Fighting Games Friday: Free to Stay Cautious
YouTuber and Twitch streamer Maximilian Dood alternates between posting videos full of gameplay and opinions and providing streams, largely for fighting games. His takes on the genre are usually agreeable for those who’ve spent too much time learning how to play individual games and watching streams for them, and he’s skilled at a bunch of games. There’s a reason why he’s paid so well to do both. This week, though, he provided one of his relatively controversial takes, addressing how fighting games going free-to-play could be more beneficial and detrimental for the genre.
There are notable benefits to the format, features prior free-to-play fighters have provided. Instead of buying a base fighting game with a bunch of characters for $59.99 (or an equivalent outside the United States) or more, it would be possible to sample a game with one or more characters (depending on how large the initial roster is) before plunging into the microtransactions for more characters, modes, and outfits. The potential for all these games to offer a sampling of how they play could attract a larger audience that might simply want to try them out and, perhaps, hope their favorite character is the free one, while buying anything else they want for a potentially-low price along the way.
This sounds good on the surface, but every positive point about free-to-play fighting games comes with caveats, various “well, it depends” points about whether all the microtransaction schemes can be fair. The games could all get expensive in a hurry. This isn’t just my nostalgia for the good-old days of full physical fighting game packages speaking, though that’s nice.
The potential of only purchasing a few characters to focus on and play through various modes, including online play, sounds nice. But most players will not know which characters will fit their fighting style best as they start. There have been plenty of characters that fighting game fans, including myself, wanted to learn to play after seeing their designs, watching them in action in trailers while screaming “I want to learn them!” and pointing at the screen like an Ace Attorney character. It’s a foolproof plan until they start playing them and realize they don’t fit their fighting style after much experimentation. Sampling other characters gets much harder when most of them have to be purchased individually compared to when they’re all available in a base package.
Not to mention that having few characters available in a base package with online accessibility (provided they have a subscription) means online would be dominated with those characters. This perhaps wouldn’t be to the liking of fighting game pros; online modes in most 2D-ish fighters with even slight mainstream appeal are already dominated with Ryu and Ken-like “Shoto” characters. They would assuredly adore the thought of having more of them.
There might be too much content to purchase for the more “casual” audience. Don’t underestimate the number of people attracted by games that include a laundry list of features, even though we’re beyond the time when they’d read about all of them on the back of a retail package in a store. It’s unlikely that all the robust single-player features will be available in the initial package, provided they made them for the game at all (it would be a separate issue if they didn’t). It’s tough to tell how all of this would be priced, but buying a few characters and other modes would already be expensive enough that it would have some players questioning whether they were scammed.
This leads right into another point: Several publishers cannot be trusted to price microtransactions accordingly. There have been prior efforts like Tekken Revolution and the Core Fighters versions of Dead or Alive 5 and 6 where merely purchasing a few characters would be an equivalent to buying a full base package. Revolution was particularly horrendous, where characters were priced at a steep $5.99, with $1.99 outfits. There were also coins available to unlock other features faster. If Bandai Namco were to, say, make Tekken 8 free-to-play, it’s unlikely the microtransaction schemes would be much better than this. It’s not like gacha games have overall improved since 2013.
There are plenty of players whose free-to-play fighter dreams are influenced by Street Fighter V a game rife with free-to-play-style microtransactions despite having a full-priced base game. This was since mitigated with the Champion Edition, which includes most of the content from the first four seasons (outside the Capcom Pro Tour content — bastards), but the game’s microtransactions were a wild west for four years. I won’t mind it if developers try experiments like the aforementioned Core Fighters versions of DOA5 and 6, where “traditional” base versions were available for everyone who wants them. But not every publisher can be trusted to provide fair pricing schemes.
It’s not as if we won’t see this experiment play out eventually. It’s likely that, for instance, League of Legends fighting game spinoff Project L will be f2p when it arrives, considering the main game’s popularity and how Project L itself evolved from the also-f2p Rising Thunder. The format that will become dominant in the future remains to be determined.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
