VALORANT won’t allow skin trading

Anyone who has ever heard of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive knows about the game’s extensive skin trading history. There are certain skins for weapons like the AWP that can go above $1000 USD. Not to mention the community’s passion for valuable knives. What made all of this available is Valve allowing people to trade Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skins, and offering them in the form of loot boxes. This is something that Riot Games doesn’t plan to allow in VALORANT.

The Revenue Lead of VALORANT at Riot Games, Joe Lee, was featured in an interview with Forbes, where he went in-depth with how the studio wants to establish the value of weapon skins within the community. The studio doesn’t want players to spend money on loot boxes, where odds are in play. Instead, Riot Games wants VALORANT players to check the store, and if they like something, they pay for it directly.

“For skin trading, no (it will not come to Valorant). I think skin trading works in other game economies when the only method of acquiring content is through loot boxes. Drop rates and loot box supply can be tuned by the developer, which then impacts the supply and demand of the product. For us, we primarily support a direct purchase store model, meaning if you see something you want, we want you to be able to consider the product and purchase it as a known quantity: no randomness, no considerations for after-market speculation. If you like it, we hope you’ll consider it worthwhile. If you don’t, we would love to hear that too so that we can improve our content,” clarified the Revenue Lead of VALORANT at Riot Games, Joe Lee, in the interview.

Not only that, but he also continued to discuss what VALORANT skins should indicate within the community. Riot Games wants them to give players the chance to say “I was there,” which showcases how long they have been playing the game or whether they attended a special event. It shouldn’t give them to other VALORANT players with you in the game that opened enough loot boxes and got lucky.

“Skins in Valorant are designed to be meaningful representations of a player, whether they want to say ‘I was there,’ using an exclusive skin from an early battle pass, or they’ve managed to get a time-limited skin from the store. Having a secondary market introduces a lot of complexity around what a skin means in-game, and oftentimes just makes it about who has the most expensive one,” commented Joe Lee on using certain skins.

What do you think of Riot Games’ decision to not allow skin trading on VALORANT? Do you think it is the right thing to do? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!