ve doubtless heard before: free-to-play, no pay-for-power, cosmetics-only monetization. The game launched with critical acclaim. The latest iteration in the fledgling “drafting autobattler” genre, with new layers of polish and innovation. Six months later, they’ve pivoted their model entirely; it’s now a box price product selling $20 expansion packs. Presumably, cosmetics-only wasn’t paying the bills.
I don’t blame them. Cosmetics-only monetization is the standard in big PC esports games: Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Rocket League, Starcraft 2, LoL (sorta), etc. This is often seen as the purest form of meritocratic competition; anybody can play, and there are no artificial price barriers to prevent skilled players from rising to the top. Idealistic fans and spinoff companies have attempted to follow this mantra. “Free-to-play, cosmetics only” is all over the ex-Riot* diaspora; Supervive, Spectre Divide, FANGS, Spellcraft, etc. As a former pro Hearthstone player, the CEO behind the Bazaar is clearly a “competitive integrity first” kind of guy.
*Some of these ex-Rioters were explicitly against the cosmetics-only model that those games employed, but the path had already been predetermined.
Unfortunately, this model has mostly failed. Most free-to-play cosmetics-only games have either shuttered or reworked their monetization model. Competitive integrity and critical acclaim alone won’t pay the bills; at some point, your players need to fork over some cash. The Bazaar was particularly ill-suited towards cosmetics, as a 1v1 game without a strong avatar. But cosmetics-only still failed for games like Spectre Divide, whose systems closely matched their genre predecessors. Ultimately, these monetization models failed because they didn’t seem to understand what they were selling.
Cosmetics is fashion. Fashion functions in a society. Fashion is how we represent our identity and socially signal to our peers. Ripped jeans or polo shirts, flip-flops or high heels; these clothing choices tell others about who we are and who we want to be. Fast fashion is how the industry makes money, akin to converting a one-time purchase to a stream of subscriptions and microtransactions. But fashion is only compelling if society is there to observe, like a proverbial tree falling in a forest. Kids will dress up for the school dance or football game, but they couldn’t care less what they wear to their piano lesson.
In-game cosmetics work great in a socially ubiquitous game like Roblox or Fortnite, where kids buy skins to raise their status among their classmates. Stories go viral about schoolkids being bullied for not having a Fortnite skin, much like wearing unfashionable clothes to school. But Bazaar is a niche hobbyist game. I hardly know anybody who plays that game. The players I encounter are randos; I couldn’t care less about how they perceive me. Buying a skin in The Bazaar is like dressing up to go to the grocery store.
With that said, some people do buy skins in The Bazaar. In “All Falls Down”, Kanye (🪦) says:
Then I spent four hundred bucks on this
Just to be like, "N****, you ain't up on this"
And I can't even go to the grocery store
Without some Ones* that's clean and a shirt with a team
*Fancy shoes, likely referring to Nike Air Force Ones or Jordan 1s.
But Kanye is an outlier, a whale, who clearly has identity issues. If you can’t get your ordinary players to buy a graphic tee, then you’re going to have some monetization problems.