Street Fighter V has a Shop now. Thanks to the wonderful free-to-play-game-inspired system of "Fight Money", you can now buy all of the bonus content in the game without spending any more Real Money (except for the good costumes you really want)!

Just by playing the game, you'll earn enough "Fight Money" to buy anything you want from the shop. Downloadable characters, new outfits for the fighters (not the good ones), alternate colours, new stages, titles (why would you ever buy these?) and more!

I purchased the Season Pass at launch to ensure I had all the characters. I play this game regularly in tournaments, so I need an up-to-date setup where everyone could have their chosen character.

And to spice up tournaments and avoid The Grid forever because The Grid sucks, I tried to buy all of the new stages.

Emphasis on tried.

After completing the game's Story Mode, I got 30,000 Fight Money, bringing me to a total of 87,950.

Before looking at the prices in the Shop, I was optimistic! Characters cost a whopping 100,000 each, but I already own them all thanks to the great deal I got from the Season Pass. That's a lot of extra FM that I didn't have to spend on characters!

So I bought a new stage, Balrog's casino. A brand new page would be great for spicing up local tournaments.

Apparently, new stages cost 70,000 Fight Money. That...is more than I expected. But new content costs more, I guess that makes sense. The other stages are basically reskins, old stages with new lighting. I tried to buy one of these, hoping it would cost less.

40,000 Fight Money. I was somewhat conservative with my Fight Money before 1.0, expecting some cool content to come later. The only thing I'd really purchased before Street Fighter V 1.0 was one character costume and two titles. 40,000 is still WAY out of my reach.

How do I get more Fight Money? I know that Survival, Demonstrations and Trials are all listed as easy ways to get some more. Unfortunately, I've already finished Demonstrations and I'm not good at the game, so Trials are too difficult for me to finish on multiple characters.

Survival it is!

I had already completed Survival on Easy for the entire cast, and beaten Survival on Normal with three characters.

After finishing the two new Survival courses on Easy, I had 24,000 Fight Money. Sorry, Balrog. We did not get any decent cash out of this.

And I'm not going through Survival on Normal because it's not fun at all. 30 Stages with no checkpoints, AI that can randomly decide to go God Mode and kick your ass, and getting screwed over when you need High health recovery and it keeps giving you Low? No thank you. It's a crappy mode. Also I'm not good enough with the entire cast to complete it even if there weren't RNG elements.

The only other option I could think of to get Fight Money was online matches. Winning in Casual or Ranked gives you some Fight Money. How much? Not enough.

50 Fight Money per win would make this grind painfully slow. That's if you win, of course. What if you lose? What if the opponent disconnects?

What if you win, but they quit/the server messes up after your win? No Fight Money.

I was still 10,000 Fight Money short of buying a single stage. Then, I noticed that "Buy on PlayStation Store" button. Like any good free-to-play game, Street Fighter V offers the option to buy content with real money if you don't feel like grinding for their in-game currency. And the price is reasonable.

These less-complex "reskin" stages are only $1.99 each. I could just spend $6 to buy these and have them for the tournament. But I don't want to do that.

Once I heard that the content in SFV could be earned by just playing the game, I decided that's how I want to unlock it. I'll play the game a lot thanks to local tournaments, and it'll be supported by Capcom for a while thanks to the Pro Tour. But you don't get currency from playing locally! That might stop you from spending real money, you see.

There are not enough ways to earn currency. Survival on Easy gives you a chunk, and so does Normal. But I don't think most players are going to complete Normal Survival on multiple characters because it's not fun and it can get very difficult, even for pros.

Trials have the same problem, as I don't have the versatile skills to complete some of the later challenges. I'm good enough to play R. Mika and not get completely destroyed against other players, so I finished her Trials. Everyone else, I'm about halfway through and I just don't have the skill to finish them.

Story Mode gives a chunk of Fight Money, and the "advanced difficulty" version gives more. But it has the same problem as Survival: it's not fun. It's a boring slog. At least you get to retry fights in that mode.

