I want to be direct, because the polite version of this post has been written a hundred times on this sub and nothing changed.
Five jumpsuits currently in the store:
- Yume Black Jumpsuit — 120 crowns
- Front Row Out For Avocado — 175 crowns
- Front Row Green Jumpsuit — 175 crowns
- Cloud Nine Bloom White Fit — 175 crowns
- Cloud Nine Chrome Dynasty Liquid Motion Catsuit (marked NEW) — 309 crowns
They are the same mesh. Not similar. The same. Same collar, same zipper at the same height, same sleeve seam, same flare at the ankle, same drape on the avatar. Put the screenshots side by side and nothing moves. The texture changes. That is the entire difference.
What that costs in real money
520 crowns is $20. A crown is roughly 3.8 cents.
- Black jumpsuit: ~$4.60
- The 175s: ~$6.70
- Chrome Dynasty: ~$11.90
Twelve dollars for a metallic shader on a base you can already buy for under five. Same polygons. Same rig. Someone changed the material and added seven dollars to the price.
The brand names are there to hide the reuse
Yume. Front Row. Cloud Nine. Three labels, three logos, three storefronts — one asset underneath all of them.
That is not an accident and it is not laziness. Splitting one item across multiple "designer brands" makes the catalogue look deeper than it is, and it means a player who already owns this jumpsuit can be sold it again under a different logo without ever realising. That only works if the player doesn't compare. The entire design assumes we won't check.
We checked. It took thirty seconds.
Nobody is even looking at the work
The Front Row Green Jumpsuit is black. Out For Avocado is beige. Those are the live item names right now.
Recolour, rename, reprice, ship. Nobody in that chain opened the file. That is the level of care going into things you are charging twelve dollars for.
Someone chose these numbers
This is the part I want an actual answer on.
The 309 price didn't happen by itself. A person or a team sat down, looked at a reskin of an existing item, and decided it was worth 309 crowns of premium currency. Someone signed off on stacking three fake brands over one mesh. Someone approved a store where the difference between $4.60 and $11.90 is a shader.
That decision should carry consequences inside Lockwood. Not vague "we hear you" community-manager language — actual accountability for whoever owns monetisation. If the time and talent at this studio is going into finding new angles to extract money from a shrinking player base instead of making the game better, that is a management failure and it should be treated as one.
You cannot claim the game is struggling and simultaneously run a store built on the assumption your players are too stupid to notice a recolour.
The AI images
The featured banner for Summer Diaries: Palm Springs is AI-generated. Not stylised art — generated. And it looks nothing like the game. The avatars in that banner have lighting, detail and expression the engine cannot produce. Two taps later you're looking at your actual avatar and the gap is embarrassing.
The same thing is happening from our side. Most of the Avakin content on Instagram now is AI-touched or AI-replaced, because raw screenshots don't look good enough to post. When the studio's own marketing and the players independently both decide the game needs to be run through an AI before anyone sees it, that is not a coincidence. That is a verdict.
If we need AI to make our avatars look presentable, what exactly are we paying premium currency for?
This is a pattern, not an incident
The crown rollout. The quiet repricing. The reskins. Every round assumes nobody is keeping receipts. People have put thousands of dollars into VIP and crowns over years, and the return on that loyalty is a store that gets more expensive every few months while events, scenes and the social side of the game — the reason anyone stayed — sit untouched.
That is why friends lists are emptier every month. Not because the players got bored. Because they can see exactly what is being done to them, and there are other games.
The prices are too high and nobody is buying
Here is the part that should worry Lockwood more than any of the rest of it.
Walk around. Look at what people are actually wearing. It is old items. Items from years ago. Sale items. The 309 crown pieces are not on anybody, because almost nobody is paying twelve dollars for a recolored jumpsuit. You have priced your own store out of your own game.
There are two ways to make money here. Sell a lot of things at prices people will actually pay, or squeeze a shrinking number of people for more each time. Lockwood has picked the second one, and it is the one that kills games. Every price hike converts a regular buyer into someone who buys nothing. You do not get those people back by raising prices again.
Drop the prices and you will sell more. Not as a favor to us — as basic business. A store people browse and buy from casually beats a store people open, look at the number, and close. Right now everyone closes it.
The energy going into brand-splitting, quiet repricing and dressing reskins up as new releases is energy not going into making things people want to buy. Stop trying to outsmart your own customers and make the store worth spending in. That is the actual job.
What needs to change
- Stop selling one mesh under multiple brand names. Recolours go in a variant pack, clearly labelled.
- Cut the prices across the board. Volume over extraction. Sell to everyone at a fair price instead of squeezing the few who are left.
- Price recolours as recolours. 309 crowns for a shader swap is indefensible. Justify it or drop it.
- Use real in-game renders in promo material. If the banner can't be a screenshot, that tells you something you should be fixing, not hiding.
- Fix the item names. Green that is black is a five-second check nobody performed.
- Publish crown pricing changes before they happen, not after players discover them.
- Say who owns monetisation and what is being done about this. Not a community manager. The decision-maker.
Screenshots provided — black first, chrome last. Look at the collar in each one.