The whole game is free. TR has different gameplay than TTT2.
Honestly, from what I’ve heard and what’s being speculated, it doesn’t seem that Tekken Rev. is going to be something you’d see in tournaments.
I don’t think this is going to make much of a difference. The people who buy fighting games will still buy these, and the dudebros will download the demo and not buy any DLC or whatever. If they think this is going to bolster profits, I’ll be surprised if that actually happens.
Free to play is good as long as there is in game currency that can be used to PERMANENTLY buy characters and it doesn’t take 4 months of grinding to get one character.
Well if you could get all the characters through playing the game how exactly would a F2P fight make any money? And if anybody says ads I will Raging Demon their first born on their first day.
If you expect your game to make millions of dollars maybe you shouldn’t make it a free to play game. Freemium only really works in games where a lot of extra content can be thrown in without much thought put into it, like a Freemium FPS game selling clothes, guns, decals, and other bullshit that adds to the gameplay without detracting from someone who doesn’t pay money for it. This is done with skins and outfits in games like LoL and Awesomenauts as well. Fighting games can also do the outfit spiel, but not many people care about outfits in fighters to begin with. Generally though, that’s what you should aim for.
Requiring real physical money to unlock characters in a fighting game both detracts from the game for people who don’t pay money, but also makes the game more of a chore to learn competitively, which is 100% what fighting games are about. If your fighting game can’t be taken seriously at a competitive level there is no reason for it to exist. If people can’t learn matchups because they haven’t spent $60 on the game yet, that’s a problem for a competitive game and begs the question why it’s free in the first place.
I don’t. I’d only want to support my game’s community. I wouldn’t care for CoD numbers and pleasing everybody.
I don’t agree. There’s plenty of bells and whistles for a fighting game people would dig, that doesn’t affect the metagame. And in any case, you have to have an open mind about what kind of people this model would appeal to. Which leads to your next comment…
Nah. There are people who barely enter training modes, and can care less about tournaments. It’s not black and white.
Again, disagreed.
For people who don’t care about everything you just spoke about. Especially in a system where there would be a full package option, which I would do anyway. Full game for the traditionals, and a F2P ‘extended trial’ deal where you choose how far you wanna get into the game. Don’t really a downside that isn’t related to subjective ideals.
So basically your retort to every point is “That’s not accurate” or “I disagree.” Wonderful. Brilliant discussion we’re having here.
For the first point where you said you wouldn’t care about CoD numbers, good for you, but I wansn’t talking about you, I was talking about developers, and every single fighting game developer wants all of their games to sell 2 million units baseline besides indie games because they know they’re never going to do that. NRS, Capcom, Namco, ASW, they all constantly say their projected sales are 2 million units.
Also, I never said anything about tournaments, I said playing competitively. That can mean against your friends OR at a major. Competitive is not strictly the tournament scene, and yes, fighting games are 100% about COMPETITIVE play. There is no argument about it, fighting games are designed so that two people play against each other and one player wins while the other loses. That is a competition.
And if your game is a joke to play against ANYONE (i.e. Guitar Hero is a terrible competitive game because all the songs are the same and never change and it is simply a matter of who messes up more, but the upper level of that game being flawless 100% completion and optimal star power usage, so there is a real tangible cap to how far the game can go and the competitive scene goes nowhere), it’s not going to last very long, and a FIGHTING GAME that is a joke competitively shouldn’t even exist.
Basically, all the f2p model for fighting games is really doing by having a hard limit that characters are not, cannot, and will never be free or use in game currency and will only be purchased with real money is nickel and dimeing people who really aren’t interested in the game, aren’t going to invest any time into it, and will maybe buy one or two characters before never playing the game ever again, and I don’t see that as a model that is good for anyone besides maybe the developer getting a couple more bucks than normal. It also reeks of a lack of confidence in your product, and ultimately isn’t guaranteed to benefit the customer at all.
Man you being hella squidward right now
Disagree.
You keep coming back to this hypothetical fighting game being a joke because all the characters are piecemeal. That isn’t the point. And I love how you simply gloss over the fact that it would be an optional version, for people who don’t have any care for your ideals toward fighting games.
So let’s say I don’t care for Tekken. I do play fighting games, but I never dived into it. I see some hype tournament or whatever on YouTube and think, “I’ll just try it.” Now you tell me what’s the better scenario - financially speaking:
- I find a copy at a store. I have to buy it, no bones about it. Maybe I find a used one (a less likely scenario going forward let’s be honest) or a digital copy for a few dollars cheaper. From there I either end up liking it or I don’t - after buying the game.
- OR, there’s this F2P version with a few characters. I can play online or go to training mode with those characters and learn to appreciate Tekken’s system. All for free. This was the job of a demo once upon a time, but there is no Tekken demo. If I don’t care for it after a while, no loss. No 30-40 dollars spent. Or maybe I like it, and unlock it full… or maybe I go little by little buying a character I think is cool. Eventually I will unlocked the full game for hopefully the average price of any game.
