I agree. Imagine going to restaurant, ordering a burger that costs 10 burger tickets, then when you get the check they tell you that you can only buy burger tickets in increments of 4 tickets at $4 per. You're forced to buy 12 tickets, spending $12, leaving you with 2 tickets you cannot spend on anything because it's not enough. There's a reason why IRL establishments aren't like this. This most definitely would be illegal.
@@WutTheDeuceGaming Starbucks already does this with their app if you want stars. You can only load up a Starbucks Gift Card, and if you do that, I believe the absolute minimum is $5 increments.
@@WutTheDeuceGaming Actually, I've recently been in a bar in Belgium that operated on tickets lol, and something similar to what You mentioned happened there lol, they had "beer tickets" and they forced You to purchase at least two beers' worth of tickets to purchase something which was kinda wild, granted, it was a bar that only served during shows and concerts, but it still felt weird.
The replay feature is hands down the best feature of Tekken 8. Not letting you utilize that at all because your opponent paid for a character you didn't is bonkers. I get why they would disallow people from playing the dlc in training mode for free, but not being able to access your side of the replay.... C'mon guys. I hope they change that.
i actually DONT get why they refuse to let you play dlc characters in replay/training. if anything, playing characters typically gives you appreciation for them and as far as DLC goes it would just serve as a free sample that you cant really use until you pay for it.
@@Acusumano25and it directly could make people more inclined to pay who wouldn't before. But most people will buy them to try them out anyway so I guess the strategy works
Idk bout that dlc character in training part i can't tell you how many dlc characters I've bought and the amount that I actually play can be counted on one hand I wish we could try the character in practice to see if your feeling them or not
'Full Price Game' is the part people aren't getting, I think. Battlepasses are dope in FREE TO PLAY games, like Fortnite, Apex, etc. Tekken costs 70 fucking dollars. That battlepass should be free, and permanent. No 'premium tier', no 'get it now because in three months its gone and onto the next battlepass!', no 'use premium currency to unlock', none of that is acceptable in a game that is over 40 dollars, let alone almost double that. The worst part is, this makes money with the casuals, so it's just going to get worse. Not trying to doom about it, that's just how it is. Unless people take hardline stances against the fundamental ideas we get no where. No compromise, if they made it 6 bucks instead of 600 coins it still sucks ass, don't let them have 1 or 2 wins when they make it slightly less terrible. These suck at a fundamental level. DONT BUY THIS SHIT AND IT WILL GO AWAY! VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS!!! Don't let greedy executives break the fun nature of the games, make sure that this feedback is given with the context of 'the game is good but dont give us stuff like this'.
Bros mad that theres OPTIONAL content to spend money on, i get that they are old cosmetics and blah blah blah, but nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to buy it. I aint buying the battlepass but i did buy the t4 jin outfit.
@jaxonmayhall5719 Whole thing is true, but keep in mind this is not a "casual" thing. Plenty of people in the FGC Paid for the overpriced SF6 outfit. They were out there in ranked. And inversely many casuals did not buy anything, because for someone not deeply invested in the game, it's not like having the integral package is that important as long and they won't be willing to spend a lot on something they don't see as particularly important. This is a issue of those who spend vs those who don't not another casual vs hardcore.
and even then what every other game didn't learn from fortnite is you can have their battle pass for free if you played long enough, the free pass gives you the currency to do it
im spoiled to be playing under night where you can create 5 custom colors for each character on top of having like 30 premade ones. grateful for fighting game devs that prioritize the player experience over this extra cash, and i'm disappointed to see this trend worsen.
Tekken lets you recolor every individual part of any costume to any color and shade of the rainbow. This also includes hair color. The costume variety isn't too great, but there's a lot of color customization.
The thing about the street fighter battle pass specifically is that for most of us, it's content we never see or look at. I know there's some people who like being in the battle hub and seeing the avatar but most of us are in fighting ground trying to get into ranked or casual matches and none of that content effects anybody on the roster. So realistically even though there's been a ton of stuff added to SF6, it feels like the only thing we've gotten is outfit 3 and the Ed stage alongside Ed.
I wanna tack onto this, as you're not wrong, but we also get World Tour content updates as well. I know it's not a popular mode (You should play it though, it's *fun*) but I feel that at LEAST with SF6's DLC, there's a bit more breadth to it. If/When they expand World Tour to continue the story, I think it'll just add more value.
You haven't even played a single one of the arcade games? For someone whose a big fan of old Capcom games, the arcade games have been a bit insane. Some games that have never been ported or hard to access port are just randomly in sf6.
@@2Eliishere All of the arcade games in SF6 are available either in the recent Fighting Collections or Capcom Arcade Stadium compilations. Although the emulation in SF6 is a bit better for some games
The SF6 fighter passes are useless but that's probably for the better because the passes are dirt cheap as far as BPs go and it's the first pass I've seen in any game that give you back MORE coins than it costs. I feel like if SF6 ever picks up in it's other content production those Battle Passes would be fine, 5 bucks for some dumb avatar stuff but you could use the coins to get stuff.
@@aledantih6524I actually don’t mind the passes. If you play ranked or casual. You buy one pass and you can unlock a second one by just playing. Even if you’re not into world hub, you still get some small customization and music. I don’t see the big deal. 5 dollars for essentially a lot of tiny content.
As much as people moan about the current monetization, it's not like we ever had it good in the past either, lol. First, we had bullshit input-reading CPUs in the arcades to suck coins out of you, then we had the tons of rereleases that were basically balance updates sold practically at full-price, and now this. We've never had it good. Man, we really never had it good, huh.
Yea the FGC is literally the OG pay to play and pay to win crowd lol, fighting games are the one genre I've spent most money on. I skipped lunch to spend allowance at the arcades back when I was still in school. In fact it's exactly because fighting games are now played more at home than at arcades that the devs have to somehow monetise homes to make money.
this is worse man. These games now are like if you went to the arcade, threw some quarters in and after a while of playing they charged you to stay on the machine even if you hadn't lost or beaten the game. Or, if you went to the character select screen and they had locked characters only available if you throw more quarters in.
That's a good point. A lot of fighting game publishers are still pining for the arcade days where you got to charge players every single time they stepped up to play. $0.25 a pop is what, $1.85 today? You know they're salty that they can't get away with that anymore.
@@WutTheDeuceGaming Nah I literally don't buy skins, there's nothing for me to spend, why is there a need to spend anything? Even a new character for a few bucks, that's nothing compared to a few bucks per visit to the arcade, which I did daily, meaning I spend hundreds to maybe even thousands each year on a single game in the arcade.
Honestly, I booted up SF6 the other day saying to myself "I know this is highway robbery, but I really want Spring Clean Ryu and Fro Kimberly" and then I didn't buy them because the interface was so bad I couldn't even find the menu option to buy enough coins for both of them.
What makes the shop and battle pass in Tekken 8 even worse than the other fighting game mtx is the fact they waited 2 months until everyone bought the game to shove these things in without telling anyone. That's the lowest of the low of being scummy.
The key frustrations for me, both of which Sajam mentions are: 1) incorporating F2P monetization into full-price games and 2) locking colors behind paywalls/grind. Until SFV, Street Fighter always had multiple colors available for each character by default, so this is a very obvious case of them taking away something we had (and requiring $ or a grind to get it). Now, I do realize that modern fighting games include TONS of content we never had back in the day, primarily ever-more robust story modes. SF6 has a long-ass story mode, Tekken 8 has two shorter story modes. I suppose if I had to choose having multiple character colors available by default, or having in-depth story modes I would pick the latter, but why not both?
@@aledantih6524 Palette swaps have always been and still are literally just moving hue and saturation sliders around, my guy. They’re not part of that “shit this costs way more, how do I make it profitable?” dynamic. You’d have more of a point arguing against stylized UI than against palette swaps when it comes to saving money. Harada’s point doesn’t really apply in this context and the fact that anyone puts stock into anything he says is hilarious considering the depths of bullheaded stupidity he’s demonstrated in such occasions as repeatedly defending T7’s dogshit netcode or trying to justify the frame data paywall with tier lists.
It's hilarious to me how bad the rewards are for the first ever Tekken battlepass. Ain't nobody experiencing FOMO for Tekken 7 jackets and a white ball.
It's fucking disgusting the things Harada thinks are okay to do to his full priced game that has intentionally worse customization than the game before it. No game you paid money for should have a battle pass. Costumes should come bundled with the annual dlc character pass (or at least be like $1) and they aren't even new costumes, they're ones that were in previous games. What the actual fuck Harada!?
i would actually get kinda hype if you got a discount on all costumes if you buy the annual/season pass. if costumes went from like $6 to $2 i'd feel a lot more inclined to shill out 10 bucks for 5-ish costumes
@@MelloGrunty Other games literally give out skins with season passes. Hell NRS added an infuriating rank grind for skins that I have a bunch of legitimate problems with but at least it was free with the game. Charging for skins is nothing but cheap tacky bullshit from "free" to play games, that shouldn't be normalized in games we paid for up front.
I've been saying this for YEARS. I was looking to try getting into fighting games for over a decade, and every time I tried to get my friends to get one with me... the upfront cost was stupid. Full price game, day 1 dlc with extra characters, inability to even test (as/against) characters you don't own. The entire monetization has basically assumed that no new players are playing fighting games, but the existing fgc is a captive audience that will just buy whatever the fuck gets thrown at them. The biggest problem is they DO buy all that dumb shit. If every streamer started to boycott any fighting game that launched with locked characters or dlc pack, that system would be gone in a flash.
Killer Instinct (the 2013 reboot) has your back. They still have a free rotating character every week, and you can buy the game a la carte to only get what you want. KI has been F2P since day 1. I have hopes that, since MS was able to get Iron Galaxy back last year after Rumbleverse was canned by Epic, we may one day get a sequel, as Phil Spenser has acknowledged the demand for it, but that MS didn't have inhouse staff who knew creating fighting games well enough.
@@mindwarp42 unfortunately they'll need some new-game-hype to get them invested I think. I went out and got sf6 on my own but only played 100hours or so of ranked, and fell away after hitting diamond. I'm holding out a little hope that Project L will grab them as they all played LoL back in the day, and it's fully f2p, so no excuses! Also hoping it gives capcom etc a kick up the ass monetization wise
vote w/ ur wallet is a flawed argument i think, because these are _creative_ products and experiences that come with some requisite uniqueness that's not really replaceable. You can't shop around for "the version of street fighter without predatory monetization" because if you want to play Street Fighter, you want to play _Street Fighter_ not something else. This greatly increases the degree of shit ppl will put up with cuz they kinda have to? imo monetization in games just needs to be like 5x more regulated than it currently is. I don't think you can really organize a critical mass of people to _give up on their favorite game franchises_ to make a moral stand on this. sorry to say. This is just life under capitalism. We'll be subjected to the worst treatment we can collectively tolerate and they'll make sure thru marketing or other deceptive practices that we _do_ tolerate it. Corporations that want profit don't care if we love their product or merely put up with it.
