Skin (video games)
In video games, a skin is a - sometimes unlockable - cosmetic option for a character or in-game item. Skins range from a simple recolor to a completely new costume or design.
Skins can sometimes include historical incarnations of the player character, as well as crossovers with other video games. Fortnite Battle Royale has similarly featured extensive uses of licensed properties as the basis for skins, also including non-gaming properties such as comic book characters, the National Football League, and musicians.
Skins are sometimes distributed as part of downloadable content, and as pre-order incentives for newly-released games. In the 2010s, skins were increasingly deemed a virtual good as part of monetization strategies, especially within free-to-play games and those otherwise treated as a service. Via microtransactions commonly known as "loot boxes", a player can earn a random selection of in-game items, which may include skins and other cosmetic items of varying rarity. While often defended as being similar in practice to booster packs for collectible card games, researchers have deemed loot boxes to be "psychologically akin to gambling", and their inclusion in full-priced games have faced criticism from players for being an anti-consumer practice. They have largely been supplanted by "battle passes", which are collections of in-game challenges and goals that unlock reward tiers over a short- or long-term period.
Via the Steam platform, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 also allow players to trade these items, which has led to communities devoted to bartering them for real-world money, as well as gambling.
Online games from East Asia, such as Tencent's Honor of Kings and NetEase's Justice, are especially famous for their commercialization and selling of skins, which more often than not changes not only a game character's audiovisual appearance but also its play feel. Being a cultural product, skins have also incurred serious political and cultural debates in China.