Current Store Rotation is Too Much, Sapping AL Revenue

So, uh, longtime designer/marketer weighing in here. I'm hearing everywhere that AL revenue is down. Here's a couple non-gameplay reasons why that might be.

To effectively drive sales, the user experience must do two things: a) attractively frame desirable things, and b) create a sense of scarcity (to motivate the purchase action). The change in the store rotation design ham-strings both of these principles.

a) First off, there's way too much on display. The new shop experience is cluttered, diluting desirability and creating choice paralysis. Even in 4k, it's a muddy, noisy mess that fails to adequately showcase marquee items. Previous store iterations, while not perfect, did a much better job of focusing user's attention to facilitate a more memorable experience.

b) Secondly, the sheer volume of re-issues has completely obliterated any sense of scarcity. The urge to buy/collect is largely driven by the feeling that "I have to buy this thing now, because I can't /won't get it later". Previous AL seasons did this well. The current storefront undermines this both in the proliferation of re-issues, and again in the sheer volume of content offered.

The fix here is easy. Scale back the shop. Stop hiding excess items in slideshows (subsequently-viewed items have reduced perceived value), and focus on smaller, more exclusively-curated sets that drive attention to marquee cosmetics aligned with the progress of the season. Marketing is largely visual storytelling, and "big piles of stuff" is lousy storytelling.

- neb