Fighting games that respect their playerbase exist. Undernight and Melty have been great examples. There's indie fighters that occassionally release at a very good quality like Pocket Bravery. DNF Duel was a bit of a weak release, but it's not a giant money sink. SNK has yet to be cringe about their fighting games in terms of money. There are options to avoid these bad practices and they're all games that are relatively new. We got fighting games releasing soon that will also avoid these bad practices.
I hate that I couldn't even get excited about eddy without him being associated with the immediate deflation of happiness that was the introduction of the battle pass
I wanna buy costumes. Street Fighter, why are you putting ALL of your resources into avatars? There's cool shit that should've been part of customizing the characters we actually play, but instead they make a space suit for the guy you walk around with in the Battle Hub and it's $20 because I guess SOMEONE is buying that shit. Meanwhile, it's a year later and we only have one set of outfits that are expensive, not available to just buy, and then the DLC characters don't even get them until they're all out. We were feasting with SFV and now we're actually starving for costumes. Even the battle pass only gives avatar stuff. It's insane how much a nosedive monetization took.
Also look at Monster Hunter for another Crapcom example: World has a lot but you can basically ignore most things because there's so many things in the game and the only real noticable stuff is like stickers. Now go to Rise and there's literally trailers showing off paid DLC: VA's, layered weapons and armor(notably Lost Code), etc. I'm really looking forward to Wilds as MH is pretty much my favorite game series but if the monetization is shit enough I probably just won't
season 1 of SF5 was like this too and tbh the one set of outfits they put out for 6 are already infinitely better than anything in 5 so I'm fine with them taking their time on those
It probably takes about 3 minutes to make an avatar costume. Like just slap an image on an existing shirt that doesn't have cloth physics isn't really much of a task. The game would be less tacky if they didn't but it's eating approximately zero resources.
I think Capcom thought too highly of their character creator. I was suspicious after the first trailer, and then got the game and... oh no, it's ugly as hell. The character customization in SF6 is the ugliest I've ever seen. It's just a meme and abomination mode for shits and giggles. It's mostly notable in the SpyxFamily trailer when you see that monster with a yor costume.... how are you even trying to sell that like this? they are blinded by greed I guess.
@@Spwookie the characters they make in the trailers are pretty ugly yeah but you can genuinely make good looking characters and complete monsters in that character creator. It's one of the best character creators I've seen.
Also worth noting that Granblue isn't a full price game, and nearly everything else that they release besides the premium tier of the battlepass can be obtained with the earnable in game currency. That means characters, any skins outside of the battlepass, etc. I'm honestly pretty shocked at how fairly Cygames is monetizing this game, and hey man it makes me happy to pay for it.
I will say the pricing for the base game is great and the deluxe edition is fine. But the fact that the deluxe character pass alone is 50 euros and the normal character pass is still 35 euros, is honestly singlehandedly stopping me from buying the game. Because I dont want to immediately buy the character pass but if I dont the price to but it basically doubles.
@@theunarmedbrawler3546 Honestly, it's a pretty comparable price to other modern FGs character passes. The reason why the price is a little higher is probably because it has 6 characters, while GGST, SF6, and T8 all only have 4 characters per pass. I definitely wish they were cheaper (god I wish everything was cheaper), but this isn't really a Granblue problem, it's just kinda the way shit is right now. Edit: Also if you want to play a FG with godlike monetization you should pick up a FB game, UNI2 and MBTL are both extremely reasonably priced and UNI2's character pass was literally free for the first couple months after the game released (now it's like 10 bucks). MBTL has just been releasing 'DLC' characters as free updates. GOD I wish I enjoyed FB games...
Also to be fair, while the DLC characters can be bought with in-game currency, they're so pricey you will be saving that up forever to do so. Even if you level up every character enough to get all the bonus rupees available, you'll be able to get one, and only one. And you get ruppees a lot slower once those run out. So in practice, good fucking luck getting those without buying them.
I think they're gentle because the game is a big sell for the Granblue gacha game, if you fall in love with the franchise here and then try the gacha and want your gbvs main that's when they getcha
@@minty2156 It's actually the opposite, CyGames wants to expand the Granblue IP because the browser game isn't going to be permanent but now with Relink and Versus it has a big identity outside of its roots
God I love having to pay $70 for a basegame, $30 for the first season of DLC characters, $10 for a battlepass, $4 for past skins, some of which are poorly made (T7 Brian still has the texture error on his fingers). Bamco claiming it's because "development is expensive" and "Tekken Lounge servers cost a lot of money" is a blatant lie.
Granted, the game IS 10+ years old now, but I feel it should still be said. Why is it that other, more mainstream fighting games have YET to reach Killer Instinct's standard. That game is F2P and had better monetization during its peak than the modern selection. We've reached an acceptable online standard, but it cost us fair and convenient monetization.
Idk why companies decide to make it difficult to spend money on their product. Like there's either some Machiavellian super secret dark pattern that some business analyst discovered that said "yes actually if you make it 750 points instead of $5 you will make 2% more money," or no one learned from the Microsoft Points days. Also, how is it not illegal to make these Capcom fun bucks not expire?
They do it because it works. :/ A lot of people will just buy the points and accept getting ripped off so the company has no incentive to stop. With all the uproar about Street Fighter 6's costume 3 DLC, I bet you'll still see people using the costumes. People buy it and seem content with being forced to overspend so it's a practice that's here to stay.
>Like there's either some Machiavellian super secret dark pattern that some business analyst discovered that said "yes actually if you make it 750 points instead of $5 you will make 2% more money," that's literally it tho. They know everyone hates it. but the numbers are all they care about.
It's the first one, genuinely. The company decides on the package they want you to buy and design their store to make it the "best" choice by making every other option notably worse. They want you to pay $X for Y stuff and deliberately funnel you into making that choice because that's the one they've calculated to be most profitable. Also, by abstracting the cost into funbucks, it's harder for you to really feel how much you're spending, which makes it easier to spend more than you planned. The further away you get from physically handing over money, the easier it is to get you to spend. It's all psychological manipulation.
Im not really that mad about the battle pass (compared to some people.) it's really shitty, anti-consumer behaviour, but ultimately i can just ignore it. The replay takeover shit is egregious though and just inexcusable imo. Ive seen comments like "eddy's easy to deal with as a good player, he only gives scrubs problems." Well, hello, i am scrub. I just wanna be able to see what parts of the 'infinite blockstring' i can interrupt/sidestep etc. Now I can't learn the matchup efficiently, just because i didn't buy a character i dont want to play as. i should be able to. i dont think thats too much to ask for bamco. Would it really hurt their bottom line to allow it?
Well, of course it would hurt their bottom line if they allowed it. They don't care why you buy the character, just that you do. So if they can create more reasons to buy the character beyond wanting to actually use them, they'll get more sales.
I didn't pay for frame data through years of T7 out of spite, and sadly it seems we will be relying on youtube guides once again. The fact that i cant even see my own counterplay in replays though, if they dont change that in future updates im keeping my review negative.
Harada and Bamco intentionally deceived their playerbase over their monetization plans. They took it away from consumers to make an informed decision. I dont like being tricked into supporting such horrendously monetized products.
So did Street Fighter. They snuck in the battle pass only for launch version, and told people who received review copies that they were banned from talking about the battle pass or monetization.
This practice, along with the fake currency that you have to buy, should straight up be illegal. If some representative made a genuine case at Brussels, there's a decent chance this practice would 100% get criminalized in the EU. And there's no way Bamco/Capcom will keep doing it when their games get banned in the second biggest consumer market in the world.
Not surprising. Guy blatantly said that T7 was on "special rollback netcode" when it wasnt. Archaically released T7 as an arcade first title then didnt give us a console version until 2 years later. Also made people have to pay just to get frame data and argued against the positives of having it available in the game. People thing Harada is some messiah but he's a big of a scum bag as other high role devs.
@@dickthebirthdayboy2132 i agree that this way of negatively changing the business model so shortly after launch and without transparency at launch should be illegal.
honestly the big thing that bugs me about all these battle passes is permenance. it sucks that these costumes and such arent permenantly available, if they make something cool and then it turns out I cant get it normally anymore, that just sucks
It’s insanely depressing that a fighting game based of a LITERAL GACHA GAME has better progression for colors and weapon skins than the big 3 fighting games on the market
The thing that I hate most is that modern fighters are doing ALL of the bad stuff at once. Overpriced microtransactions (that aren't exactly micro anymore), season passes for characters, premium currency AND battle passes. Like, I could maybe tolerate one or two of these in a FULL PRICED game, but doing ALL Of these at once when the base game is $60-70 bucks is way too transparently greedy. Fortnite led the charge on this with skins now costing as much as full games in some cases and you cannot TELL me that some of these avatar costumes in SF6 took more time and money to make than a whole character. Really hope they can change course on this....not looking forward to having this conversation again when Multiversus is back out alongside 2XKO later.
There's another guy who commented this and he's right, fighting games were always made on these models and money making tactics, even back when they designed the games at arcades to eat coins to even play the things.
As far as I can tell, Guilty Gear Strive and King of Fighters 15 are not doing anything beyond season passes. This isn't modern, but Skullgirls is the same way.
The thing is granblue allows you to buy Costumes and DLC characters with the coins, the battle pass also adds music form the mobile game. I think it has way more value than the others for that reason
Listening to this while working out was the worst decision I've ever made, Riddler Sajam and SaJMcrofts cracked me up so bad I fell off the pull up bar twice. Great video keep it up
2XKO monetization is gonna suck so bad if valorant is any indicator. Fuckass premium currency, 20 dollars for a basic ass skin for a shitty pistol in a rotating shop, battle pass fomo, no bundle to unlock all the agents, and they’ve recently made the stuff you can actually unlock by playing the game infinitely more annoying to do because instead if it unlocking naturally as you play you have to specifically go in and spend ur free points or else you might hit the super low cap on it
@@PSIclops_ the thing that gets under my skin is this fake ass shit coin currency that they force you to purchase in order to buy DLC characters. I don't mind DLC but let me buy that shit directly with my money.
And I'm looking at LoR, being as free as it is - losing them money. It's crazy but they said, new pets and arenas were not economically feasible, and even skins for champions were not making money. They are even stopping updates to pvp portion of the game altogether. Closing Riot Forge also has been a big disappointment for me. Wild Rift has been getting stingier with free currency update after update. Even bloody poro coins from weekly boxes are now not guaranteed, and a low chance pull. Keys for boxes, like the main game does - in WR are only bought with real money currency. Wild Rift even stopped doing their esport league... And I forgot that LoL now has 200$ recolor skins behind lootbox guaranteed unlock. Because that particular Jhin skin was not for the average player, and is specifically for whales to feel special. What I want to say is - if people think "former Project L" will be the new greatest F2P fighter. They weren't keeping up with the news.