I only want to spend real money on stuff that I HAVE to, like Premium Costumes.

Fight Money is a limited resource that you don't get from playing local multiplayer in a local-multiplayer focused game. Even if I could complete Survival with every character on 4 difficulties AND all the Trials, I've burned out a non-renewable source of FM. Then I'd be stuck gaining the currency in intervals of 50 until the end of time. 50 currency at a time, for items that cost 40,000 currency each.

The system is heavily weighted toward getting you to spend real money. The ways to gain currency are either annoying, slow, or both.

They are designed to grind your soul to dust, until you cave and say "okay I'll just spend some cash on this". The idea that "you can buy everything in the game just by playing!" is currently laughable.

I tried to buy the new Street Fighter V stages with Fight Money. I gave up.

The way they were doing this stuff wasn't great before, but after playing Overwatch, fuuuuuuck this.

The biggest problem is we're still waiting on those daily challenges that are supposed to be implemented as a way to earn FM...

As someone who grew up more with Tekken and Soul Calibur (as well as those other fighting games that people refuse to accept as fighting games, such as Smash Bros), I was used to unlocks being the single player content.

I spent hours upon hours grinding out cash in Tekken Tag 2 when it was released on consoles just to create zany get ups (I had a Henrietta/Triela set from Gunslinger Girl for my Alisa/Lili team. Because I'm a cool dude), and that was hours upon hours spent playing through arcade and survival mode over and over again by myself. The fighting system was fun and the AI weren't entirely brain-dead, so it was a relaxing way to spend a evening.

Street Fighter V needs this. It needs some sort of endless mode with Fight Money payouts increasing for how far you get. An arcade mode with payouts at the end increasing for difficulty played. Hell, if they were being nice about it, they'd let you fight the CPU in versus and grind out currency that way. Naw.

The cosmetics in Street Fighter V and the cosmetics in Tekken serve different purposes. Tekken uses the cosmetic items as a carrot to lead you back to play the game more, whereas Street Fighter V uses these items as a way of persuading you to give them more money. The addition of "premium" costumes that are only obtainable through coughing up real life dough are proof.

I don't intend this reply as any sort of "Grr Tekken is better than Street Fighter!" debate by the way, because that's silly. Both are fun fighting series.

@theht: It really just looks like they are hurting for money. I doubt most players can make enough currency to buy all the things they want, so they're counting on them to just give up on these bad modes and spend real money in the Shop.

@vasta_narada: I wouldn't be surprised if those got totally scrapped. I don't know how it's actually happening, but it looks like there's a very small crew with a small budget working on this game right now.

And no daily challenges = less Fight Money = more reasons for people to spend real money

MY FIGHT MONEY!!!!!!!!!!

(sorry, i had to)

Did you do the individual character stories?

Pretty sure doing that with every character should net you maybe a few 100k FM and they are stupid easy.

I don't mind too much the way they've done the FM stuff, it's all very frontloaded so you get a whole bunch fairly easily through one-off earnings, but as they dry up, the rate at which you can earn it slows massively, so as you say, you're more and more likely to eventually move towards spending actual dollars. The first taste is free! I don't really mind spending real money either. I had a lot of the costumes in SF4 and I felt like I got my money's worth and felt fine with giving Capcom my dollars while I continued to get hundreds of hours out of a game that they otherwise wouldn't see other profit from after my initial purchase.

That being said, I'm pretty sure that they did indeed say with SFV that everything would be purchasable with FM and now there are premium costumes that are not, and the pricing on that stuff is fairly steep.

But yes, the game would definitely benefit from getting those daily challenges. Maybe when they've got Urien and Juri out and have a bit of breathing room before season two of new characters.

Also, StanDinglow is a pretty good name.

Do the Individual stories, they are dead easy(there is a video of a literal baby beating Birdie's) and give 10,000 FM per character, so if you have the season pass that is 200,000FM right there.

