Even if the update was free & mailed to your door people will complain about how long it took. There’s reasonable complaints and unreasonable ones. You can’t lump them all together.
lol
Which complaints are reasonable?
^ the UMvC3 ones.
and (most) of the SFxT ones.
It’s also an annoyance for TOs to have to spend time to unlock characters. As Mike Z once said, he’d rather pay for characters than to have to spend “3 hours hitting the coin switch on an MvC2 cab.”
Besides, done right, I’d rather just download characters than have to buy an all new disc release. Last disc update I bought was Super SFIV. For AE I got the $14 download because buying another disc (which I know some pedants did, despite owning Super). As for UMvC3, I got my copy for free.
this was embarassing
Doesn’t Capcom give out free DLC for consoles used at EVO?
I guess that’s just the thing. I understand people not liking DLC characters/payed game updates due to it being a pain in the ass for TOs. That I get. It’s a reasonable argument.
The rest of the complaints though? I don’t really view them as being particularly reasonable. Most of them boil down to “I don’t want to spend money” supported by a poorly reasoned, emotional argument that doesn’t consider how the industry operates at all.
The SFxT on-disk DLC complaints especially don’t make sense to me.
I really don’t understand why people have an irrational belief that everything on a disk inherently belongs to them, when that has basically never ever been the case in the history of all software licenses. With the exception of the issues with co-op play on Xbox 360, Capcom delivered what it promised at the advertised price point. Hell, it even has a lot of characters, for that matter.
I guess I can blame Capcom on some level for being unable to relate to it’s own player base’s limited understanding of software licenses, but when the overwhelming majority of complaints are unreasonable, pants-on-head-retarded rants like this, I don’t really have that much sympathy for the player base.
What you are supposed to get is what it says you’re supposed to get on the box. What you’re supposed to pay for that is the price also conveniently placed on the box. That’s just how it works. That’s how it has always worked.
Everyone who disagrees with this practice and still runs MS Windows should really try to consider their viewpoint.
nice to see the usual stupid hate against dlc chars.
people complain for new revisions and people complain for dlc.
what do you want then?
and dont come with free dlc because that is just stupid.
i seriously want to see all of you trying to run a company just to fail miserably because your idiotic bussines ideas
I personally face-palm every time someone makes a stupid analogy, especially car ones considering some of the things that automakers charge for these days. For example Porsche charges $960 for a button that makes the car perform better (just a button mind you, everything that’s needed for what it does to happen is already in the car) and the same company I recall used to charge hundreds of dollars for “lightening packages” where they simply took stuff out from the car. Then there’s Ferrari who charges $1.8 million for a car (FXX) that you can only drive when they want you to, where they want you to, after which the car is then stored in their factory.
You might not *like *that you can buy upgrades for Zynga games, but they’re making them a lot of money. It seems logical (if perhaps sad) that other companies follow that trend.
A certain segment has a hissy fit if the character is On Disc. I’d think letting people use those DLC characters in trials might be a decent “Character Demo” idea, but the anti-DLC crowd will find any reason to be hostile. It’ll be interesting to see how future DLC is handled. :\
One thing to wonder about is: where does that money go? Does that money get plowed back into further R&D and game development, or does it get used for hookers and coke? I’d probably guess the former.
WTF? What TO’s are you referring to?
Kind of one of the huge points of SRK has been that that’s it’s by the community for the community. Having personally unlocked people for tournaments before, having worked with other people to unlock stuff for their tournaments, um: no.
Maybe in the past year TO’s have been taking some money out of the pot, but I know I ran tournaments for many years at a loss. Plus taking the time to unlock characters, and (more recently) ensuring that each console had the character DLC.
You work in development of some sort. Tell me its a good idea to design your product to cater to maybe a hundred people out of an audience of millions. If they think your event is worth it, companies seem to like to provide DLC anyways (like D3v said per capcom and Evo above). If its a huge PITA, any organizer is free to… not include the annoying characters, or games even.
By all means they should minimize inconvenience and make characters available to everyone (like I’ve said above, DLC characters aren’t imo a very good match for FG’s anyways, and if we’re including unlocks that time has passed as well. It’s oldfashioned inconvenience for inconvenience sake), but we should do it for everyone in the community, not a mini-micro-minority of the community. It’s just a silly lack of sense of proportion.
Edit: It’s weird how focus shifts sometimes. I wasn’t at all trying to say that TO’s are getting rich by taking out money from events, but rather that if they’re doing it right, cash outlays should be expected and taken care of.
I only ran one tournament before, but I agree that not all of them are making money back. I lost the vast majority of the cash I paid for the room. I never bought DLC characters before because I never owned games that supported them, but I think I will support the DLC characters for Skullgirls if I can start playing it with people again. The team was real honest with us during its production and you can be sure that these future characters weren’t made during the game’s production.
I say the best way is -all ways-.
- Release DLC characters, with free patches to allow non-DLC people to play against you.
- Release an updated disc for purchase with everything included.
- Offer a very cheap mmo-style subscription. You get access to various premium online and community features, you get DLC for free whenever it’s ready, plus they will mail you the update disc for free earlier than it’s released to the public.
- Tournament organisers can register each copy of the game they buy, up to a reasonable limit. They will receive update discs for free. This is beneficial to the publisher since it generates goodwill and a small amount of publicity.
The best way is to cater to every combination of preferences 
I honestly think you need to do the first one or the second one, or none of them.
Especially the subscription model, it’s hard to provide enough content on an ongoing basis to justify it, and if not enough people sign up and the company decides to pull the plug, a number of people get screwed.
About the last, sounds a little exploitable/hackable. Developers wanna be really careful giving out free DLC for systems (especially a mass of systems like at a major), who knows where they’re gonna show up or who ends up with them.
If you’re gonna expand your game do a straightforward DLC without overpromising (ala MK9) or just punt and do it as an expansion (AE). I really think that anything else causes more problems than it would solve.
I was directly and specifically replying to your point about TO’s making money and thus that this wouldn’t be a concern for them. No further implications were made.
In the arcade era, everybody wanted to be like the very cool MK3 unlocks, but that meant that tournaments got screwed because picking hidden characters in some games (MSHvSF, SFA3, etc) was difficult. They eventually(?) came up with the better/time/secret code unlocks. I suspect they’ll figure out something here. It really helps to have a team like Skullgirls actively innovating in this space and giving other companies great examples to follow.
Having a special “tournament” permit seems abusable.
Oh? How is their DLC model different? (I honestly don’t know the details)
Tekken is the one I always think of as the model for unlocks though, and hell in the arcade it was cool! (Especially once you figure out that you have a small chance of getting the next character to drop by playing random)