Glad somebody knows this. Our dollar only gets worse. This DLC model really offers the best bang for your buck if you don’t want to spend more money. It’s also great for those that don’t want to wait and are willing to spend.
Being a student has everything to do with it. School itself isn’t cheap either, If Capcom wants to offer a model where we can earn DLC, I’m all for it.
It’s not about hurting wallets, it’s that $600 is still a lot of money and being able to access content by playing is great and really makes your purchase even sweeter. Which was my ORIGINAL POINT. Thanks for overlooking that and telling me about my hobbies, though.
I paid a couple of bucks for Warcraft 3 including the expansion, played that game for 7 years and had during 5 years of my 7 years playing continued support from the developer in form of balance patches and bug fixes.
Damn, the server are even still up until this day. I can go play Diablo 2 and WC3 whenever I feel like.
Many thanks to the Blizzard of old. That company was the pinnacle of online multiplayer with free support in the 2000’s.
What they gave you for free in 2001, companies nowadays charge you 20 bucks for.
But hey that kind of investment by the developer kind of paid off. Look at the hundreds of thousands of mindless Blizzard drones, that buy every new product released by them.
If you’re nice to the customer, the customer will pay you back.
Jim isn’t all that bad. I’ve heard that some find him overbearing and I guess that’s why nobody is taking the video posted seriously.
That and it seems the topic at hand is very hard for people to be neutral about. So much that mentioning the exchange rate in your country as a reason why you think F2P is a good model apparently brings your hobbies in to question -_-
Because F2P is so iffy, I feel like people are voicing their thoughts on the video and topic and passing it off as Jim love/hate. All things considered, Jim is an alright dude.
For some reason, games have been immune to inflation (despite the fact that the prices of everything else has naturally gone up over the years). Adjusted for inflation, a $60 game you bought in 1996 is worth the equivalent of about $100 today. Part of the reason we see DLC, is to make up for that missing $40.
Very true, sir. I honestly thought that games would be $99.99 ($79.99 in the US) over here by this time. I was shocked to see how much more games cost while we still pay roughly similar prices from last gen. Surprised they’ve kept it at $79.99 while everything else goes up.
Spoiler
Except for poutine. You can still get a solid poutine in Toronto for under $15 lol.
US gamers always forget that paying the same price as 10 years ago is something exclusive to them, the rest of the world have been dealing with rampant game’s prices for a long time now.
My SNES copy of SF2 in 1992 cost $75, or $127 in today’s USD. HF and Super were even more expensive as the game size increased. Games have gotten a lot cheaper over the years.
What generation did prices start going up for you? Or do they go up every gen? I’m genuninely curious and there’s no other thread for this. Up until now, my country received the same price points as the US, so I’m fascinated with this as nothing beats asking someone directly about stuff like this. Do games prices ever go back down if your dollar’s worth goes up? A lot of us believe that even if the loonie (Canadian dollar) gets back to parity with the US dollar, our prices on products will still be as they are (Ex: $79.99 games won’t go back to $59.99).
It’s hard to answer, because here in Brazil we have the black and gray markets, meaning products that are not sold by the official retailers and are mostly ilegally imported or imported without paying all the taxes, so they’re sold by a lower price than the “official” price.
Up until 2010, Sony didn’t officially offered any Playstation product here, so every PS1, PS2, PSP and PS3 and their games here were imported from other countries (mostly US or Mexico). Some by legal means, others not so much.
So back then or even today, we have a big variety of prices for the consoles and games. Our best source for the “official price” is the PS Store (but Brazil didn’t get a PS Store until 2011 or 2012).
The prices here tend to go up everytime the US dollar goes up and now we’re at an all time high for the dollar, roughly 1USD = 4BRL. In the 90s we used to have 1USD = 1BRL, and back then 1 game was around 70 to 100BRL (something between 70 or 80USD).
When the PS4 arrived, the “official” price of the games was around 170 and 200BRL, but the dollar was around 2BRL. Now SFV is selling for 250BRL and EA games like Star Wars Battlefront or the new NFS is “only” 300BRL here.
The official price will hardly go down IF and WHEN the dollar goes down, but the black and gray markets are more regulated by the offer and demand rule than Sony here, so they’ll probably bring the prices down again. It has happened before
Anyway, the general consensus here is that games used to be more expensive in the 90s and early 2000s, the price went down around 2009 or 2010 and now they’re going up again. But we’re dealing with a 10% yearly inflation here, so our currency is worth less and less every year too.
This reminds me of of a YouTube video I watched of parents complaining in the 90s that Nintendos were too expensive. They felt pressured to buy these systems for their kids and were more pissed off that the 16 bit next gen versions were just down the corner.
I will be honest, anytime someone says this I feel like I can immediately discard their opinion. It’s just a sign of a fundamental disconnect between our views. I don’t want to be overly dismissive, only it really rubs me the wrong way.
You have to understand that the initial investment is the single greatest barrier between fighting games and a wider audience. That investment comes in the form of both money to access the content and the time you have to spend until you learn how to play the real game.