@@TheOblomoff all i HAVE to say, Is that your statement has Been nothing but a pile of septical waste comming right out of your mouth Aren't you that funny ahh socialist that follows this weird little head of all left Wing ideals that goes by Karl Marx Vladimír Lenin Joseph Stalin etc.? Didn't they commited litteral genocide for what cringe they Believe? So much for being morally flawless beings!
Granblue ironically the lesser evil here despite vanilla originally being an absurdly expensive game, that’s where we’re at right now. Sleeping on the music in the granblue passes btw
I think one of the problems with putting a battle pass in your game is how much stuff you have to make super quickly to make it worth buying. Epic Games can hardly keep up with it, and they invented the model in the first place! Do the character design and 3D modeling teams for SF6 and TK8 really have the manpower and infrastructure to maintain such a high quantity (let alone quality) output every 2-3 months?
Actually 🤓 valve probably was the first one with dota 2 but epic did make it go crazy with fortnite and def popularised it. I do agree with your point that it might be really hard for them to actually do such a system with good quality.
Yeah that's another thing, if your monetization relies on battlepass spam then that has to take priority over actual content, because that's where the money is. Even the low quality filler still takes some time to make, and that's less time to work on the actually important stuff.
Thank you for continuing to speak out on this topic. It needs to be addressed and changed by these devs and publishers. There's a monetary value to customer goodwill, it's just more long-term than these companies want.
the not being able to purchase exact amount is EXTREMELY disgusting in all these games. I was looking at SF6 cuz I wanted to buy AKI. $12 is what you need to spend to unlock a single character because of that currency bullshit. If you were to buy 3/4 of the season 1 characters, that is near as much as buying the season pass FOR ALL FOUR CHARACTERS. This basically forces you to buy the season pass, even if you don't want to buy all the characters because its the better deal. Now you're left with spending more money than you initially wanted to and you have characters that are gonna sit there because you didn't want them or plan on playing them. This shit is gross, fighting game microtransactions are the absolute worst kind in gaming right now and I don't think it's close. The sad part about Capcom is they charged $10 for the Ada DLC in RE4 which gave you multiple characters for Mercenaries mode AND gave you the Ada story which was 4+ hours of gameplay. They went from being reasonable to absolute scumbag mode in an instant. Asian devs have historically had these ridiculous archaic ideologies (Nintendo with the copyright crap, now Namco banning modders) except when it comes to microtransactions, they're very much with modern gaming with all these very disgusting monetization business models. This should be a golden age for fighting games, instead the devs/publishers have absolutely prevented that at every chance they've gotten.
As much as I agree the coin pricing is scummy af it's the same in pretty much every game that has that coin model in there because that's what it's designed to do. Even something with a lot of good faith like Hunt Showdown has that in the way of microtransactions. You're right but it's not just a fighting game problem that's just an industry problem.
@@aledantih6524 the difference is that a lot of those games are FREE TO PLAY! The fact we get all this scummy bullshit on top of having to spend 60-70 USD is ridiculous.
It also seems like the issues were compounded with the balance patch seemingly breaking stage hazards, although that's just from what I've seen i'm not super knowledgeable in the game yet
Fighting games need to pick a lane. You can either be $59.99 (or now $69.99) game, and just have everything be unlockable; or you can be a free-to-play game and sell people characters and costumes piecemeal. You don’t get to do both, and you especially don’t get to do both that these stupid prices. Honestly, the model they’ve gone with makes absolutely no sense at all. If the idea is to make you money selling DLC, you’re going to make more with a F2P model simply by virtue of the F2P model giving you more access to more players. When Capcom last announced Street Fighter 6 sales they were over 3 million. Tekken 8 did 2 million in a month. That’s the pool of people Capcom and Bandai Namco have to sell stuff to. The percentage of people that actually spend a lot of money, that are buying everything, or damn near everything is probably pretty low. Then you have something like that free-to-play MultiVersus platform fighter that’s coming back this month, that game had 20 million players in its first month; that’s a lot more people to sell costumes and whatever to. It seems like the way Capcom and Bandai Namco want to do things they should be selling things way cheaper, and trying to get the most people possible to give them money. It’s kind baffling companies that had highly successful arcade business don’t get this. Street Fighter 2 made billions of dollars at the arcade by getting a whole lot of people to pump .25¢ into arcade cabinets. They should be taking a similar model with characters, costumes, and other little things in the game if charging for costumes is the way they’re going to go.
Thank you for talking about this. We as a community need to pushback against this lazy monetization in fully priced games. It astounds me that people defend their recent practices including big fgc content creators
100% with you but sadly there are a lot of boot licking content creators in the FGC. My entire timeline on twitter was full of people glazing Bamco and downplaying the Tekken store announcement. Now look at where we're at.
The whole tekken 8 and SF6 situation is just so wack to me, as someone who mostly still plays BBCF (an older game), MBTL, and UNI2. All of those games were BELOW the 'base price' of most games (below $70), offer tons of customization for free, and were made by a much smaller company, in the case of UNI2 and TL specifically. UNI2 has like 40 colors per character and the ability to make your own custom colors. the idea of charging for colors is just insane, idk how capcom got away with that for SF5 and 6
I gave up SF6 not because of the gameplay, but because the Capcom pissed me off so badly with the monetization. Seriously, fuck Fighter Coins. I've played SF since '92, but fuck them.
"I would like to purchase a denomination of a made up currency that I cannot buy the correct amount of" is spot on yo, that sht feels horrible every time 😭
Man if devs wanna selll me shit that's fine and if I'm really enjoying your game I'm fine with having more stuff sold to me but please for the love of god stop splitting everything up into battle passes and premium currency mtx. Just put the costume in the shop with a 4$ price tag or whatever and let me just pay for that. All the extra bs hoops to jump through results in no purchases, at least for me, where a simplification would sell more product
The best thing about the sf6 passes are the music. Thing is, so many other fighting games just give you the full "jukebox" of old(er) games, even if some are a little more limited than others, at the start. Maybe it is the GG route where you have to gacha, or "buy" them with in-game stuff, but the point is they are just in there like swimwear. So in saying that I could never bring myself to actually buy an sf6 pass even if I'd get "refunded". Even just selling some music packs would go over a lot better than getting 2-4? songs per premium pass.
@@squiddyte4552 I'm not actually sure because I only have the free ones I don't care about, so I never looked into using them. If that is true then it is even worse than I thought lol.
And so far there have been zero rereleases, if you missed a song you like then tough luck buddy. I generally do not mind SF6's monetization but the music, the C1 colors, and the COINS are easily the worst parts that absolutely deserve criticism. Also SF6 should get replay takeover. Then I wouldn't even mind not using DLC in training mode, as long as I have somewhere I can practice against what's beating me.
I think the costume 3's in SF look great. There are 4-5 of the costumes I really wanted to buy. But since they use inngame currency with bundles that don't give enough for a costume I've avoided buying them so far.
I suspect part of the reason people are _so_ mad and _so_ loud about something that's become pretty standard in the games industry, is that it wasn't the standard for FGs _yet._ There's a chance for pushing back on it, even if it is only in a pretty isolated genre.
Wrong. The reason people are mad is because the mtx came way after the release. Every time this happens people are way more pissed off than usual, because we all know they probably didn't put the MTX on release just to avoid bad press/reception.
It's really frustrating to see Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 do these practices, because it tarnishes what are otherwise really fun games. This makes French Bread look like a legend, with their free dlc updates in Type Lumina, and the crazy amount of color pallettes in both TL and Under Night
The thing that pissed me off Is I can't buy Eddy with the currency I earn from the battle pass. Eddie is 10 dollars, and if you bought in game currency already you have to spend a separate 10 dollars because in game currency can't be used to buy Eddy.
Man istg, why can Super Smash Brother Ultimate have 80 characters with 8 colors per character that are basically full on costumes a well made story mode and a plethora of good alternative ways to play the game, while SF6 or Tekken 8 can't even give each of their characters more than 2 free skins even though they have half the god damn roster size at best.
While the story mode portion of this comment is gonna get shit on,(it was basically a revamped event mode) Smash still generally has the best DLC practices when it comes to bang for your buck. It had a huge starting roster, each dlc character was reasonably priced and came with a stage and a wide array of songs, and sometimes they added stuff in just cause. Smash could have easily charged for more unique costumes and they never did. It was a game that marched to the best of its own drum, mostly for the better.
New character comes out and you buy it in a bundle for like 9.99 for a character, all their colours/alts, a stage and the music. OUTSTANDING value for some of the hardest working devs getting other peoples characters online.
As long as I can't buy your product directly with my real money, you don't get my money. I will never bend on that - sell me a good product at a fair price and I'm happy to pay you, but manipulative bullshit trying to force me to pay extra is an immediate hard pass. I was going to buy Rashid in SF6 until it turned out I couldn't do that, I could only buy "Fighter Coins," and only more than I needed to get Rashid. And Tekken pulling the same crap has solidified my decision to not even pick up Tekken 8 to give it a shot after not being a fan of 7. I only pray that ArcSys doesn't see the big names adopting this f2p "premium currency" BS as an excuse to do the same in their future games. They're the only ones still doing this right at this point*; if they go down this path, I will truly despair for the genre. *Aside from putting a Battle Pass in Granblue, but that's a licensed game based on a f2p game, that may be Cygames' call instead of theirs. I'm hoping it is, anyway.
you know what the insane thing is, I can boot up granblue fantasy versus rising, complete the battle pass, get weapon skins and character colours, a whole ass outfit at the end, profile customization and decorations that you can show in the loading screen, titles and stuff, then when ive cleared the battle pass, I click purchase, it takes me to steam, I buy it for w/e amount of real world dollarydoos and then I get everything on the paid level. Why is that so fucking hard to copy?
Quick league pricing rundown for the people who are looking forward to 2xko but dont play league: individual characters cost 3 to 9 dollars but you can earn them with free currency. Most skins cost about 12 bucks. There are ways to get skins for free. But there are expensive skins(35$) and newly installed loot box type things with hyper premium skins thatll run you ~200$. There are bundles that will give you characters and costumes - the current 4 character 4 skin bundle is 66$. The premium currency is in uneven denominations. Tft's content is entirely loot boxes with rotating premium thing and 60 roll until you get the premium thing guaranteed. 60 rolls is ~200 dollars.
I remember getting into SFV because Sakura was announced and I bought her separately for something around 10 or 15 BRL. Just paid with my steam wallet, no need for in-game currency. Then SF6 releases and if I wanna buy a single dlc character I either get the full season pass or pay 51 BRL in in-game currencies to be able to buy a character and maybe a color. I can't even get a costume with that. I honestly lost my gas with the game when the DLC started coming out because of that.