They have said they are also still planning to put in the daily challenges stuff but I am skeptical about how much FM those are gonna give, my guess is tops a couple hundred a day.

Personally I don't have an issue with the premium costume stuff, yeah they are expensive but I mean not horrendously so compared to other fighting games, and I much prefer spending a high amount on something I know I am gonna get then paying for random loot boxes like in Overwatch. I just wish they had some combo deal to get them all at a cheaper price. In fact I wish they had a "pay 60 bucks and get every new thing this year" kind of deal, a full season pass thing and not just one for the characters.

This is the one thing that makes me not regret the PC version purchase. Still wish you couldn't filter platforms, I swear half the PS4 user base locks out PC users.

@theht: Yea I feel the same way. The Fight money will not be pouring in until they announce daily bounties/tasks to get more

All of this stuff, all the stupid little niggly painful things in SF5 have pushed me out of it completely.
Looking forward to Tekken 7.

The best way to get Fight Money is to cheat at beat Survival Mode.

The future sucks.

Worst part is seeing the market accept these ridiculous nickel and diming techniques.

@rafaelfc: The future is awesome. I'm not sure how old you are but when I bought SFII it came with 8 dudes and 8 costumes. If I wanted 12 dudes, I had to buy the game again, and if I wanted 16, that's another full price purchase. SFIV again required multiple purchases. Most unlocks in most other games also required a ridiculous amount of grinding to get.

We now have the best option and people still aren't happy. How can you actually prefer the old ways? If we want to grind for everything we can, if we'd rather spend a few bucks we can. People need to stop acting so entitled. Costumes take time and money to make. There's no option to give them away for free. You either pay for them or they can't afford to make them. How many extra costumes were in previous games before they had the chance to sell them?

@hunkulese: Yeah! Preach!

Jesus @50 pnts per match, and you can't keep replaying story modes/survival modes for pnts? smh, glad i did not pay full price for this game GMG is a life saver. I'm thinking about hopping back on though, i only play hado characters anyway so meh.

@hunkulese: These days the common assumption is that dlc is content you would've gotten for free if the concept of dlc didn't exist. As if content created alongside a game must be content that was removed and used to upsell players on top of an incomplete experience.

It's often not based on any particular reasoning and is one of many ways people get to dunk on developers and publishers they deem evil or underhanded.

Doing the character story modes help a lot. I have something like 200 000 Fight Money, and 90% of that was from just playing the easy single player content. But your argument still holds up. You can't buy anything close to every stage or costume, and once you have done the stories once, there is no reasonable way to earn more.

There's a certain lil' helper that can get you what you need, but you won't find it on PS4...

Granted, I probably wouldn't have touched it if it was PS4 only for that and other similar reasons.

That too. It's one of the reasons if someone says "im waiting till X happens before I buy" I nod approvingly.

I agree OP, fight money is too hard to come by. I've beat everything I can but still hurting for FM.

So is this fight money concept the reason behind no traditional arcade mode?

This is the crux of the issue whenever the excuse of 'Oh but you can earn currency in-game' is ever mentioned. You cannot ever trust the developer to have a reasonable grind curve when they're also offering paid short-cuts. They will most likely make it so steep that you'll pretty much have to pay or spend an unreasonable amount of time grinding away.

@jedikv: 2k sports does a reasonable job with it (so far anyway), i've never bought vc and if they ever make it like sfV i'll probably stop playing the game completely. And i think they make a reasonable amount of sales that way as well without completely annoying players.

Theres a mod that allows you to beat survival in one round. a lot of people have used it. They don't seem capable of catching it. Beat survival at all difficulties and with every character and that gives you enough fight money to buy all the characters and stages and most of the outfits. Their incompetence is our gain... kinda.

Yeah why can't they make it easy to get all the post-release content for free and make long-term support of the game completely unsustainable?

Sneaky underhanded for-profit companies.

