I wanted to share a concept that could significantly enhance the adoption and success of corporation-branded ship skins across New Eden.
The success of corp skins will ultimately depend on how easy and practical it is for corporations to acquire and distribute them. If individual members are expected to purchase or rent skins, adoption will likely remain limited. This approach puts the burden on players rather than enabling corps to express their identity collectively. What we want to promote is a strong and unified visual identity for corporations, not fragmented or inconsistent usage.
Proposal Summary:
Allow corporations to purchase skins at an organizational level.
Skins would apply per ship class (e.g., frigate, cruiser, battleship), rather than per ship type, to avoid excessive granularity.
Corporations would pay a monthly licensing fee per ship class, making it scalable and financially accessible.
The cost should scale with the size of the corporation (e.g., member count tiers), ensuring fairness and accessibility for corps of all sizes.
This model incentivizes corporations to invest in their identity and gives members immediate access to branded visuals without friction. It strengthens corp culture, improves visibility in space, and aligns with EVE’s community-driven nature.
I’d be happy to explore the idea further or provide additional context if helpful.
It sounds like they’ll be releasing a “poor man’s” version of SKINR (coloring only) for corporation/alliance brand managers. So you won’t have specific SKINs per say - but your ships would automatically take on the colors of the corporation.
That’s my extremely tentative and not necessarily accurate take based on limited discussions with those that talked about this with those involved at FanFest.
In the coming expansion, corporations will be able to choose a palette (a selection of three colors). For right now, this palette does little more than decorate listings in the upcoming freelance jobs window.
During a panel on Saturday, it was discussed that this palette may (and I stress may) be used for other things, perhaps/maybe/someday including corporation SKINs. From the little said about that point, it sounds like what they are thinking is that players would buy special corporation SKINs from Evermore (presumably for Evermarks). Knowing CCP, the player would have to buy a SKIN license for each hull, the same as they do now for corporation and alliance emblems. And I imagine such template SKINs would be very basic (no patterns or anything).
The corporation would pay Evermarks to enable their corporation palette to apply to their players’ corporation SKINs in the same way they pay Evermarks for station SKINs. And I expect this would be an ongoing upkeep, the same as it is for stations.
The upside to the above (if they do it) would be that a player buys the corporation SKIN once, and it applies the colors of whatever corp they are in. (I imagine CCP will probablymight designate corporation palettes for NPC corps as well.)
EDIT: thinking about that some more, they might not. I expect the default for a corporation SKIN would be “transparent,” so maybe they wouldn’t give NPC corps color palettes.
I think this will end up being a “poor man’s” free SKINR, ie: whenever you board a ship, your corporation/alliance colors will be automatically applied if you’ve ticked that option. Anything more advanced (exotic colors, patterns) will require SKINR.
I expect both parties, player and corp, will have to pay Evermarks for the feature. Players once, corps in perpetuity. Since you have to grind to earn Evermarks, that’s only free if the value of your time is zero.
Maybe. I think your suggestion of Evermarks for “poor man’s” SKINs is probably what we’ll see (especially considering creating SKINs for Evermarks has come up).
They’ve alluded to a “shell SKIN” that would utilize the brand colors, so most likely this would be a new type of SKIN offered. Still very much in the design stage, and we can probably expect a dev blog at some point.
I got a feeling that the whole game-design for SKINR for Corp Colours was far from final, because they had a very hard time answering any questions around it during Fanfest.
What they did say in one session was that the adaptation of SKINR had not met their internal targets. And I’m honestly worried that if they rely on members to buy them for each ship etc, adaptation will very likely fail.
Regardless if it’s a full SKINR or colouring only, i think for this to be a success, it has to be made (read: paid) on a corp level and be able to be used by members. That way, you as an FC can for example do a Corp Roam with all Corp coloured Guardians.
Else, you will end up with 2 out of 20 have bought the rights for that specific skin, because they had already bought it for the Vexor that’s never used anymore, bla bla bla. And with just 2 out of 20 having the skin, no one else bothers to get it also.
Heck, I’ve personally not bothered to buy any skin for my ships as is. I wouldn’t for the corp (even though I’ve been there for 12 years), but if the corp provided colored skins I would happily use them in all fleets.
I wonder what metrics they used: Number of SKINS rendered, PLEX consumed, etc? It wasn’t really until the second iteration where they added a second pattern and skills to drop the PLEX tax that things improved.
Replace “SKIN” with “emblem” and you just described the current situation with heraldry (corp and alliance logos). Do I expect CCP to learn from that? Not for a second, no.