Thank you for speaking out on this issue. Hopefully Harada's dumb brain finally realizes that hes killing the franchise. First it was no T7 console edition for years, then him gaslighting people into thinking T7 had rollback netcode and was proven wrong. Then having people have to pay for frame data and him fighting against the need for it in the game. Guy is a hack and needs to be removed from bamco. T8 had such good will going in and he's slowly destroying it in the matter of a couple of weeks.
Honestly not really surprised that Granblue's battlepass is the least bad of the 3, since Cygames is known for being one of the most generous mobile game companies which makes it feel worth it to buy the premium stuff from them, also cuz they have experience with making good battlepasses like Shadowverse's
4:16 I hope 2XKO doesn't follow in the footsteps of Legends of Runeterra. LoR's monetization was a disaster that forced the team to focus on PVE content instead of PVP because its monetization was too generous. Also, Brawlhalla does the free-to-play stuff right. You can unlock colors, but there's around a half dozen colors you have by default on each character. Last I checked there's no replay takeover, but you can go into training mode and try out every character in every skin they have completely for free. Finally, there's a bundle that gives you every character in the game past, present, AND future. I can't tell you whether the skins themselves are good deals, but there's a lot of skins since every character has at least 2 and there's over 60 characters at this point. It has a lot of other problems, but it does the free-to-play stuff right, and I expect 2XKO will take a lot of lessons from it.
When I got into fighting games a few years ago, they seemed like a safe haven from this kind of shady live service shit. I could buy the game and its DLC characters, and that felt fair. Some games sold costumes, and that wasn't great but at least it was straightforward. Now the new Street Fighter and Tekken games have caught up to the rest of the industry. They're the same nonsense and as great as the games look I cannot buy them, cannot support them. So where do I go now?
I know the feeling. I've always been fine with buying DLC characters in fighting games, because the individual prices were reasonable, and I could just skip any that didn't interest me, which was usually half or more of any given "season." Now that the big names are pulling this crap and that basic transaction - offer me a product I want at a price I'm willing to pay - is being broken in multiple ways, I fear I may be stuck with the vanilla versions of future fighting games as the only thing I'm willing to buy. Or worse, that the genre really will move broadly to the f2p model after 2XKO (still a bad name), and that'll prompt me to stop touching new fighting games altogether, despite how much I love the genre. :(
@@Zevox87 I really worry about future fighting games being f2p. It's a horrible model. F2p games are sometimes okay for the first year, but they inevitably must go downhill because of the financial incentives/pressures pointing toward time-limited grind-heavy low-quality content spam. Anything to keep the player hooked into the client. And then when even the trickle of cheap mtx doesn't keep payers in the client, the lights go off and the servers shut down, gg.
The tekken pass doesn't even let you buy it if you get to level 41 on the free track. So you cant even make the purchase once you know you'll be refunded
Fortnite has ruined gaming so much solely because it's monitization practices made business men salivate at the mouth to try and get the same strategy, when everyone is doing it after the games that can get away with it are set in stone. It's basically the gold rush for greedy business men in the video game industry
I don't think there is an elegant way to introduce battle passes to fighting games, especially in full priced releases which already demand a big investment of your money. The passes either have irrelevant fluff like stickers, music you'll never listen to etc. or they have costumes and colours, maybe a stage, and at that point it would be unfair to the consumer to time gate actual content and potentially leave them with a forever incomplete game.
The worst part is that I really want to give them my money. I bought so many SFV costumes even for characters I don't even play just cuz they are cool af. But in these new games they are doing their best to make as hard as possible for you to buy the stuff you wanna buy, just stupid.
I'm relatively new to the fgc and I have one question for all of you older fg fans. Why do we let devs do the business practices they do right now ? My introduction game was GGST, and I was shocked that you HAD TO pay for every single new character. Take other non-fighting games : in Apex, the newly released chracters become free right away. Grinding for the currency to get them is kind of annoying, but it helps gain engagement from your player. Even if the devs still need the new character money, they could just have it be like new operators in Rainbow Six Siege where you can only aquire the charcter without spending money 2-3 weeks after release and bank on the player wanting to play it at release. The hype for new characters drop after a week anyways, and I could bet devs make 90% of the new realease money on the first week. Rainbow Six Siege base game is 20$ (I speak in CA$ btw), Apex is free, Overwatch is free and you can still get new characters throught challenges, yet in games like GGST (50$), Street Fighter 6 (80$, 55$ minimum on sale) and TEKKEN 8 (90 FUCKING BUCKS) you still gotta pay for everyhing. The fgc gets fucked in the ass rough all the time and I think devs know that we're gonna take it up and swallow anyways.
Speaking of the replay takeover being inaccessible. I've always hated how Strive is a pay-to-win game because you literally can't lab against characters without paying to unlock them. You can't even have training mode. If you want to get better at the game, you either have to buy every season pass or pirate the game. Not great options.
Most monetization would be okay if a fighting game on launch (when it's usually around 70% finished) wouldn't be 100 bucks now. Let me buy your game + first season Pass for 60 dollaridoos and we're good.
I think that also the fact that the customization system is the more barebones version for tekken. The battle pass feels bad not because it's extra stuff, it's because most of it feels like stuff that should have been the game in the first place. Even something like the female GI, yes it's on the free part of the battle pass but it just should have been in the game since the start. Feels like they're just recycling stuff from tekken 7 and making us pay for it. If there was better customization from the start and then there was really cool stuff in the battle pass, I probably wouldn't mind nearly as much. Also what sucks about adding the old costumes that you have to pay for, is that they are no longer presets in the game, so you cannot pick them in tournament. A big thing in 7 was that a lot of us had favourite presets for tournament and we'd only pick them in tournament. Or I would just no longer use customization because I prefer to use tournament legal stuff because but it didn't feel bad because you still had around 10ish presets to choose from.
11:55 Probably also laughing because they fumbled the ftp model 3 separate times (and probably more considering some region locked Japanese phone games) Had their chance with 2 mobile games and 1 actual ftp Tekken game. They got their money and delisted them almost immediately too.
You actually can't unlock all the levels in the street fighter battle pass without buying it anymore. It was an unannounced change a few months ago and as you can see they were really sneaky about it cus nobody seems to know about it.
These FOMO tactics are actually keeping me from buying all three of these games at the moment. It really sucks because the games themselves are good fun. Granblue in particular. It's not that I even want the content. The idea that there's stuff the game just locks away because I wasn't there at the right time sickens me. Especially when it starts as a fully priced game in the first place.
The dumbest decision of sf6 is not having a bundle for costume 3. I gave them 6 euros bc i wanted one skin, but if they bundled all of it foe thirty, i would have gotten it. So they missed out on 24 euros on my end. Surely, I am not the only one.
Ono had that right in SFqv, and that was it. The monetization model in SFV was sort of consumer friendly and it sucks we have to take 10 steps back when we have more content in SF6.
people memed on doa6 costumes bc they saw the bundle prices but individually they were like 1.99, i think it's really warped how this stuff is created and perceived
Say what you will about MK1's Invasions, at least you don't have to buy into them and they're relatively easy to complete (kinda wish armor wasn't so strong. Elder gods forbid you try to punish a whiffed or unsafe move lest you want to be taken to Memphis. Anyway, I'm losing track). And from what I could tell, if you skip a season for whatever reason, the outfits and accessories are moved to the shrine, which is exponentially better than in MK11's, even if Koins are harder to get if you don't play Ranked matches.
It’s crazy somehow the monetization from SF6 managed to be worse than 5. Despite how for a while you couldn’t realistically earn enough of the fighter coins to buy costumes outright eventually at least the bundles happened AND championship edition as a release/update by itself was worth its cost given all that you got in that singular purchase. In Chun skins alone you made your money back. The wildest part is we will buy the stuff. Just don’t be shady or convoluted about it
I've said for years it will only get worse after paid DLC characters and it did, I also think they will continue to push the envelope even further for years to come making monetization worse and worse especially with all the people defending these companies doing this crap. I've stopped playing most fighting games because of it after over 16 years of playing them; I just don't have the time or money to learn about these systems and buy into them i'd rather do other things. I hope the people defending these practices are happy with what they got and won't mind the bad deals they get in the future as well.
Folks, you might be wondering what round it is. Well I'm here to tell you, it's round 1! And when will it start, you ask? Right now!
10/10 would buy
Folksss!!
This feels like a bojack horseman bit and I love it
Rare Round start will just be "Folks, we are here to talk about why X is op"
Obscuring price through proprietary currency should be illegal.
I agree. Imagine going to restaurant, ordering a burger that costs 10 burger tickets, then when you get the check they tell you that you can only buy burger tickets in increments of 4 tickets at $4 per. You're forced to buy 12 tickets, spending $12, leaving you with 2 tickets you cannot spend on anything because it's not enough.
There's a reason why IRL establishments aren't like this. This most definitely would be illegal.
@@WutTheDeuceGaming Starbucks already does this with their app if you want stars. You can only load up a Starbucks Gift Card, and if you do that, I believe the absolute minimum is $5 increments.
@@WutTheDeuceGaming Actually, I've recently been in a bar in Belgium that operated on tickets lol, and something similar to what You mentioned happened there lol, they had "beer tickets" and they forced You to purchase at least two beers' worth of tickets to purchase something which was kinda wild, granted, it was a bar that only served during shows and concerts, but it still felt weird.
Fortnite is quaking at the thought
To me this is the worst part of all of it. The Disney Dollar shit. Just let me pay you for the one thing I want.
The replay feature is hands down the best feature of Tekken 8. Not letting you utilize that at all because your opponent paid for a character you didn't is bonkers. I get why they would disallow people from playing the dlc in training mode for free, but not being able to access your side of the replay.... C'mon guys. I hope they change that.
i actually DONT get why they refuse to let you play dlc characters in replay/training. if anything, playing characters typically gives you appreciation for them and as far as DLC goes it would just serve as a free sample that you cant really use until you pay for it.
@@Acusumano25and it directly could make people more inclined to pay who wouldn't before. But most people will buy them to try them out anyway so I guess the strategy works
What the hell
Idk bout that dlc character in training part i can't tell you how many dlc characters I've bought and the amount that I actually play can be counted on one hand I wish we could try the character in practice to see if your feeling them or not
yea this sucks, but when will we be able to choose the character in practice so we can lab them and not the rando from online?
7:39 That was a scaringly on point jmcrofts impression LOL
I will be honest, I would pay money for that.
jmcrofts is white, basically Sajam.
Sajam is just jmcrofts with the hair DLC
“FOLKS…”
'Full Price Game' is the part people aren't getting, I think. Battlepasses are dope in FREE TO PLAY games, like Fortnite, Apex, etc. Tekken costs 70 fucking dollars. That battlepass should be free, and permanent. No 'premium tier', no 'get it now because in three months its gone and onto the next battlepass!', no 'use premium currency to unlock', none of that is acceptable in a game that is over 40 dollars, let alone almost double that.