I'm sorry but if your only going to have a finite way to earn things(virtually impossible to earn everything) then don't have that at all and just charge for DLC or make better yet make a new game. I honestly think the old model is better, because if i buy Super street fighter and get the new characters etc, then i'm not playing against the people who bought regular street fighter leaving them at a disadvantage if they don't have the time or money to buy extra characters. And a lot of people bought the game not knowing about the new business model because unlike us not all street fighter fans read up about that kind of stuff, some just play it because they've played it since 92 or buy it for their kids etc.

The people who are most dedicated will find a way (one way or the other) to get all the new content for free. Those who don't will buy them. Seems reasonably fair. People forget how angry people were about the old model. They'd have a whole full release for every patch of the game. They had 3 releases of SFalpha, a bunch for SFII, 3 releases for SFIII, 3ish for SFIV (vanilla, super, superAE, Ultra), and 2 releases for marvel 3. People were furious. Everybody wears rose colored glasses. Now i'm not saying Capcom is not trying to get away with something here, they are. But they're trying to get away with less. I really hate how cheaply they put this game together. That being said, I only paid for the original release (actually somebody bought it for me on my birthday). I've bought every character, every stage and a whole bunch of outfits and saved enough FM to buy the two remaining characters without paying a dime. I mean, i did search the internet for "help" on how to beat survival mode. The 50 fm per match do add up (but way too slowly). I do foresee myself buying season 2 with money because i have nothing left to grind but at that point, if they fix what they need to fix by then, the actual game is good enough to earn that. If they fix what they need to fix.

Uh... so you're saying rather than have the option to earn some of the stuff... you would rather have no option to earn any of the stuff and just have to buy it all? Or buy an entirely new game? That... what?

OK there, Ono, this isn't a PR session.

@starvinggamer said:

If the post-release content is cosmetic only (i.e. cosutmes/taunts) then there's not really an issue; Rocket League, DoTA2, CS:GO and Overwatch have done it pretty well and generally people have little problem with it. However locking gameplay content e.g. extra characters behind grind/paywalls is a crappy thing to do in a multiplayer game.

I'm torn between posting "Welcome to the year 2005" or "Did you notice you have a Metal Gear Solid V avatar".

All jokes aside though, sure in a perfect world there wouldn't be DLC characters. Buying characters with Fight Money gives people that are willing to spend a good amount of time with the game a way to unlock content. The alternatives are either all characters are free (see sarcastic comment above) or you just pay for everything. I don't understand why providing additional options for people to unlock content is a problem. Sure it may be designed to make people want to spend the money rather than grind for FM but at the end of the day you make the decision to spend the money or not. If you are playing the game competitively you'll probably amass enough FM to buy the DLC characters after a period of time. If you just want one or two of the DLC characters, you can easily earn enough FM to get them through the single player content.

@jedikv: I'd love to know why that is. Why are devs allowed to pursue cosmetic revenue streams but expected to dole up gameplay relevant content that is leaps and bounds more time consuming to generate for free?

I'd tend to agree with an argument like this if the game resembled a $60 game at launch. It didn't. Jeff, Jason and the whole crew attest to that. I think it's almost there and still not quite there yet. It's underhanded to release a game like this that is not complete and charge $60 for it and not even have close to the feature set of other fighting games in its class.

@jayzilla: How much content was or wasn't in the game at launch has nothing to do with the sustainability of the game long-term via DLC sales, other than the fact that due to poor perception the game did not sell very well to casual fans increasing the need to secure additional revenue streams.

Also I'm not sure how something can be underhanded when Capcom explicitly outlined exactly what content was being included with the game prior to release and what was coming further down the line.

It's a whole lot better having people grinding or paying for new characters than it is to say no new characters ever because people don't want to grind or pay for them.

That's such a ridiculous statement to make unless you don't think any Street Fighter game has ever been worth $60. If you want single player content that won't bore you to tears after three days, survival mode is way better than any arcade mode they've released. A bunch of bad modes don't add value to the game.

Yes, it should let you fight the ai in versus. How much is that worth?

