@sideburnt said:
I don't understand why this is such a bad thing. Who the hell plays every character in a fighting game? I assume you could try the characters before you buy them, I think its awesome that you could buy your favorite characters and be done with it.
I've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of the various incarnations of SF4 since it came out and there are very, very few characters out of the 39 that I don't enjoy playing in that game. Obviously, I have my mains that I've focussed on, but I've had quite a few many hour long play sessions of random vs with a friend. Obviously, the majority of people who bought SF4 haven't spent that much time with it, but I'll get back to that. Also, assuming you can try characters before you buy them might be overreaching. Yeah, that would be the sensible way to do it, but I wouldn't take it as a given. For example, Marvel Heroes, which just released and does charge for characters has no such feature.
I do agree with you though that the idea of a free to play fighting game isn't something that deserves a negative reaction. I saw a lot of dumb comments on another website with people getting really angry about the idea of the free to play version of DOA5 because if you bought all the content in that, you'd end up spending I believe somewhere in the realm of $90. Which is a really dumb thing to get angry about, considering Team Ninja made it pretty clear that the $60 full version of that game would still be available if you knew that you WOULD want all of that characters. Which is the important part to me. If a new Street Fighter game comes out, I'm going to want it and I'm going to want every character etc. In the case of DOA5, it's hard to juggle fighting games, and I've been playing 5 or 6 of them lately and as far as 3D fighters go, I prefer Tekken and Virtua Fighter over DOA, so I haven't actually played DOA5 yet. Getting a F2P version of that is totally cool, because I could spend about $10 and get two extra characters and that would be enough to be a value proposition to me.
So I guess the point I'm trying to bring all this rambling to is that I hope that there is at least a way to save money, buying all the content at once, or at least all the characters, a buying in bulk sort of thing. I think the F2P model for fighting games is a really great idea provided that there are also good, fairly priced options for get all the content for people who want to do that.
I guess part of the problem with KI is that the roster is tiny compared to a lot of other fighters, so they can't afford to give you too many. In the face of Tekken Revolution coming with 8 characters for free, since the Tekken cast is about 55 characters at least, just getting Jago is pretty lame. Just think of how much of online play is going to Jago mirrors. That seems like a problem. The extension of that is that if people DO buy other characters, they're probably more likely to buy top tier.
But then again, I think Killer Instinct is bad, so that's a problem too.
@hadoken101 I don't think that'll really be an issue, it doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that will gain any traction as a competitive game. And before you have to worry about getting all those DLC characters, tournament organisers need to actually worry about having lots of Xbox Ones. If there's nothing but KI on the new hardware, they won't bother. I wouldn't say it not having a presence in the Fighting Game Community would necessarily affect it though. Firstly, there are so many people that will basically play anything as long as it's free. Secondly, when the 2D fighter boom died out, while the FGC was largely focused on stuff like Third Strike and Marvel 2 and CvS2, the only fighting games that were really being made were Tekken games and Mortal Kombat games. The only MK games that have really been part of the competitive scene were UMK3 and MK9. That didn't stop every single one of those MK games selling millions of copies.
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