This isn’t a conversation about competition and whatever. It’s strictly about the the price of entry. If that price is absolutely nothing, there’s a much higher chance of attracting people. I could go to Facebook and paste your passionate ideals of fighting games in regard to Street Fighter and watch nobody but fighting gamers get it. Or I could say, “Hey guys try out Street Fighter Digital (or whatever), it’s free to try no worries.”
Which approach may make a new Street Fighter fan out of somebody? Honestly?
Or, you know, they could have made a demo instead of a f2p game. Coming back to a point I made previously, best case scenario for a developer is nickel and dimeing people who buy a character or two. Let’s look at this from the consumer perspective. Let’s say you try the f2p version of the game and find that you might enjoy the mechanics, but you don’t like the available character(s). Maybe if you bought another character, you could enjoy them and like the game. So you buy the character you think looks the coolest, and you try to enjoy the game, but you don’t. So you buy another character and see if you like them, and you don’t.
Now let’s assume you stop there and decide the game isn’t for you. Which price of entry do you think has a higher chance of attracting people, the free demo or the, let’s be nice and say, 2 bucks you spent on two characters you thought you might enjoy? The real issue is that developing a demo costs money and you don’t make any of that money back, so developers don’t like making demos anymore. That’s what I think a huge contributor to the new f2p craze is right now. You’re calling the game free, but really it’s not all that free. It’s a demo you can make money off of. It doesn’t guarantee someone will enjoy your product any more than a demo would, it doesn’t guarantee more people are accepting of your brand, all it does is increase the chances of someone spending money on it. It does not benefit the consumer, it benefits the developer.
If you want to make a free to play game, I don’t agree with the decision unless you have a means of acquiring all, or in some cases “equal” or comparable content within said game without paying for it. Paying should be the quick easy method of getting everything. Most f2p systems almost always boil down to pay to win or paid demos or other what I view as scummy business practices and I don’t agree with it. If you disagree then fine, but those are my thoughts about free to play fighters.
Since you’re such a fan of the term, I don’t agree that people would be as happy to be required to pay for essential content of a supposedly free game like what I’m describing. It is a comparatively lower price of entry than having to buy a full retail game yes, but if the goal is to get people interested in the product you cannot sit there and tell me that either f2p is the ONLY way to do it or even f2p is the BEST way to do it.
What do you guys think of TR f2p model?
i like it.
mostly because I’m not great at Tekken, so it’s pretty accessible, and more often than not, I’m just looking to get a few rounds, so the 5-match / 2 arcade run limitations isn’t a big deal to me. I get a few rounds before I leave for work, and I’m good to go.
And I agree with D3v. It’s a nerfed assed out Tekken game, not worth tournament play.
It’s an excellent primer though, because I’m sucking that hardness in Tekken Tag 2.
Gives me some more motivation to play it after winning a little in TR.
Is it really nerf? I mean they add invincible moves and they remove almost all bound moves which removes the ridiculous combo damage of TTT2. Also the stats… I think it’s a different game than TTT2 ones you get at the higher level which will be totally crazy (Critical hits all day).
It’s interesting that it’s like an arcade simulator where if you win you keep playing while not spending premium tickets/coins but if you lose you need to spend coins/tickets to keep playing. I don’t know if they can get money off of these model. When I watch people playing they don’t even spend money because a.) They always win(top players). or b.) If they run out of coins/tickets it’s already past an hour or so which most casual gamers spend their time playing games.
They dumbed it down to the point that it becomes accessible.
Tekken’s very complex and not normally easily accessible. I suck at Tekken, as I haven’t played it seriously since TTT1 and even then, MvC2 took over my life at that point. This game is very accessible by comparison, so yeah, its’ nerfed down Tekken game.
SirMix is a very important perspective to take into account. It’s exactly what I was talking about.
Back in the day, we used to call this shareware.
Is it simplified or actually dumbed down? Didn’t get into tekken seriously because money wasn’t around for T6 or TTT2 but so far all I’m hearing is people saying it’s more like TDR which isn’t a bad thing.
In my experience, F2P games attract the wrong crowd. The game has to be designed with people who will never understand how to play in mind.
It sounds elitist, but subcultures don’t survive on “low barrier to entry”. You need people who actually want to play a fighting game, not people who want to play a fighting game if it’s free and easy, with the free and easy part being more important than the game part.
Also, imagine a fighting game where your opponent gets (blind pick here) to ban you from picking three characters.
Empirically, F2P works for “competitive games”. LoL works. You want to argue that LoL is for low barrier scrubs?
Whether it works because of or in spite of being F2P is the question… That, I don’t know. I’m glad someone is stepping up and testing it out, though. Maybe it does work, and fighters become the next esport, who knows. As a spectator, that can only be good. As a player, well, not everyone is Pete Sampras…