You say in a perfect world as if cosmetic-only DLC that's unfeasible. Yet I've listed 4 of the most popular (and profitable) games that are being played right now that are pulling it off successfully. (Heck Rocket league had a much smaller budget and resource pool than SF). Offering all heroes for free is not unheard of, look at Overwatch and DoTA2; there's no excuse for capcom to have that in SFV. Gating characters affects balance and creates artificial barriers. If a player who likes Guile buys the game and realises they can't play it without paying a 2nd fee or wasting time grinding with characters they don't want. As the OP has shown, Capcom have adjusted the grind curve to be steep to nudge people to just fork out money, much like crappy F2p mobile apps.

Profitability and sustainability are fantastic excuses. You can't compare SFV to games like DotA, Overwatch and CS:GO that have these absolutely insane install-bases. It's simple math. You can't compare it to Rocket League either because that game has 100% symmetrical gameplay with effectively one character. They could do literally anything and the game would always be balanced.

Speaking of balance, how does gating characters affect it again? Are Alex, Guile, Ibuki and Balrog suddenly rocketing to the top of the tier lists and warping the metagame because they're gated? Of course not, because Capcom has gotten pretty damn good at balancing their games. Speaking of which, I don't remember hearing any of these complaints out of the casual audience every time NRS released a DLC character that was completely broken and absurdly overpowered (see: almost every DLC character for MKX). That's because if you care enough about the game to be competitive, then you're going to be forking out the money for the DLC characters because you've invested hundreds if not thousands of hours into the game. And if you don't care enough about the game to be competitive, then the "balance" doesn't matter because you're never going to be playing the game at a high enough level for that sort of thing to manifest itself.

EDIT: As an aside, I know LoL charges for characters yet somehow is the biggest thing out there. Is their game busted balance wise? I honestly don't know but it seems highly unlikely given its popularity.

The games you're saying SFV should copy have much, much larger audiences. Fighting games are targeted at a niche and much smaller audience.

It seems like your argument is that DLC characters shouldn't exist or should be given to players for free - that's not the argument posed in the OP; they are complaining about FM as a secondary option to unlock DLC characters. They may also have the same argument that you do at the end of the day, but that's not what they talked about.

Dota 2 is a free-to-play MP game; I wonder if it would have the same success if people had to spend $60 to play it. Comparisons to Dota 2 don't work since that is a free to play game and has a completely different operating model.

Overwatch costs $40 on PC but $60 on console (forcing players to get origins skins they probably didn't want and are functionally useless) and has no single player content unless you count playing against bots. Also the DLC is cosmetic only for the moment - I'm not aware of any commitments by Blizzard to avoid any hero DLC or content expansions (such as maps that splinter the online community) behind paywalls.

Rocket League is in a similar boat as Overwatch although it costs less (most people probably got it for free) - but it has had multiple DLC packs that you had to buy, locking those stages and cars behind paywalls. Psyonix didn't design their game to have cars with different attributes or stats, so the "heroes for free" analogy isn't applicable to this game.

CS:GO has had plenty of multiplayer content packs behind paywalls (Operation Vanguard, Bloodhound, Wildfire, etc.) which included maps, guns, and missions tied to skin drops.

Regardless of the success of those games, most fighting games have had DLC characters for years; the only exception I can think of being Tekken which was mentioned earlier (which has the unique problem of people wanting additional content that isn't added). Sure as I mentioned it would be cool get additional characters for free but I can't expect Capcom to deviate much from the status quo. I'm not defending DLC; I'm just confused by the complaint about the Fight Money option.

@starvinggamer: not at all i mean if you have it, have it so you can earn all of it in a feasible way. Lets say i earn 200k or whatever and they relase 5 new fighters i miss out unless i pay money. Or i dont understand it's non renewable and i spend it all on stages etc. I think at least in terms of characters everyone should have equal access to them while playing the same version of the game, especially a competitive one. Cosmetic items and even stages are whatever imo. I just think the different versions are a better idea in the long run to keep the game competitive and make it feel more fair for non hardcore fans who want a full experience. Maybe if it was f2p or not full retail it would be more palatable.