At the current point in time, anything that reduces that initial investment is a Good Thing. If I finally convince a friend to play AE2012 with me because it’s on sale, and he only cares about playing one character in the entire cast, he does not have to spend any additional money on the game, even if new DLC characters come out. But then when Ultra is announced 2 weeks later, and he (and every single other person who plays the game) is forced to invest further in the game to continue playing with each other, that is the worst possible thing you can do.
“Give me a complete product” is an obsolete viewpoint. Development on this and other games does not finish when the gold master copy is complete. If you really try to use that as an argument that spending money for characters is worse than spending money on characters AND balance updates, then you’re just grasping for a justification to argue against something that can understandably feel unfair for the people who actually buy the characters.
In a hierarchy, DLC characters like in KI for example are a better thing than forced balanced updates a la Capcom Past. The fact that you CAN (and 95% likely, WILL) buy those things with fight money instead of real money is just icing on the cake.
Edit: It’s also worth noting that in a game like LoL or DotA there is more pressure to be able to play a variety of characters than there is in SF, especially when you take character banning into account. The game is not designed in a way where people can realistically play a small number of characters, so it means more to have DLC characters in those games than it does in a fighting game.
Very informative, thanks! So it seems there isn’t necessarily a dollar trend/order they follow so much as it is supply and demand? I hope I’m not too far off.
An article explaining the same stuff Capcom has said multiple times on how they will ensure the system for getting all the gameplay content for free will be fair. You will be earning fight money during the next beta and they will be using that data to judge how to price the characters so they are fairly attainable with the fight money (aka free).
“BAH IT’S THE YOUNGSTERS FAULT WHO RAISED THEM THEY’RE ALL ENTITLED, YOU SEE BACK IN MY DAY…”
Nah, I swear you’ve said the same thing before somewhere else but again ima say fuck outta here. People were the same back in the 80s/90s, everyone always wants more and nobody is going to say “I don’t want this extra content for free” for the sake of not sounding entitled. Just an easy straw hat excuse to pull out whenever the situation calls for it to circlejerk yourself or some weird shit.
I don’t get why everyone is using the buzzword “Exploited” though. Exploited would be more along the lines of Early Access games that never finish development and devs bug the fuck out after filling their pockets. Or games like WarZ(You had to pay to respawn faster), that is being exploited. Now people have an issue with a system that gives you balance updates for free and you can even get the DLC for free? It’s an improvement over the traditional rerelease scheme Capcom had and for most of us online warriors having the fight money for one character every couple of months is going to be a most likely doable thing, hell I remember playing Rise of Incarnates for a week and having enough for 4 characters with in-game currency. That was like half the damn roster and I haven’t payed a penny for that game.
Unfortunately DLC has been done poorly by too many video game companies where people just label DLC as a rip off or exploit. It can be done correctly, just more companies have to step up like Capcom is with V and do it the right way so it can be something that can be integrated into the way people already play games. It’s all about making it fair for the people that invest time in the game which is the right way to go.
This isn’t about paying for DLC characters specifically, this is about how Capcom is using the fee-2-pay model in SF5 and inadvertently/intentionally making the game pay-2-win. The problem I and perhaps others see too is that pay-2-win is a terrible idea to adopt for a game that prided itself for its competitive scene for decades. This is not about entitlement, I don’t give a fuck about the money. This is about the principle behind what they are doing and how it truly affects the game negatively.
Every time they release a DLC character they augment game balance by introducing new match ups to the multiplayer experience. The least Capcom can do is make sure that players can only play against the new DLC characters online if they themselves bought/unlocked them too. This way they can preserve the initial product’s experience, without putting players in the situation where they need to either grind or pay to learn the new match ups. Can’t you see how unfair this can be?
I’ve already stated that I want to pay Capcom for their work because I like the company. I’ve stated the reason why I posted the Jimquisition video in the first place. I’ve also already stated that I don’t mind the fee-2-pay model so long as whatever they are selling me does not affect the outcome of the match. However if they are employing pay-2-win products (such as DLC Characters) in their game and they are, they are indeed exploiting any player who takes the game remotely seriously any way you cut it.
Now you can tell me you can earn these characters for free. Sure, but you can bet it will take ridiculous amount of hours or wins to do so, to incentivize the purchase of Bison Dollars. This is all besides the point, even if you can earn the character for free, there is still a time period between the release of the character and the time you earn him/her where your game experience will be incomplete. The game balance of the initial product that you paid for in full is changed forever if they force the new DLC character match ups onto you.
To be fair with the consumer, Capcom have one of the poorest track records with DLC/disc locked content so it’s easy to see where the criticism is coming from.
I personally like the system, it sounds like they’ve put a lot of thought into creating a market scheme that can reward both dev and player for their work. Who knows if it’ll work though, could all come crashing down if Sony pull the plug.
You can never please everyone, someone will find something to complain about. In fact lets stop making games, we have enough of those lying around now.
I think the consumer is being exploited by all of these sequels, we already have the first game in the series so why make more? I wanted everything to be in the first game I paid for what fucking con-artists dude.