The worst part is, this makes money with the casuals, so it's just going to get worse. Not trying to doom about it, that's just how it is. Unless people take hardline stances against the fundamental ideas we get no where. No compromise, if they made it 6 bucks instead of 600 coins it still sucks ass, don't let them have 1 or 2 wins when they make it slightly less terrible. These suck at a fundamental level. DONT BUY THIS SHIT AND IT WILL GO AWAY! VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS!!! Don't let greedy executives break the fun nature of the games, make sure that this feedback is given with the context of 'the game is good but dont give us stuff like this'.
Deep Rock Galactic, Halo Infinite and Helldivers 2 is the go to example for how to make a battlepass.
Bros mad that theres OPTIONAL content to spend money on, i get that they are old cosmetics and blah blah blah, but nobody is holding a gun to your head and telling you to buy it. I aint buying the battlepass but i did buy the t4 jin outfit.
@jaxonmayhall5719 Whole thing is true, but keep in mind this is not a "casual" thing. Plenty of people in the FGC Paid for the overpriced SF6 outfit. They were out there in ranked.
And inversely many casuals did not buy anything, because for someone not deeply invested in the game, it's not like having the integral package is that important as long and they won't be willing to spend a lot on something they don't see as particularly important.
This is a issue of those who spend vs those who don't not another casual vs hardcore.
@@leithaziz2716 Brother, I own DRG and I hate the battlepass there with a passion. They could've spend the resources making more beer.
and even then what every other game didn't learn from fortnite is you can have their battle pass for free if you played long enough, the free pass gives you the currency to do it
Tekken selling a default engine object (the ball) as a premium dlc item might be one of the craziest things I've seen in awhile.
Venom from Guilty Gear confirmed as guest character
Its really embarrassing.
im spoiled to be playing under night where you can create 5 custom colors for each character on top of having like 30 premade ones. grateful for fighting game devs that prioritize the player experience over this extra cash, and i'm disappointed to see this trend worsen.
Not to mention the 3 DLC characters were completely free if you bought the game in the first few months
Common Uni W
Tekken lets you recolor every individual part of any costume to any color and shade of the rainbow. This also includes hair color. The costume variety isn't too great, but there's a lot of color customization.
@@ComptonFalconThe game also launched at $50 rather than $70 as well.
The thing about the street fighter battle pass specifically is that for most of us, it's content we never see or look at. I know there's some people who like being in the battle hub and seeing the avatar but most of us are in fighting ground trying to get into ranked or casual matches and none of that content effects anybody on the roster. So realistically even though there's been a ton of stuff added to SF6, it feels like the only thing we've gotten is outfit 3 and the Ed stage alongside Ed.
I wanna tack onto this, as you're not wrong, but we also get World Tour content updates as well. I know it's not a popular mode (You should play it though, it's *fun*) but I feel that at LEAST with SF6's DLC, there's a bit more breadth to it. If/When they expand World Tour to continue the story, I think it'll just add more value.
You haven't even played a single one of the arcade games? For someone whose a big fan of old Capcom games, the arcade games have been a bit insane. Some games that have never been ported or hard to access port are just randomly in sf6.
@@2Eliishere All of the arcade games in SF6 are available either in the recent Fighting Collections or Capcom Arcade Stadium compilations. Although the emulation in SF6 is a bit better for some games
The SF6 fighter passes are useless but that's probably for the better because the passes are dirt cheap as far as BPs go and it's the first pass I've seen in any game that give you back MORE coins than it costs. I feel like if SF6 ever picks up in it's other content production those Battle Passes would be fine, 5 bucks for some dumb avatar stuff but you could use the coins to get stuff.
@@aledantih6524I actually don’t mind the passes.
If you play ranked or casual.
You buy one pass and you can unlock a second one by just playing. Even if you’re not into world hub, you still get some small customization and music.
I don’t see the big deal. 5 dollars for essentially a lot of tiny content.
As much as people moan about the current monetization, it's not like we ever had it good in the past either, lol. First, we had bullshit input-reading CPUs in the arcades to suck coins out of you, then we had the tons of rereleases that were basically balance updates sold practically at full-price, and now this. We've never had it good. Man, we really never had it good, huh.
Doomer vibes
Yea the FGC is literally the OG pay to play and pay to win crowd lol, fighting games are the one genre I've spent most money on. I skipped lunch to spend allowance at the arcades back when I was still in school.
In fact it's exactly because fighting games are now played more at home than at arcades that the devs have to somehow monetise homes to make money.
this is worse man. These games now are like if you went to the arcade, threw some quarters in and after a while of playing they charged you to stay on the machine even if you hadn't lost or beaten the game. Or, if you went to the character select screen and they had locked characters only available if you throw more quarters in.
That's a good point. A lot of fighting game publishers are still pining for the arcade days where you got to charge players every single time they stepped up to play. $0.25 a pop is what, $1.85 today? You know they're salty that they can't get away with that anymore.
@@WutTheDeuceGaming Nah I literally don't buy skins, there's nothing for me to spend, why is there a need to spend anything?
Even a new character for a few bucks, that's nothing compared to a few bucks per visit to the arcade, which I did daily, meaning I spend hundreds to maybe even thousands each year on a single game in the arcade.
Honestly, I booted up SF6 the other day saying to myself "I know this is highway robbery, but I really want Spring Clean Ryu and Fro Kimberly" and then I didn't buy them because the interface was so bad I couldn't even find the menu option to buy enough coins for both of them.
What makes the shop and battle pass in Tekken 8 even worse than the other fighting game mtx is the fact they waited 2 months until everyone bought the game to shove these things in without telling anyone. That's the lowest of the low of being scummy.
Im fine with dlc characters being like 5 or 6 bucks but 8 bucks with just 1 character and nothing else is crazy.💀
Say what you will about SFV, at least the DLC characters came with a buncha costumes.
@@ArmageddonD11 At least you can get all DLC characters for free with trials.
I thought there would be at least a character ending for Eddy 🫠 not even that smh
Only half true. I think you can get all the way up to season 2 or 3 completely free which is still amazing.
Especially since some characters are just recycled from the previous game.
The key frustrations for me, both of which Sajam mentions are: 1) incorporating F2P monetization into full-price games and 2) locking colors behind paywalls/grind. Until SFV, Street Fighter always had multiple colors available for each character by default, so this is a very obvious case of them taking away something we had (and requiring $ or a grind to get it). Now, I do realize that modern fighting games include TONS of content we never had back in the day, primarily ever-more robust story modes. SF6 has a long-ass story mode, Tekken 8 has two shorter story modes. I suppose if I had to choose having multiple character colors available by default, or having in-depth story modes I would pick the latter, but why not both?
@@aledantih6524 Definitely true, though on the subject of alternate colors specifically, I don’t think increased dev time is the issue.
@@aledantih6524
Palette swaps have always been and still are literally just moving hue and saturation sliders around, my guy. They’re not part of that “shit this costs way more, how do I make it profitable?” dynamic. You’d have more of a point arguing against stylized UI than against palette swaps when it comes to saving money.
Harada’s point doesn’t really apply in this context and the fact that anyone puts stock into anything he says is hilarious considering the depths of bullheaded stupidity he’s demonstrated in such occasions as repeatedly defending T7’s dogshit netcode or trying to justify the frame data paywall with tier lists.
It's hilarious to me how bad the rewards are for the first ever Tekken battlepass. Ain't nobody experiencing FOMO for Tekken 7 jackets and a white ball.
I dunno ball is pretty tempting 😅
I think people are gonna grind for the ball just for the memes.
you'd be surprised
It's fucking disgusting the things Harada thinks are okay to do to his full priced game that has intentionally worse customization than the game before it.
No game you paid money for should have a battle pass. Costumes should come bundled with the annual dlc character pass (or at least be like $1) and they aren't even new costumes, they're ones that were in previous games. What the actual fuck Harada!?
i would actually get kinda hype if you got a discount on all costumes if you buy the annual/season pass. if costumes went from like $6 to $2 i'd feel a lot more inclined to shill out 10 bucks for 5-ish costumes
@@MelloGrunty Other games literally give out skins with season passes. Hell NRS added an infuriating rank grind for skins that I have a bunch of legitimate problems with but at least it was free with the game.
Charging for skins is nothing but cheap tacky bullshit from "free" to play games, that shouldn't be normalized in games we paid for up front.
One day fighting games will be free to download but they will make us buy virtual quarters to fight people online
I've been saying this for YEARS. I was looking to try getting into fighting games for over a decade, and every time I tried to get my friends to get one with me... the upfront cost was stupid. Full price game, day 1 dlc with extra characters, inability to even test (as/against) characters you don't own. The entire monetization has basically assumed that no new players are playing fighting games, but the existing fgc is a captive audience that will just buy whatever the fuck gets thrown at them. The biggest problem is they DO buy all that dumb shit. If every streamer started to boycott any fighting game that launched with locked characters or dlc pack, that system would be gone in a flash.
Killer Instinct (the 2013 reboot) has your back. They still have a free rotating character every week, and you can buy the game a la carte to only get what you want. KI has been F2P since day 1. I have hopes that, since MS was able to get Iron Galaxy back last year after Rumbleverse was canned by Epic, we may one day get a sequel, as Phil Spenser has acknowledged the demand for it, but that MS didn't have inhouse staff who knew creating fighting games well enough.
@@mindwarp42 unfortunately they'll need some new-game-hype to get them invested I think. I went out and got sf6 on my own but only played 100hours or so of ranked, and fell away after hitting diamond. I'm holding out a little hope that Project L will grab them as they all played LoL back in the day, and it's fully f2p, so no excuses! Also hoping it gives capcom etc a kick up the ass monetization wise
vote w/ ur wallet is a flawed argument i think, because these are _creative_ products and experiences that come with some requisite uniqueness that's not really replaceable.
You can't shop around for "the version of street fighter without predatory monetization" because if you want to play Street Fighter, you want to play _Street Fighter_ not something else.
This greatly increases the degree of shit ppl will put up with cuz they kinda have to?
imo monetization in games just needs to be like 5x more regulated than it currently is. I don't think you can really organize a critical mass of people to _give up on their favorite game franchises_ to make a moral stand on this. sorry to say. This is just life under capitalism. We'll be subjected to the worst treatment we can collectively tolerate and they'll make sure thru marketing or other deceptive practices that we _do_ tolerate it. Corporations that want profit don't care if we love their product or merely put up with it.
Fighting games that respect their playerbase exist. Undernight and Melty have been great examples. There's indie fighters that occassionally release at a very good quality like Pocket Bravery.
DNF Duel was a bit of a weak release, but it's not a giant money sink.
SNK has yet to be cringe about their fighting games in terms of money.