Anyway if your fine with it then thats great, but arguing about isnt going to change opinions on this one.

@oursin_360: You're literally saying you would rather spend $60 every year than $30 on a season pass or less if you grind some currency. I just don't understand, not to mention I'm sure there will be a $60 repackage with a lot of the Season 1 DLC some time next year. All you're doing right now is arguing for fewer options which is never a good thing in my book and I'm trying to understand how it's preferable in yours.

Well obviously the game would have to be a full retail product, with full features for me to spend 60(which this game is obviously not). And i don't think they were 60 for 4 were they? I don't know i only bought 4 and then ultra.

Just my opinion, but this topic is somewhat misleading. Besides the money for doing the new story mode the game throws it at you for doing individual character stories, the payoffs for survival are fairly generous, and characters level up rather quickly with a reward of 1k fight money per level (so just keep playing online matches). If you are going to put serious time into this game, as I have, there is no reason you will ever have to spend money on characters and stages.

@oursin_360: It's more featured than any iteration of SFIV so... /shrug. Not that that has anything to do with anything we're talking about.

@starvinggamer: if you say so

How exactly isn't it a full retail product? Maybe you just don't like Street Fighter.

Even if I play every character on the cast often enough to level them up all the time, 1,000 Fight Money per level-up isn't a significant bump. I have completed all of the "easy" methods for gaining Fight Money and purchased the Season Pass, but there's still 3 stages I can't afford.

It seems like a lot of people have more tolerance for tedious grinds than I do? Or am I being lied to here, because I don't know anyone who has ALL the stages and characters without spending extra money (for the sake of competitive play I just bought the Season Pass ASAP).

I played Sonic Dash on iOS for a while and the game had plenty of ways to earn their "Red Rings" currency. Just through Daily Challenges and a login bonus, I was able to buy extra characters in a reasonable time just by playing the game.

Street Fighter V gives you 50 Fight Money per online match win (if the servers feel like it) and prices items at 40,000+. I enjoy playing the game and play it regularly, but that's not a reasonable tradeoff. Especially compared to every free-to-play game I've played. Especially when you play any other fighting game that just gives stages away.

They are intrinsically linked. The 'Grind or Pay for gameplay' mechanics are something that should be left to F2P games. You cannot trust the developer/publisher to make it a fair grind (as demonstrated in OP).

Yes, DoTA2 is free 2 play, and probably the most fairest models we see (which makes it more impressive). Compare that to LoL or any other game in that genre where gameplay elements are locked behind a pay/grindwall. DoTA 2, from the start lets you play from a slection of 100+characters. Intentional or not, that's makes the game pretty accessible as it caters to many more players and playstyles rather than forcing them to a small selection and having to grind away to get access to their favourite hero that they can win with. The fact that it does it without an RRP free puts SFV to shame.

Your complaints about Overwatch's lack of singleplayer content and potentially (and it's pricing on consoles, which is fair), can be easily applied to the current state of SFV too. However, Blizzard have stated that all future heroes and maps will be delievered as free updates, so no worries about splitting player bases.

Rocket League's DLC is all cosmetic (flags/hats/cars/tyres and trails). Arenas and game modes are delivered as free updates. While heroes aren't a factor, I use them as an example of gameplay elements are not paywalled and have significantly profited from it.

CS:GO operations are (mostly) a way to showcase community-made maps. Yes maps used to be exclusive for a time but that was changed a long time ago. All maps are available to everyone during those operations, with only the 'co-op part' having to be purchased. Weapons are not paywalled (again only cosmetic skins). None of this impacts the balance of the competitive side.

The issue is that there are better ways that keep the community competitive and fair without creating a haves/have-not or an unbalanced situation and still profit well from it. DLC fighters have existed before, but much like the old capcom re-issues of before, we have to move on once a better way has been established.