Instead, let Street Fighter from Street Fighter tell you how game companies have set about slicing fighting games apart to make more cash from an audience they’ve secured leverage over.
From SoulCalibur VI to Mortal Kombat, everyone is here!
Instead, let Street Fighter from Street Fighter tell you how game companies have set about slicing fighting games apart to make more cash from an audience they’ve secured leverage over.
From SoulCalibur VI to Mortal Kombat, everyone is here!
brb I’m going to make a racing game where the wheels are DLC.
This is a good topic to address, but I think your casual knowledge of fighting games created a misunderstanding of the bigger issues here. Even in fighting game sequels, there can be a number of system changes at work so that even returning characters can feel vastly different from what they used to. I remember maining Talim in Soul Calibur 2 only to have to abandon her in the following games because the changes to her gameplay made her less viable for me. This is especially true of Cross Tag Battle, where the systems are so specific to that game that people have complained about picking their favorite characters in other games, like Akihiko from Persona 4 Arena, only to find that they don’t play anything like they remembered. So in that sense, putting old characters behind DLC isn’t really the issue. If it was as simple as dragging-and-dropping the old characters into the new games, then just charging for a new game in the first place would be a ridiculously scummy move. Like when Capcom used to charge $60 every couple of months for slightly different versions of Street Fighter 2.
For me, the bigger issue is that these DLC characters are often ridiculously over-priced. I think ArcSys started this with BlazBlue, when the DLC characters started releasing at eight or nine dollars a pop- over half the price of what a typical season pass might cost even nowadays. And all you got then was a single character. Now we’re supposed to be grateful that Base Form Goku and Vegeta are only six dollars each, or that you can get packs of three characters in Cross Tag Battle for ten dollars. All for characters that you’re not allowed to use in Practice Mode to even see if you want to bother spending any time with them in advance. Worse yet, most DLC characters tend to be hideously overpowered on release, and it happens so consistently that you’d be naive to believe that it’s unintentional. The devs want you to get blown out by the DLC characters so that you’ll be more encouraged to buy them. This is especially bad in Smash Bros. for Wii U, your pick for best usage of DLC characters, where even casual fans can see how Bayonetta and Cloud tower above everyone else in competitions. Essentially, if you want to compete with the big boys, you very often have to open your wallet and play the premium characters.
I think DLC characters are a great addition to fighting games. Characters with new niches can very often shake up the way the game is played and give everyone a reason to go back to revitalize the community for a bit. But I think the developers of these games need to let us practice with them before purchase, stop charging us a tenth of the game’s full price for single characters, and for God’s sake, actually balance these characters out before they end up on-disc in either the sequel or the inevitable EXTEND revision.
HOLD UP! I agree with much of what you’re saying, BUT you didn’t take into account every factor with the blazblue cross dlc thing.
For starters, the game isn’t $60 it’s 50. And the dlc packs, which had 3 characters each, were only five dollars a pop.
Also, it was extremely clear that the dlc characters weren’t finished upon the release of the game. Hackers got into the games files and we’re yet with the sprites and voice lines, but the characters were very incomplete functionally.
I feel like arc shouldn’t get a pass on this practice, but shouldnt be talked about in such a sinister way.
Edit: Also, the entire game is made up of people from other series except the rwby characters which were a HUGE selling point for it. They couldn’t just put none “Mainstays” in the dlc roster
Frankly, most of the people complaining about this sort of thing aren’t part of the FGC. It’s spectators looking in from the outside or casual players who complain about a lack of single player content in street fighter 5. And the producer of Tekken isn’t really correct, at least not across all of the fighting games. The only thing you really need ‘all’ of the characters in the roster for is labbing them and practicing how to respond to their attacks with your favorite character, which you can also do by just matchmaking. There are some exceptions like certain match ups being very difficult, but you don’t know what the match up is because matchmaking is blind, so it literally does not matter at ‘all’ unless you’re an offline tournament player where character selection is allowed.
You can earn every character you want in Street Fighter 5 by grinding out fight money, which, for a casual player, might seem like a long time, but with bonus daily quests and the grind that anyone who’s really into a fighting game will indulge in, you’ll have way more than you can spend unless you want to buy every single character. Capcom even lets you create new accounts for free, and each account starts with 100k which is enough for a character, so worst case, make a new account, lab or play the character that you want for free.
The screenshot on steam is misleading because the majority of that price is really just over priced cosmetic fluff (SF5 has a ‘lot’ of cosmetic fluff, but a lot of that money goes back into the community through Capcom pro tour tournaments).
