A FTp fighter would be cool
Fresh Lettuce provides some really good points about the F2P business model that I think can be expanded on. Basically, the goal with any competitive F2P game is probably something along the lines of:
- How should the better player be rewarded?
- How do we avoid punishing the worse player too harshly?
Thinking about this a bit more, a big analogue is found in Magic: the Gathering Online. In that system, you pay money for the three booster packs you need to participate in a tournament format known as ‘drafting.’ You don’t bring in a deck with you, you open up the packs and pass the cards one by one and construct a deck out of that. The winner of the draft tournament wins up to 8 packs depending on the payout format. Now, that winner can use those packs instead of opening them to participate in another draft tournament. However, draft tournaments also require two tickets to enter in the first place. These tickets can be purchased with real money, although there are plenty of bots in the system that will take cards. This means that unless you’re a godly godly player, you will have to keep on paying money in order to keep playing (randomness of the cards you get helps a bit in that too). However, even if you’re a poor player, you still get to keep the cards you opened in that draft anyway. And of course, the game makes money because all the players had to purchase packs in order to compete in the first place.
So:
- The better player is rewarded by having their next entry into a tournament subsidized (but not completely)
- The worse player still gets to keep their cards
Part of the advantage that MtGO has over paper Magic is that as an online game, there’s almost always a draft tournament ready to fire. There’s no need to wait for a certain day or wait for a certain time; there are almost always people available to play with.
MtGO isn’t exactly F2P, but here’s some examples from other games that are:
Dragon Nest is currently a F2P MMO that’s surviving without giving power to cash items. Cash shop items are mostly costumes or minor conveniences. There is very little in the way of actual power being sold in the cash shop.
In theory, League of Legends’s business model doesn’t force a player to spend money to be competitive either. If you play long enough, you can eventually get everything that’s worthwhile gameplay wise. In reality, if you want to play at the top competitive level, money is going to need to be paid to unlock everything. But most players don’t care about the top competitive level and are happy with the free 10 out of ~70 characters along with whatever they’ve unlocked.
So how do we apply this to a competitive F2P fighting game? How do we reward the better players in the game without punishing the players who aren’t as good? What do we give players for free, what do we keep behind a paywall, and what things are just easier to get with money?
I think the answer to the first question is having a bunch of tournaments with entry fees. Have tournaments that are constantly firing which don’t only reward the winner, but also reward players for just trying and entering the tournament. Give the winner some rare or nifty novelty thing, and give the runner-ups some in-game currency or something that can be spent on nifty novelty things as well.
This way, people can play the game casually as much as they want, but if they want the cool nifty things, they’re going to have pay money. Tekken and Soul Calibur have both shown that people can have a ton of fun with customizable and vanity items.
Zeech’s idea is very similar to LoL’s model, and in a perfectly designed fighting game, there wouldn’t be a problem with having characters locked behind an unlock wall. However, no fighting game is perfectly balanced, so if a F2P fighting game were ever to be made, a lot of efforts would have to be taken to make sure that characters you have to unlock aren’t better than ‘free’ characters.
I think Tencent is trying to make a F2P fighter. It was covered on SRK’s frontpage here: http://shoryuken.com/2011/11/22/new-chinese-fighter-xuan-dou-zhi-wang-is-demoed-by-top-kof-players-looks-suspiciously-familiar/
Tencent is a company that makes a lot of F2P games and makes a good portion of their money through in game transactions and virtual goods. It may be worth watching to see how well it does to see if this a good F2P fighter can be made.
You misunderstand my idea. You have access to all characters for free. Just one at a time. (it takes a week to switch). You pay money for the ability to conveniently jump between different characters in a play session.
I think the idea of having some characters locked behind a paywall is bad
In LoL, most people are locked, so you can only choose a few. But you’ll fight the guys you’ve never seen often if you’re new. This isn’t too big of a deal because its a TEAM game and it won’t affect you as much if the opponent has some new guy you never got practice with.
But in a fighting game, it makes all the difference if you don’t know what character the opponent is using because its just you to. He knows all about your starter character but he has a new guy that’s probably stronger since he had to buy him.
Of course they could get around that with research but the casual player doesn’t want to put in that much work, they’ll either stop playing or buy the character.
I think it would be great to have all characters available, pay to enter tournaments and pay for costumes.
That’s an issue with readability, access of information, and the problem can be solved by just playing the game. I don’t really see anything wrong the the arcade style model of learning. Especially since while you might be hiding some content from the player, you’re also lowering the barrier of entry by extreme amounts as well. The tradeoff is “well I could pay “full price” for 100% of the content of the game, or x amount of money for y% of the game”. With extra ways for the player to spend their money on top of that, this is really not that bad at all. Of course, the “full game” price should be reasonably fair (must be sub 100 dollars for sure). The great thing about this is it allows players to choose how much time/money they can put into the game. A person who wants something, but not a lot ouf the game, can opt for like 10 dollars or no money worth of content to try it out or have fun every once in a while. If they like the game, they can invest more. The best thing about fighting games is that they’re honestly one of the most time to money effecient games you can play. I would gladly pay 100 dollars for a “full” game if it was that fulfilling and worth getting every nook and cranny out, especially since I don’t have to risk any of my money on learning if the game is enjoyable to me in the first place.
What would be the difference between a F2P fighter or a really good PC fighter made by a developer that has a Valve or ID Software philosophy to their games? I was thinking about it and it would just make more sense to make an awesome fighter, release it on Steam for about $20-30, and constantly be able to update the game free of charge without going through Sony/Microsoft bullshit? You could add free stages, release an editor, players could own servers and run their own mods, DLC characters, etc. We need a developer with enough balls to release a good fighter made from the ground up for PC.
I haven’t read most of the thread but Nexon, who specializes in games that are free to play with micro-transactions had a revenue of something like $900 million as of early this year. They expect that to go up for early next year too, to 1.3 billion.
Skullgirls? knock on wood like the fist of the north star
We have countless good and bad fighting games that you can play for free by now, and lots of crap fighting games being played at the moment, so I fail to see what the real benefit of yet another fighting game that is either good or bad might bring, regardless of the business model. If people played - while trying to improve - instead of wasting time conjecturing BS, a number of smaller scenes would have much better competition.
This is with reference to a game with online play and online distribution, everyone else seems to understand this. Your comment is not relevant, not to mention it’s really silly to say discussing stuff like this takes away from anything.
Really? I’ve never heard of GGPO CDs. In addition to it, not taking away from anything is different than adding something, whatsoever.
yay kwonho