so any thoughts? since it was trending I'd been thinking of trying it out as I'm familiar with 80% of the character roster.

and it also looks like great fun from how a lot of people on the internet has been talking about it. 😀

so is the in game currency going to be the main earning method for WB, as this game is F2P after all...

also I wonder how many more characters form which IP's are going to be added to this list of playable characters. 😋

I'm a teeny bit excited to see what else comes of this.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/26/23279073/multiversus-open-beta-wb-games-smash-bros

Because the goal of this game is to sell micro transactions, and getting as many people into the game as possible to buy those micro transactions, by making it free, is the proven way to do it.

The whole point of this game is to get people who are fans of the properties (who may or may not be core gamers) to play and spend. Charging $60 or even $20 for entry would have kept a huge proportion of the audience out. If it's FTP people will say "might as well try it, it's free" and may stick around.

If they had charged for this game it would have been a huge mistake. Yes the similar Nickelodeon fighter charged, but that doesn't seem to have done great and also it's easier to sell a game when people are probably fans of all the licenses involved than a total hodgepodge. Nobody wants to pay $60 to play a game if they're only interested in a few of the characters, but they may buy cosmetics and other stuff for those characters.

"Let them in the door for free and then charge them once they're there" seems to be the strategy of almost every online game in the past few years. Like others have noted, it's way easier to get someone hooked on a game if they can try it out on a whim rather than needing to pay 30$ up front, and since it's free they'll be a lot more open to the idea of buying microtransactions after they get their feet wet.

@bigsocrates said:

This right here. The roster of characters combined with the familiarity of the gameplay will bring in a ton of people who don't generally buy more than a couple of games a year. It looks similar enough to Smash Bros, which is a game series that tens of millions of people have memories of playing at some point in their lives.

Because they like making scads and scads of money?

Because even fighting games, which only need 1v1 to be viable (which is only 1 mode of Multiversus, and not even the default one), often fall off a cliff in terms of player counts in the first month or two. If you start low, it can become a huge barrier later on because it becomes harder to break into.

The game also only has online multiplayer with ZERO single-player stuff outside of bots and training, which is tough to sell to the more casual audience that it's aiming at.

It can also be a loss-leader with a company as massive as WB, and one with an extensive library of marketable alternate costumes to sell for $ without the customer blowback. Every single character already has an alternate costume (and they're all QUITE good, freaking Superman is from DC 1,000,000), and they will not be the last.