I get you generally want to make a stand against this sort of practice in the industry, but when the fans of the games and genre aren’t that phased by it, it does seem like you’re making a bigger deal of it than it deserves.
Literally every console game with online components placed behind a paywall does this. Paint with the same brush, Jimmy Bowimmy.
I mean Jesus Christ it’s already sounding like a shitton of this video could have “fighting game character” replaced with “online play” and it’s still make perfect sense.
Yeah, polish Nintendo’s knob while they’re openly conspiring to take away content from Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and shit unless you pay them more money. Why are you ignoring paywalled online? Ignoring it is complacency in it, and complacency in it is support of it.
Skullgirls creators have broken down how much it costs to introduce a new character to a 2D fighting game. Long story short – it’s expensive and it’s easy to find online if someone’s interested. I agree it’s ok to ask for money for a cast of new characters, but when the creators gate an existing character behind a paywall in a new version of a series then that’s just wrong. About Cross Tag Battle though – there’s 20 characters in the base game, same amount as in the newest Under-Night for example. Also all characters have to be brought up to Blaz-Blue level of complexity and mechanics while still maintaining their original game’s feel which can’t be a simple task. What I’m not okay with is that Blaz-Blue characters could be all in game without the need to pay for them as they were already part of Blaz-Blue franchise. I hate this so much…
Blazblue CTB is cheaper however and the dlc (in australia anyway) meant it was the same price as say tekken 7 or dragonball fighterz at launch. 40 very unique fighters compared to dbfz 23 or whatever at launch is far far better.
That with DBFZ each character costing damn well 8 Aus dollars each, just ridiculous
as someone that has played and making fighting games for 10 years now i can tell you that there is one thing that Jim did not calculate in to his argument. FIGHTING GAMES DON’T SELL WELL (yes that includes street fighter )! unless your Smash or Tekken fighting games almost always lose money on the initial sell and i don’t want to here that “well fighting games would sell better if they had a full roster to start with. ” let me explain how this shit works. devs generally has huge list of characters the they want to put in the game then an executive producer looks at sales data for fighting games for the last 10 to 20years then come up with a budget/cost per characters and sells projections for your tile which means a lot of the time you don’t have the budget everyone you want, a lot of times its only fraction. but you can you use initial sell to fund dlc to make a some small profit then hope to god you sell enough dlc to fund your next project. if you ask a hardcore fan would you rather pay for dlc OR not have fighting games most would just pay the extra $30 for a season pass
p.s. on disc dlc is shit
edit: grammar
One day all games will be is DLC. Get the new Audio DLC, The deluxe “See Stuff on The Screen” Graphics DLC package, The premium game engine DLC, The DRM DLC… The DLC installer DLC!!!
Acting like all characters in fighting games should never be DLC and the games should die after first release and receive no support and should never announce upcoming DLC before release,and trying to circlejerk against ArcSys and BBTAG using points that have been disporven time and time again by actual players who knows how DLC in fighting games work, is extremely dishonest and hurts companies with nothing but ignorance. BBTAG’s DLC works like this;
-The game is 50 dollars on retail, 40 in some parts of EU, and DLC in total brings it up to 70 dollars in US and 60 in some parts of EU.
-This means you’re paying 20 dollars for 18 characters, all of which are unique, none of which plays or works remotely similar to how they used to in their original games. They are completely different characters, this isn’t up to debate. Anyone who plays these games seriously would tell you this.
-ArcSys announced DLC for DBFZ, a game retailing at 60 dollars on release with 21 characters, season 1 brings 8 characters, upping the number to 29, coupled with this you’re paying more than 70 bucks, but no one circlejerked against that because it was translated well.
-None of the datamined characters played anything remotely similarly to their final release versions. Yang being an obvious example, one of the few “datamined” characters and her final version wasn’t anything alike her “datamined” version.
-None of these characters are disc locked but hey, that doesn’t make for a good cirlcejerk and controversy so let’s act like they were. I forgot games are just supposed to die and receive no support after release nowadays otherwise they’re “anti-consumerist”.
Can’t wait to hear people cite this video and use it to talk about how Nintendo is somehow supposed to be the best fucking company in the world and put down traditional fighting game developers.
It’s fine to try to criticize fighting games, while it hurts a genre that already is rather rare because it requires you to actually sit down and git gud where skill is rewarded unlike most mainstream titles that any kid can play, it’s not like these games should be devoid of criticism just because they are rare so it’s fine to criticize stuff no matter how less played it is. But your criticisms of the way BBTAG handled it’s DLC is plain wrong, yet it’s gonna get shared everywhere anyway with people going “asw are just nasty milkers!!!” and doing no research of their own.
