If you don’t like or don’t want to participate in this discussion, then get off your high horse and get the fuck out. No one is forcing you to read or write here.
For the all shit Jim Sterling gets, I gotta hand it to him for accurately predicting the reactions of some people in this thread.
I remember watching a friend playing Smash 4. He was doing that side game shit to unlock custom moves. I was like, “I would pay about $5 to skip all of this and just get the moves”. Does that make me a mark? Would Nintendo be an evil megacorp if they gave us the option of bypassing their stupid time stretching crap? In this era of professional victims, people like to act like they’re children and companies are guys with candy and a van. You’re most likely a grown ass man.
The way I see it, Capcom can do what they have to to make Street Fighter profitable. I never cared about the SFxT on disc DLC debacle. I cared that the game sucked regardless. Keep in mind that Capcom doesn’t even have to make new fighting games. They could just make Street Fighter pachinkos. They don’t owe us anything. Give me what I want; I give you what you want. If we both get enough from the trade maybe we can do this again some time. Capitalism.
Give me that Tekken Tunes. I’ll pay $10. Actually, if this whole fee 2 pay psychology means anything then maybe this confirms Tekken Tunes. The music is so shitty it makes you want to pay extra for better music.
As long as I can pay for the characters separately instead of having to buy the whole pack.
If he stays on his high horse he can GTFO faster.
I just can’t agree with this part here. I would never expect someone to work on something as time consuming as a character an hand it to me for free. While balance updates mostly involve tweaking stuff already there, creating a new character is not so simple. You can still enjoy the game without a DLC character, but it’s much harder to enjoy something that needs to be heavily balanced/patched.
I guess what I’m saying is that balance updates are a comitment to quality and longevity (or quality of life). A free character certainly doesn’t put money in a developer’s pocket to circumvent keeping their game alive. A DLC character wasn’t a part of the initial product you paid for. The system mechanics that will continously get balanced throughout the game’s lifetime, though? Yeah, that’s a part of the initial product you paid for. It just sounds greedy and entitled to want something that was created and implemented after the fact.
I completely understand your point and I believe if you are good at something you should get paid for it. I wouldn’t want to unfairly take from Capcom, especially when keeping Street Fighter alive and healthy makes me happy.
But, the fee to pay model itself is flawed, it’s a set up, and a trap even. The initial product should be a complete 60 dollar experience. One can argue that the addition of outcome changing factors like new characters affects the initial product’s experience. This is really what it’s all about because if you want to play this game seriously you will want those characters, you will need them even. DLC characters artificially create voids in the initial product’s experience that you must then fill with your time or money. They negatively affect the paid for initial products’ experience somehow or someway.
This is why I personally prefer DotA’s model over LoL’s. Valve preserves the integrity of the competitive nature of its game by keeping characters and balance patches free. In return, the community supports Valve far beyond expectation, proving that a company can profit immensely from the free to pay model without resorting to pay-to-win which is essentially what DLC characters are. Competitive DotA is completely free.
This is also why I preferred the expansion pack upgrade model over individual character DLC. Even if potentially divides the community online, it preserves the playing field and the initial product. Capcom can even take a page from Blizzard’s book and make the expansion pack characters temporarily available to players online only when they play with players who already bought it (it’s called Spawning, look it up), thus solving any issue with dividing the player base.
Capcom will make their money, they will make a ton of it with or without DLC characters. So it makes sense to me because of the nature of SF that characters and balance patches remain as giveaways part of the 60 dollar experience that you paid for. Sure, SF characters are more elaborate and complex than DotA characters, so they cost more to produce but they will make more money in the long run by giving them away through the sales of accessories and through community support.
Bottom line, Competitive Street Fighter 5 should be part of the initial product experience, something you paid for in full, and DLC characters sold individually not part of an expansion/upgrade compromise that.
So how then do you propose that Capcom recoup their initial investment? Because a single $60 product sure as hell wont. A game like this probably has a budget in the tens of millions. Now take into consideration the fact that people tend to buy less individual titles these days as more players tend to focus on one or two titles and just pick up additional content for that title.
If Capcom need DLC characters to recoup the initial investment (i.e. 16 characters Vanilla SF5) then there is a problem with their sales and marketing plan. Vanilla SF5 should and will pay for itself, and if it doesn’t then Capcom seriously fucked up. Likewise DLC should and will pay for itself one way or another.
What we should be asking is how can Capcom offer balance updates and new characters as part of the initial 60$ investment from the player and still make a desireable profit. Alt. Costumes is the most sensible way IMO (among many things that cannot be defined as ‘pay 2 win’).
Alt. costumes sold individually at 3-15 dollars a pop (depending on rarity, quality, and complexity of the costume), as part of bundles centered around themes or seasons, or even random ‘treasure chests’. They are like the sunglasses of the Fashion industry or Found Footage horror movies, very cheap to produce but have disproportionately large profit margins. Over the course of 5-7 years, this kind of DLC is what will be bringing in the money. A character can only be sold once to a player that likes them, but the costumes for said character can be indefinitely numerous and will likely always sell to the players that like them. It is more profitable in the long run to give characters away if they plan on having no expansion packs, even if it reduces the frequency of new characters.