There are options to avoid these bad practices and they're all games that are relatively new. We got fighting games releasing soon that will also avoid these bad practices.
I hate that I couldn't even get excited about eddy without him being associated with the immediate deflation of happiness that was the introduction of the battle pass
I wanna buy costumes. Street Fighter, why are you putting ALL of your resources into avatars? There's cool shit that should've been part of customizing the characters we actually play, but instead they make a space suit for the guy you walk around with in the Battle Hub and it's $20 because I guess SOMEONE is buying that shit. Meanwhile, it's a year later and we only have one set of outfits that are expensive, not available to just buy, and then the DLC characters don't even get them until they're all out. We were feasting with SFV and now we're actually starving for costumes. Even the battle pass only gives avatar stuff. It's insane how much a nosedive monetization took.
Also look at Monster Hunter for another Crapcom example: World has a lot but you can basically ignore most things because there's so many things in the game and the only real noticable stuff is like stickers. Now go to Rise and there's literally trailers showing off paid DLC: VA's, layered weapons and armor(notably Lost Code), etc. I'm really looking forward to Wilds as MH is pretty much my favorite game series but if the monetization is shit enough I probably just won't
season 1 of SF5 was like this too and tbh the one set of outfits they put out for 6 are already infinitely better than anything in 5 so I'm fine with them taking their time on those
It probably takes about 3 minutes to make an avatar costume. Like just slap an image on an existing shirt that doesn't have cloth physics isn't really much of a task.
The game would be less tacky if they didn't but it's eating approximately zero resources.
I think Capcom thought too highly of their character creator. I was suspicious after the first trailer, and then got the game and... oh no, it's ugly as hell. The character customization in SF6 is the ugliest I've ever seen. It's just a meme and abomination mode for shits and giggles. It's mostly notable in the SpyxFamily trailer when you see that monster with a yor costume.... how are you even trying to sell that like this? they are blinded by greed I guess.
@@Spwookie the characters they make in the trailers are pretty ugly yeah but you can genuinely make good looking characters and complete monsters in that character creator. It's one of the best character creators I've seen.
Also worth noting that Granblue isn't a full price game, and nearly everything else that they release besides the premium tier of the battlepass can be obtained with the earnable in game currency. That means characters, any skins outside of the battlepass, etc. I'm honestly pretty shocked at how fairly Cygames is monetizing this game, and hey man it makes me happy to pay for it.
I will say the pricing for the base game is great and the deluxe edition is fine. But the fact that the deluxe character pass alone is 50 euros and the normal character pass is still 35 euros, is honestly singlehandedly stopping me from buying the game.
Because I dont want to immediately buy the character pass but if I dont the price to but it basically doubles.
@@theunarmedbrawler3546 Honestly, it's a pretty comparable price to other modern FGs character passes. The reason why the price is a little higher is probably because it has 6 characters, while GGST, SF6, and T8 all only have 4 characters per pass. I definitely wish they were cheaper (god I wish everything was cheaper), but this isn't really a Granblue problem, it's just kinda the way shit is right now.
Edit: Also if you want to play a FG with godlike monetization you should pick up a FB game, UNI2 and MBTL are both extremely reasonably priced and UNI2's character pass was literally free for the first couple months after the game released (now it's like 10 bucks). MBTL has just been releasing 'DLC' characters as free updates. GOD I wish I enjoyed FB games...
Also to be fair, while the DLC characters can be bought with in-game currency, they're so pricey you will be saving that up forever to do so. Even if you level up every character enough to get all the bonus rupees available, you'll be able to get one, and only one. And you get ruppees a lot slower once those run out. So in practice, good fucking luck getting those without buying them.
I think they're gentle because the game is a big sell for the Granblue gacha game, if you fall in love with the franchise here and then try the gacha and want your gbvs main that's when they getcha
@@minty2156 It's actually the opposite, CyGames wants to expand the Granblue IP because the browser game isn't going to be permanent but now with Relink and Versus it has a big identity outside of its roots
God I love having to pay $70 for a basegame, $30 for the first season of DLC characters, $10 for a battlepass, $4 for past skins, some of which are poorly made (T7 Brian still has the texture error on his fingers).
Bamco claiming it's because "development is expensive" and "Tekken Lounge servers cost a lot of money" is a blatant lie.
Granted, the game IS 10+ years old now, but I feel it should still be said.
Why is it that other, more mainstream fighting games have YET to reach Killer Instinct's standard. That game is F2P and had better monetization during its peak than the modern selection.
We've reached an acceptable online standard, but it cost us fair and convenient monetization.
lol, KI still has better net code than T8 (laughing so i don't cry)
The problem is, where is KI now
@@valos507 Still in a good state with better monetization than Namco and Capcom?
@@valos507trapped on the xbox where it's been banished for eternity
@@valos507 they just released a patch
Idk why companies decide to make it difficult to spend money on their product. Like there's either some Machiavellian super secret dark pattern that some business analyst discovered that said "yes actually if you make it 750 points instead of $5 you will make 2% more money," or no one learned from the Microsoft Points days.
Also, how is it not illegal to make these Capcom fun bucks not expire?
They do it because it works. :/ A lot of people will just buy the points and accept getting ripped off so the company has no incentive to stop. With all the uproar about Street Fighter 6's costume 3 DLC, I bet you'll still see people using the costumes. People buy it and seem content with being forced to overspend so it's a practice that's here to stay.
>Like there's either some Machiavellian super secret dark pattern that some business analyst discovered that said "yes actually if you make it 750 points instead of $5 you will make 2% more money,"
that's literally it tho. They know everyone hates it. but the numbers are all they care about.
It's the first one, genuinely. The company decides on the package they want you to buy and design their store to make it the "best" choice by making every other option notably worse. They want you to pay $X for Y stuff and deliberately funnel you into making that choice because that's the one they've calculated to be most profitable.
Also, by abstracting the cost into funbucks, it's harder for you to really feel how much you're spending, which makes it easier to spend more than you planned. The further away you get from physically handing over money, the easier it is to get you to spend. It's all psychological manipulation.
Im not really that mad about the battle pass (compared to some people.) it's really shitty, anti-consumer behaviour, but ultimately i can just ignore it. The replay takeover shit is egregious though and just inexcusable imo.
Ive seen comments like "eddy's easy to deal with as a good player, he only gives scrubs problems." Well, hello, i am scrub. I just wanna be able to see what parts of the 'infinite blockstring' i can interrupt/sidestep etc. Now I can't learn the matchup efficiently, just because i didn't buy a character i dont want to play as. i should be able to. i dont think thats too much to ask for bamco. Would it really hurt their bottom line to allow it?
Well, of course it would hurt their bottom line if they allowed it. They don't care why you buy the character, just that you do. So if they can create more reasons to buy the character beyond wanting to actually use them, they'll get more sales.
I didn't pay for frame data through years of T7 out of spite, and sadly it seems we will be relying on youtube guides once again.
The fact that i cant even see my own counterplay in replays though, if they dont change that in future updates im keeping my review negative.
If there ever will be another fighting game dark ages, it would probably be caused with these crooked ass Diablo Immortal monetization practices
Harada and Bamco intentionally deceived their playerbase over their monetization plans.
They took it away from consumers to make an informed decision.
I dont like being tricked into supporting such horrendously monetized products.
Couldn't agree more. They say "vote with your dollar" but like, this isn't what I bought a few months ago.
So did Street Fighter. They snuck in the battle pass only for launch version, and told people who received review copies that they were banned from talking about the battle pass or monetization.
This practice, along with the fake currency that you have to buy, should straight up be illegal. If some representative made a genuine case at Brussels, there's a decent chance this practice would 100% get criminalized in the EU. And there's no way Bamco/Capcom will keep doing it when their games get banned in the second biggest consumer market in the world.
Not surprising. Guy blatantly said that T7 was on "special rollback netcode" when it wasnt. Archaically released T7 as an arcade first title then didnt give us a console version until 2 years later. Also made people have to pay just to get frame data and argued against the positives of having it available in the game. People thing Harada is some messiah but he's a big of a scum bag as other high role devs.
@@dickthebirthdayboy2132 i agree that this way of negatively changing the business model so shortly after launch and without transparency at launch should be illegal.
honestly the big thing that bugs me about all these battle passes is permenance. it sucks that these costumes and such arent permenantly available, if they make something cool and then it turns out I cant get it normally anymore, that just sucks
It’s insanely depressing that a fighting game based of a LITERAL GACHA GAME has better progression for colors and weapon skins than the big 3 fighting games on the market
I hope they add cube next season
the polygon powercreep is crazy
The thing that I hate most is that modern fighters are doing ALL of the bad stuff at once. Overpriced microtransactions (that aren't exactly micro anymore), season passes for characters, premium currency AND battle passes. Like, I could maybe tolerate one or two of these in a FULL PRICED game, but doing ALL Of these at once when the base game is $60-70 bucks is way too transparently greedy. Fortnite led the charge on this with skins now costing as much as full games in some cases and you cannot TELL me that some of these avatar costumes in SF6 took more time and money to make than a whole character.
Really hope they can change course on this....not looking forward to having this conversation again when Multiversus is back out alongside 2XKO later.
All of AAA gaming is doing the exact same garbage.
There's another guy who commented this and he's right, fighting games were always made on these models and money making tactics, even back when they designed the games at arcades to eat coins to even play the things.
As far as I can tell, Guilty Gear Strive and King of Fighters 15 are not doing anything beyond season passes. This isn't modern, but Skullgirls is the same way.
The thing is granblue allows you to buy Costumes and DLC characters with the coins, the battle pass also adds music form the mobile game. I think it has way more value than the others for that reason
It's been said before but Sajam's jmcroft's "folks" is godlike
Listening to this while working out was the worst decision I've ever made, Riddler Sajam and SaJMcrofts cracked me up so bad I fell off the pull up bar twice. Great video keep it up
2XKO monetization is gonna suck so bad if valorant is any indicator. Fuckass premium currency, 20 dollars for a basic ass skin for a shitty pistol in a rotating shop, battle pass fomo, no bundle to unlock all the agents, and they’ve recently made the stuff you can actually unlock by playing the game infinitely more annoying to do because instead if it unlocking naturally as you play you have to specifically go in and spend ur free points or else you might hit the super low cap on it
Somebody gotta go back in time to stop CSGO and Fortnite BR from existing their existence has been so cancerous on the industry
@@PSIclops_ the thing that gets under my skin is this fake ass shit coin currency that they force you to purchase in order to buy DLC characters. I don't mind DLC but let me buy that shit directly with my money.
And I'm looking at LoR, being as free as it is - losing them money. It's crazy but they said, new pets and arenas were not economically feasible, and even skins for champions were not making money. They are even stopping updates to pvp portion of the game altogether.
Closing Riot Forge also has been a big disappointment for me.
