If there was a fighting game that managed to bring that many people into the hobby, I wouldn’t care what its monetization model looked like.
My Two Cents:
-The “Integrity” of ESports is kind of misleading. They are about making money at these events, and LoL is a money maker. That’s really what guarantees its spot at competitive events like this. MLG had several events for fighting games, and the money was/is not there because of a) everyone’s personal bias against those damn Esports and b) the entire population of Fighting game players, if they could be lumped together, put aside their differences, and enjoy/pay to watch the same game, would still be eclipsed by LoL fanboys (Something that I feel is easy to neglect on a place like SRK but we are the crazy, outspoken minority against almost every other genre of game out there).
30+ Million users engaged in in the game creates an audience that can buy into the relatively niche product of “Watch people play this and give us that ad revenue/premium stream fees”, and that’s why its en Esports darling at the moment.
The kind of game it is lets this model work for a number of reasons. I’m not sure these are being touched on here in the depth they should be if we really want to make this comparison. The presence of a Low Requirement, PC playable, Free to Play with server based purchasing controls make this a much smarter product to deploy in developing nations (Where a luxury device is incredibly expensive) and larger countries where the Piracy rate is ludicrous (China, etc).
To elaborate on the first point, the game is one that was designed around, and thus able to function in periods of latency, which gets more and more common as you get outside urban areas with their sexy sexy fiber optic lines. Fighting games on the other hand, rely on more or less exact framerate (With some notable exceptions like SCV that I imagine would be the most prominent if this model was picked up for FGs more so than currently). This by itself limits its audience (Also you typically need a console to play them, which get expensive/impossible to get in a lot of places on earth).
I believe F2P can easily be applied to Fighting Games and if done correctly, could afford to not care if a single person on SRK opted to not play it (Which I seriously doubt given how much discussion of LoL there is on this board already!)
Anyway, I had intended to go on a bit more but my girlfriend is dragging me off to breakfast. I’ll check back in on this thread when I’ve eaten something!
Apple’s business model wouldn’t necessarily work for Epson. The products and the cultures around them are really quite different.