Let’s be honest, there are MANY ways a company can make profit, without resorting to pay-2-win. These non-p2w DLC can be priced in a way that they will cover their own costs AND the costs of everything else being offered through the SFV DLC service, AND STILL make a significant profit. The only reason Capcom is double dipping with fee 2 pay is because they know they can get away with it. This isn’t Capcom specifically though, this is simply the zeitgeist of the modern gaming industry, and given Capcom’s history of dodgy business practices, one should expect them to jump on this bandwagon.
You forget a few factors:
-Games cost more to make these days. While we were never told the exact figures, we had enough hints from Seth and other people at Cap USA that indicate that the cost per character for SFIV was around half 400-500k. Mike Z’s statements that it cost them about the same to just reskin a character for Battlefront 2 at Pandemic also jives with this.
-People buy less individual titles and tend to focus more on certain titles and the content for that title.
Relying on just a single $60 sale to recoup costs just doesn’t cut it anymore these days. Especially not if you’re a company like Capcom who isn’t exactly flush with cash. The fact alone that they need Sony money to actually develop Street Fighter V is quite telling.
Valve can afford to do what they’re doing with DoTA 2 because they are flush with cash and can afford to take more time to actually recoup the amount that they spent on the game.
Valve can do whatever the fuck Valve wants to do because they are not retarded and made their company a joint-stock company.
When Valve decides to lose a lot of money on a project like say the Steam Machine, because they believe in that piece of hardware, there won’t be some rich corporate shareholder fucking be coming over saying:
“That’s not the direction I want our company to go into!”
Valve has kept themselves every liberty of being creative by just staying a private company and they get backed by the golden cow aka Steam.
I for one really like the sound of the new system, although it does somewhat depend on how they decide to sort out tournament organisers the extra characters - for the weekly I run I’ll likely have about 8 copies of SFV - I doubt the tournament play time each week will earn enough fightmoney for new characters, so providing they can give DLC codes or something to TOs then its fine.
As an individual for my own home version of SFV, I think the new system is great. As a TO, I’m still somewhat on the fence…
Combofiend said they are looking into this.
That would be interesting to see if Capcom would comp DLC for Tournament Organizers…but what would stop some from abusing that system?
Perhaps TO’s would have to register their events online beforehand.
The way it was suggested in our improvements/suggestion thread to Capcom was to create a tournament mode for the game. A specialized version of VS mode that places tournament rules (winner gets character locked, loser can switch characters) and can be set for 2/3 matches or 3/5 matches depending on standard, semis, winners/losers finals or grand finals where it will reset. In this mode you can make all of the characters available for free, but to use the character in story mode, traditional VS mode, online, training or any other modes they have to grind and use fight money or pay.
I feel that’s a pretty simple way to make the characters available for tournaments and to even let casual people try out without giving them access to too much of the character and bring incentive to earn or pay for them later.
Im not worried about any of this happening.
I believe it’s already happened for Evo.
That said, the easiest way would be for them to just give it out to any CPT events.
Video games over here (Canada) are $79.99 before taxes. Dropping almost $100 on a game is hard to justify these days, especially for a broke student like myself. If Capcom is offering a model where I can get my characters by doing what I plan to do with the game (play it), then I’m happy.
Hell, I know people that can’t invest in a PS4 and will only get to try SFV if it’s Canada Cup. We’re more than happy to not have to drop $40 (or $60 now, I guess) on another balance update + characters. I support SFV’s DLC model entire.
Dropping $100 on a game you will play for 5+ years is a lot? If that’s the case you may want to find another hobby.
When you factor in a $499.99 console? Yeah, it most certainly is. Especially when you’re a student as I mentioned above. But yeah, please continue to tell me how I’m in the wrong hobby and at least $600 in total is justifiable.
Again, this DLC model they’re going with is fantastic and will certainly reward those that play. Hell, just offering your console as a setup at a local will surely net you even more fight money.
Many people already have a PS4, there are more than just 1 game out for the console. Are PS4’s really $500 in Canada 2 years after launch?
WTF does being a student have to do with anything?
And I still stand by it - if $600 over 5+ years is going to hurt you financially, you may want to reconsider your hobby.
People getting into hobbies they can’t possibly afford…
Complaining that a 80 canadian dollars game is “too much” when the minimun wage there is like 1,800 CAD is too much of a First World Problem for me…
For reference, here in Brazil SFV is selling for 250BRL on the PS Store, a new PS4 costs 2,500BRL and our minimun wage is less than 800BRL
I know kids here that still play their PS1s and PS2s because that’s what they (or their parents) can afford.
PS4s in Canada actually got bumped up in price due to the Canadian dollar going down in value over the last few years.