TL,DR: fighting games in 2018 are like every other game in 2018.
You can’t talk about the DLC practices in fighting games without talking about how badly fighting games sell and perform in the marketplace. And it’s not ‘because’ of the DLC that they’re unpopular. Fighting games are too hard for the overwhelming vast majority of gamers. That’s why each and every new fighting game that’s come out in the last 5 years have tried to re-invent the wheel with their ever expanding tutorial modes in the hope that newcomers will finally get it, but they never do. Most gamers can’t even do a simple quarter circle, let alone 3-frame links or throw techs. Hell, most people don’t even know what an overhead is.
Now, Tag? People know how to play tag. That’s why Call of Duty sells like hotcakes and Street Fighter doesn’t.
I don’t think Jim is familiar enough to the FGC to actually proper phrase this in the competitive scene. SFV you can easily get all characters with the in game currency by playing 2 hours a week for an X amount of time where X is way less than the average FGC fan plays. Casuals get fucked but hey, it’s play the game or not.
To give Arc just a little defense, Dragonball fighterz was a pretty good release, had a decent amount of characters on launch, and the pre-order characters could be gotten for free for just grinding in game money (which didn’t take to long). And they’re Dlc characters are characters that people wanted to see and offer more to the game.
Jim sterling doesn’t know shit about fighting games and it’s plain as day he doesn’t actually play them. They are niche games and although I do agree day one dlc characters is a shitty process, these games don’t make AAA sales numbers while the player base expec support for years due the the innate esports nature of the games. They need to monetise somehow, devekiomentvteans cost money. I’d rather Namco charge a few extra dollars for some character’s than just drop support for the game entirely post release which was what happened right up until tekken 7. Also most serious players only pick up one or two characters and it’s not like you can’t play against the characters you do not own. It’s a bit fucking rich harassing Namco for tekken season 2 as well. The player base begged for it cause we were sick of having to wait a whole console generation per tekken game. And it’s being released over a year after the game came out. It was either this or no new content. Lei and Anna were NEVER planned to be in the game, which has been in arcades for years btw. They were added because of the immense demand, so naturally the tekken community on a whole are so happy our game is not just getting abandoned, and it’s bringing a whole new version of the game with new mechanics as well. By this token sounds like jim doesn’t like traditional expansion packs either cause this is what it is. But yeah, all you casuals get on the hate train… Personally I want to see tekken 7 supported until the next version of the game is released.
Dlc characters dont split the community and players want multiple season passes and continued support. Cross tag battle plus the dlc is still only as much as a stardard game. The base game didnt launch at $60. Lmao at giving smash a pass for fan favorite mewtwo being sold but getting mad at namco for cutting of a character like tira with low usage rates. Hell they used to just sell an update that cost as much as full priced game.
You forgot to mention for the Smash4 DLC that it wasn’t day one or on-disc DLC, it was actually developed after the game was finished, not taken out of the game then sold back to us like most DLC these days…
You are not entirely incorrect but damn, that video was alot of bullshit.
You never mentioned BBTags pricing model, because if you did, everyone would see that you are talking alot of shit. The Game with 20 Characters costs 50$. The other 20 cost 20$. Everything is 70$. So tell me, where people playing BBTag pay extra compared to other fighting games?
Giving Smash a pass, just because old characters are not DLC is also bullshit, because the problem with critical characters not being accessible unless you pay extra is still there. Even worse in Smashs case, because Bayo is OP as shit and Cloud was the top when he came out.
Tekken 7 is the problem because the first Season Pass included 2 Characters who were from entirely different series? Now, over a year after launch, they are coming with old characters and just because they were in the series in the past, every player has the right to have them for free? What the flying fuck are you smoking?
To be fair, your point is not totally wrong. Having every character available in a fighting game is important. Only that way you can actively learn to play against every character or pick a particular strong one, if there is someone towering over the rest. Thats the reason, why Soul Calibur 2 Tournaments banned Heihachi, Spawn and Link. Not everyone had every version of the game, therefore the console specific characters would be kinda unfair, because you cant learn to play against them.
But picking favourite companies when talking about that stuff is just hypocritical. Also, picking on BBTag because you didnt wanna look up their pricing is lazy. Please do your job properly.
I love Harada, it’s such a shame he’s part of Bandai Namco. He’s such a genuine person and I can imagine he was pissed off by having to put characters behind DLC paywalls… Tekken 7 is still the best fighting game out there at the moment regardless, Harada has done a fantastic job, it’s just a shame Namco are involved.