Wild Rift has been getting stingier with free currency update after update. Even bloody poro coins from weekly boxes are now not guaranteed, and a low chance pull. Keys for boxes, like the main game does - in WR are only bought with real money currency. Wild Rift even stopped doing their esport league...
And I forgot that LoL now has 200$ recolor skins behind lootbox guaranteed unlock. Because that particular Jhin skin was not for the average player, and is specifically for whales to feel special.
What I want to say is - if people think "former Project L" will be the new greatest F2P fighter. They weren't keeping up with the news.
@@TheOblomoff all i HAVE to say, Is that your statement has Been nothing but a pile of septical waste comming right out of your mouth
Aren't you that funny ahh socialist that follows this weird little head of all left Wing ideals that goes by Karl Marx Vladimír Lenin Joseph Stalin etc.? Didn't they commited litteral genocide for what cringe they Believe? So much for being morally flawless beings!
If you take a shot of tequila every time Sajam fixes his hair you'll be drunk in 53 seconds
Granblue ironically the lesser evil here despite vanilla originally being an absurdly expensive game, that’s where we’re at right now.
Sleeping on the music in the granblue passes btw
I think one of the problems with putting a battle pass in your game is how much stuff you have to make super quickly to make it worth buying. Epic Games can hardly keep up with it, and they invented the model in the first place! Do the character design and 3D modeling teams for SF6 and TK8 really have the manpower and infrastructure to maintain such a high quantity (let alone quality) output every 2-3 months?
Actually 🤓 valve probably was the first one with dota 2 but epic did make it go crazy with fortnite and def popularised it.
I do agree with your point that it might be really hard for them to actually do such a system with good quality.
Yeah that's another thing, if your monetization relies on battlepass spam then that has to take priority over actual content, because that's where the money is. Even the low quality filler still takes some time to make, and that's less time to work on the actually important stuff.
Thank you for continuing to speak out on this topic. It needs to be addressed and changed by these devs and publishers. There's a monetary value to customer goodwill, it's just more long-term than these companies want.
the not being able to purchase exact amount is EXTREMELY disgusting in all these games. I was looking at SF6 cuz I wanted to buy AKI. $12 is what you need to spend to unlock a single character because of that currency bullshit.
If you were to buy 3/4 of the season 1 characters, that is near as much as buying the season pass FOR ALL FOUR CHARACTERS. This basically forces you to buy the season pass, even if you don't want to buy all the characters because its the better deal. Now you're left with spending more money than you initially wanted to and you have characters that are gonna sit there because you didn't want them or plan on playing them.
This shit is gross, fighting game microtransactions are the absolute worst kind in gaming right now and I don't think it's close. The sad part about Capcom is they charged $10 for the Ada DLC in RE4 which gave you multiple characters for Mercenaries mode AND gave you the Ada story which was 4+ hours of gameplay. They went from being reasonable to absolute scumbag mode in an instant. Asian devs have historically had these ridiculous archaic ideologies (Nintendo with the copyright crap, now Namco banning modders) except when it comes to microtransactions, they're very much with modern gaming with all these very disgusting monetization business models.
This should be a golden age for fighting games, instead the devs/publishers have absolutely prevented that at every chance they've gotten.
As much as I agree the coin pricing is scummy af it's the same in pretty much every game that has that coin model in there because that's what it's designed to do. Even something with a lot of good faith like Hunt Showdown has that in the way of microtransactions. You're right but it's not just a fighting game problem that's just an industry problem.
@@aledantih6524 the difference is that a lot of those games are FREE TO PLAY! The fact we get all this scummy bullshit on top of having to spend 60-70 USD is ridiculous.
That's actually the good thing about Granblue, currently there is no in-game premium currency. You buy everything directly.
It also seems like the issues were compounded with the balance patch seemingly breaking stage hazards, although that's just from what I've seen i'm not super knowledgeable in the game yet
Fighting games need to pick a lane. You can either be $59.99 (or now $69.99) game, and just have everything be unlockable; or you can be a free-to-play game and sell people characters and costumes piecemeal. You don’t get to do both, and you especially don’t get to do both that these stupid prices.
Honestly, the model they’ve gone with makes absolutely no sense at all. If the idea is to make you money selling DLC, you’re going to make more with a F2P model simply by virtue of the F2P model giving you more access to more players. When Capcom last announced Street Fighter 6 sales they were over 3 million. Tekken 8 did 2 million in a month. That’s the pool of people Capcom and Bandai Namco have to sell stuff to. The percentage of people that actually spend a lot of money, that are buying everything, or damn near everything is probably pretty low. Then you have something like that free-to-play MultiVersus platform fighter that’s coming back this month, that game had 20 million players in its first month; that’s a lot more people to sell costumes and whatever to. It seems like the way Capcom and Bandai Namco want to do things they should be selling things way cheaper, and trying to get the most people possible to give them money. It’s kind baffling companies that had highly successful arcade business don’t get this. Street Fighter 2 made billions of dollars at the arcade by getting a whole lot of people to pump .25¢ into arcade cabinets. They should be taking a similar model with characters, costumes, and other little things in the game if charging for costumes is the way they’re going to go.
Put the “micro” back into “micro transaction,” in other words. I agree!
Thank you for talking about this. We as a community need to pushback against this lazy monetization in fully priced games. It astounds me that people defend their recent practices including big fgc content creators
100% with you but sadly there are a lot of boot licking content creators in the FGC. My entire timeline on twitter was full of people glazing Bamco and downplaying the Tekken store announcement. Now look at where we're at.
If only the community had the ability to boycott these practices
I rewatched the part where he went throught the Chun SF5 skins.
that was an excellent JMCrofts impression, truly
The whole tekken 8 and SF6 situation is just so wack to me, as someone who mostly still plays BBCF (an older game), MBTL, and UNI2. All of those games were BELOW the 'base price' of most games (below $70), offer tons of customization for free, and were made by a much smaller company, in the case of UNI2 and TL specifically. UNI2 has like 40 colors per character and the ability to make your own custom colors. the idea of charging for colors is just insane, idk how capcom got away with that for SF5 and 6
I gave up SF6 not because of the gameplay, but because the Capcom pissed me off so badly with the monetization. Seriously, fuck Fighter Coins. I've played SF since '92, but fuck them.
"I would like to purchase a denomination of a made up currency that I cannot buy the correct amount of" is spot on yo, that sht feels horrible every time 😭
wake up babe new sajam video
Man if devs wanna selll me shit that's fine and if I'm really enjoying your game I'm fine with having more stuff sold to me
but please for the love of god stop splitting everything up into battle passes and premium currency mtx. Just put the costume in the shop with a 4$ price tag or whatever and let me just pay for that. All the extra bs hoops to jump through results in no purchases, at least for me, where a simplification would sell more product
Same, waiting until I can actually pay money and buy what I want in SF6
The best thing about the sf6 passes are the music. Thing is, so many other fighting games just give you the full "jukebox" of old(er) games, even if some are a little more limited than others, at the start. Maybe it is the GG route where you have to gacha, or "buy" them with in-game stuff, but the point is they are just in there like swimwear. So in saying that I could never bring myself to actually buy an sf6 pass even if I'd get "refunded". Even just selling some music packs would go over a lot better than getting 2-4? songs per premium pass.
you can’t even use the SF6 music unlocks in matches right? just like in the lobby or in the ranked queue
@@squiddyte4552 I'm not actually sure because I only have the free ones I don't care about, so I never looked into using them. If that is true then it is even worse than I thought lol.
And so far there have been zero rereleases, if you missed a song you like then tough luck buddy. I generally do not mind SF6's monetization but the music, the C1 colors, and the COINS are easily the worst parts that absolutely deserve criticism.
Also SF6 should get replay takeover. Then I wouldn't even mind not using DLC in training mode, as long as I have somewhere I can practice against what's beating me.
I think the costume 3's in SF look great. There are 4-5 of the costumes I really wanted to buy. But since they use inngame currency with bundles that don't give enough for a costume I've avoided buying them so far.
I suspect part of the reason people are _so_ mad and _so_ loud about something that's become pretty standard in the games industry, is that it wasn't the standard for FGs _yet._ There's a chance for pushing back on it, even if it is only in a pretty isolated genre.
Wrong. The reason people are mad is because the mtx came way after the release. Every time this happens people are way more pissed off than usual, because we all know they probably didn't put the MTX on release just to avoid bad press/reception.
It's really frustrating to see Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 do these practices, because it tarnishes what are otherwise really fun games.
This makes French Bread look like a legend, with their free dlc updates in Type Lumina, and the crazy amount of color pallettes in both TL and Under Night
ive gotta say as someone neck deep in guild war right now hard cutting to the gbf wiki page ui scared me
The thing that pissed me off Is I can't buy Eddy with the currency I earn from the battle pass. Eddie is 10 dollars, and if you bought in game currency already you have to spend a separate 10 dollars because in game currency can't be used to buy Eddy.
Fgs have a f2p economy in a 70$ dollar game
*$70
*the word "dollar" doesn't need to be there
I was just quickly scrolling through the comments and holy moly did I misread your fighting game abbreviation lol.
sajam saying ball like that and me going out loud "hes just like me fr"
Man istg, why can Super Smash Brother Ultimate have 80 characters with 8 colors per character that are basically full on costumes a well made story mode and a plethora of good alternative ways to play the game, while SF6 or Tekken 8 can't even give each of their characters more than 2 free skins even though they have half the god damn roster size at best.
Good story? I wasn’t aware there was a decent story mode at all. The costumes are also just recolors for the most part
most characters it was recolors and the story was almost non existant
While the story mode portion of this comment is gonna get shit on,(it was basically a revamped event mode) Smash still generally has the best DLC practices when it comes to bang for your buck. It had a huge starting roster, each dlc character was reasonably priced and came with a stage and a wide array of songs, and sometimes they added stuff in just cause. Smash could have easily charged for more unique costumes and they never did. It was a game that marched to the best of its own drum, mostly for the better.
Because the series is always among the best-selling on Nintendo consoles, so they know they're making their money back.
New character comes out and you buy it in a bundle for like 9.99 for a character, all their colours/alts, a stage and the music. OUTSTANDING value for some of the hardest working devs getting other peoples characters online.
The best part about street fighter battle pass is the old school games
lol that jmc impression, dead on
As long as I can't buy your product directly with my real money, you don't get my money. I will never bend on that - sell me a good product at a fair price and I'm happy to pay you, but manipulative bullshit trying to force me to pay extra is an immediate hard pass.
I was going to buy Rashid in SF6 until it turned out I couldn't do that, I could only buy "Fighter Coins," and only more than I needed to get Rashid. And Tekken pulling the same crap has solidified my decision to not even pick up Tekken 8 to give it a shot after not being a fan of 7.
I only pray that ArcSys doesn't see the big names adopting this f2p "premium currency" BS as an excuse to do the same in their future games. They're the only ones still doing this right at this point*; if they go down this path, I will truly despair for the genre.
*Aside from putting a Battle Pass in Granblue, but that's a licensed game based on a f2p game, that may be Cygames' call instead of theirs. I'm hoping it is, anyway.
That JM impression had me rolling
I was kinda bummed asuka’s tekken og outfit wasn’t in the first wave of costumes now I’m glad I didn’t give them extra with what they have now
you know what the insane thing is, I can boot up granblue fantasy versus rising, complete the battle pass, get weapon skins and character colours, a whole ass outfit at the end, profile customization and decorations that you can show in the loading screen, titles and stuff, then when ive cleared the battle pass, I click purchase, it takes me to steam, I buy it for w/e amount of real world dollarydoos and then I get everything on the paid level.
Why is that so fucking hard to copy?
Quick league pricing rundown for the people who are looking forward to 2xko but dont play league: individual characters cost 3 to 9 dollars but you can earn them with free currency. Most skins cost about 12 bucks. There are ways to get skins for free. But there are expensive skins(35$) and newly installed loot box type things with hyper premium skins thatll run you ~200$. There are bundles that will give you characters and costumes - the current 4 character 4 skin bundle is 66$. The premium currency is in uneven denominations.
Tft's content is entirely loot boxes with rotating premium thing and 60 roll until you get the premium thing guaranteed. 60 rolls is ~200 dollars.
I remember getting into SFV because Sakura was announced and I bought her separately for something around 10 or 15 BRL. Just paid with my steam wallet, no need for in-game currency.
Then SF6 releases and if I wanna buy a single dlc character I either get the full season pass or pay 51 BRL in in-game currencies to be able to buy a character and maybe a color. I can't even get a costume with that. I honestly lost my gas with the game when the DLC started coming out because of that.
“You think I’m an idiot and you hate my guts”
Should be the introduction to a class on capitalism
GBF Killin it right now here too. I'm pretty happy there, they get funding, and with one costume you can defide if you want to grind that month or not
Thank you for speaking out on this issue. Hopefully Harada's dumb brain finally realizes that hes killing the franchise. First it was no T7 console edition for years, then him gaslighting people into thinking T7 had rollback netcode and was proven wrong. Then having people have to pay for frame data and him fighting against the need for it in the game. Guy is a hack and needs to be removed from bamco. T8 had such good will going in and he's slowly destroying it in the matter of a couple of weeks.
I'm a simple man: take my credit card info for the costume with no inbetween, or don't ask me for shit.
Honestly not really surprised that Granblue's battlepass is the least bad of the 3, since Cygames is known for being one of the most generous mobile game companies which makes it feel worth it to buy the premium stuff from them, also cuz they have experience with making good battlepasses like Shadowverse's
4:16 I hope 2XKO doesn't follow in the footsteps of Legends of Runeterra. LoR's monetization was a disaster that forced the team to focus on PVE content instead of PVP because its monetization was too generous.
Also, Brawlhalla does the free-to-play stuff right. You can unlock colors, but there's around a half dozen colors you have by default on each character. Last I checked there's no replay takeover, but you can go into training mode and try out every character in every skin they have completely for free. Finally, there's a bundle that gives you every character in the game past, present, AND future. I can't tell you whether the skins themselves are good deals, but there's a lot of skins since every character has at least 2 and there's over 60 characters at this point. It has a lot of other problems, but it does the free-to-play stuff right, and I expect 2XKO will take a lot of lessons from it.
When I got into fighting games a few years ago, they seemed like a safe haven from this kind of shady live service shit. I could buy the game and its DLC characters, and that felt fair. Some games sold costumes, and that wasn't great but at least it was straightforward. Now the new Street Fighter and Tekken games have caught up to the rest of the industry. They're the same nonsense and as great as the games look I cannot buy them, cannot support them. So where do I go now?
I know the feeling. I've always been fine with buying DLC characters in fighting games, because the individual prices were reasonable, and I could just skip any that didn't interest me, which was usually half or more of any given "season." Now that the big names are pulling this crap and that basic transaction - offer me a product I want at a price I'm willing to pay - is being broken in multiple ways, I fear I may be stuck with the vanilla versions of future fighting games as the only thing I'm willing to buy.
Or worse, that the genre really will move broadly to the f2p model after 2XKO (still a bad name), and that'll prompt me to stop touching new fighting games altogether, despite how much I love the genre. :(
@@Zevox87 I really worry about future fighting games being f2p. It's a horrible model. F2p games are sometimes okay for the first year, but they inevitably must go downhill because of the financial incentives/pressures pointing toward time-limited grind-heavy low-quality content spam. Anything to keep the player hooked into the client. And then when even the trickle of cheap mtx doesn't keep payers in the client, the lights go off and the servers shut down, gg.
The tekken pass doesn't even let you buy it if you get to level 41 on the free track. So you cant even make the purchase once you know you'll be refunded
Fortnite has ruined gaming so much solely because it's monitization practices made business men salivate at the mouth to try and get the same strategy, when everyone is doing it after the games that can get away with it are set in stone. It's basically the gold rush for greedy business men in the video game industry
Fortnite is free though. These games are not.
I don't think there is an elegant way to introduce battle passes to fighting games, especially in full priced releases which already demand a big investment of your money.
The passes either have irrelevant fluff like stickers, music you'll never listen to etc. or they have costumes and colours, maybe a stage, and at that point it would be unfair to the consumer to time gate actual content and potentially leave them with a forever incomplete game.
11:19 I didn't know that Sajam knew how install into purple shirt?
The worst part is that I really want to give them my money. I bought so many SFV costumes even for characters I don't even play just cuz they are cool af. But in these new games they are doing their best to make as hard as possible for you to buy the stuff you wanna buy, just stupid.
you should be able to have full access to all characters (including dlc you haven't paid for) in training mode.
I'm relatively new to the fgc and I have one question for all of you older fg fans. Why do we let devs do the business practices they do right now ? My introduction game was GGST, and I was shocked that you HAD TO pay for every single new character. Take other non-fighting games : in Apex, the newly released chracters become free right away. Grinding for the currency to get them is kind of annoying, but it helps gain engagement from your player. Even if the devs still need the new character money, they could just have it be like new operators in Rainbow Six Siege where you can only aquire the charcter without spending money 2-3 weeks after release and bank on the player wanting to play it at release. The hype for new characters drop after a week anyways, and I could bet devs make 90% of the new realease money on the first week. Rainbow Six Siege base game is 20$ (I speak in CA$ btw), Apex is free, Overwatch is free and you can still get new characters throught challenges, yet in games like GGST (50$), Street Fighter 6 (80$, 55$ minimum on sale) and TEKKEN 8 (90 FUCKING BUCKS) you still gotta pay for everyhing. The fgc gets fucked in the ass rough all the time and I think devs know that we're gonna take it up and swallow anyways.
I didn't know I needed a jmcrofts announcer pack until I watched this video. What the hell am I supposed to do now?!?!
Speaking of the replay takeover being inaccessible. I've always hated how Strive is a pay-to-win game because you literally can't lab against characters without paying to unlock them. You can't even have training mode.
If you want to get better at the game, you either have to buy every season pass or pirate the game. Not great options.
Most monetization would be okay if a fighting game on launch (when it's usually around 70% finished) wouldn't be 100 bucks now. Let me buy your game + first season Pass for 60 dollaridoos and we're good.
I think that also the fact that the customization system is the more barebones version for tekken. The battle pass feels bad not because it's extra stuff, it's because most of it feels like stuff that should have been the game in the first place. Even something like the female GI, yes it's on the free part of the battle pass but it just should have been in the game since the start.
Feels like they're just recycling stuff from tekken 7 and making us pay for it.
If there was better customization from the start and then there was really cool stuff in the battle pass, I probably wouldn't mind nearly as much.
Also what sucks about adding the old costumes that you have to pay for, is that they are no longer presets in the game, so you cannot pick them in tournament. A big thing in 7 was that a lot of us had favourite presets for tournament and we'd only pick them in tournament. Or I would just no longer use customization because I prefer to use tournament legal stuff because but it didn't feel bad because you still had around 10ish presets to choose from.
11:55 Probably also laughing because they fumbled the ftp model 3 separate times (and probably more considering some region locked Japanese phone games) Had their chance with 2 mobile games and 1 actual ftp Tekken game. They got their money and delisted them almost immediately too.
You actually can't unlock all the levels in the street fighter battle pass without buying it anymore. It was an unannounced change a few months ago and as you can see they were really sneaky about it cus nobody seems to know about it.
People have meme'd on the ball so much I like it now
12:00 this was actually the realest
These FOMO tactics are actually keeping me from buying all three of these games at the moment. It really sucks because the games themselves are good fun. Granblue in particular.
It's not that I even want the content. The idea that there's stuff the game just locks away because I wasn't there at the right time sickens me. Especially when it starts as a fully priced game in the first place.
There’s also character select portraits on the battle pass in Granblue which is cool also
The dumbest decision of sf6 is not having a bundle for costume 3. I gave them 6 euros bc i wanted one skin, but if they bundled all of it foe thirty, i would have gotten it. So they missed out on 24 euros on my end. Surely, I am not the only one.
Ono had that right in SFqv, and that was it. The monetization model in SFV was sort of consumer friendly and it sucks we have to take 10 steps back when we have more content in SF6.
people memed on doa6 costumes bc they saw the bundle prices but individually they were like 1.99, i think it's really warped how this stuff is created and perceived
11:20 Sajam was so upset about this situation that his shirt changed colors
Say what you will about MK1's Invasions, at least you don't have to buy into them and they're relatively easy to complete (kinda wish armor wasn't so strong. Elder gods forbid you try to punish a whiffed or unsafe move lest you want to be taken to Memphis. Anyway, I'm losing track). And from what I could tell, if you skip a season for whatever reason, the outfits and accessories are moved to the shrine, which is exponentially better than in MK11's, even if Koins are harder to get if you don't play Ranked matches.
It’s crazy somehow the monetization from SF6 managed to be worse than 5. Despite how for a while you couldn’t realistically earn enough of the fighter coins to buy costumes outright eventually at least the bundles happened AND championship edition as a release/update by itself was worth its cost given all that you got in that singular purchase. In Chun skins alone you made your money back.
The wildest part is we will buy the stuff. Just don’t be shady or convoluted about it
my dog when im playing with him and i throw a round object: 9:33
How much is the "Sajam touches hair" emote?
I've said for years it will only get worse after paid DLC characters and it did, I also think they will continue to push the envelope even further for years to come making monetization worse and worse especially with all the people defending these companies doing this crap. I've stopped playing most fighting games because of it after over 16 years of playing them; I just don't have the time or money to learn about these systems and buy into them i'd rather do other things. I hope the people defending these practices are happy with what they got and won't mind the bad deals they get in the future as well.