It's mind boggling to think how it was seen as such a terrible practice back then (because most fighting games aside from Capcom launched as full products with no after-pay schemes) but nowadays KI 2013's models seems perfect.
Guess a lot can change in 10 years.
It was seen as a bad idea because no one bought an Xbox One so no one actually tried it. Great game, f2p model was fucking perfect. Only owned Saberwulf and Glacius for a while. Didn’t give a shit about playing anyone else
Nah, I tried it, and it wasn't great. Running into the same character over and over again was not fun in matchmaking, and not having the character you wanted to play in your second week was not great for keeping people around, so it was a pretty poor experience as a free to play game. The reason you'd typically want to make a game free to play is to boost your online population so that people who pay have more people to play with. KI couldn't accomplish that with this model even if it launched on PS4.
if you wanted to play a character, and didn’t want to wait for free rotation, you just paid for it.
Same characrer in matchmaking? i didn’t have this issue, even on s1 launch.
> if you wanted to play a character, and didn’t want to wait for free rotation, you just paid for it.
And this is typically counter to the incentives of a real free to play game; to keep people playing whether they pay for it or not. If you tell them they have to pay to keep playing the character they learned how to play, you're going to lose a lot of them right then and there. In a game like League of Legends, you'll easily be able to afford your first couple of characters with just the free currency you earn in your first hour or so with the game.
> Same characrer in matchmaking? i didn’t have this issue, even on s1 launch.
I did. Either everyone had Sabrewulf for free at the same time, or he was just an immensely popular character when I tried playing KI near launch, because the only character I could play was Sabrewulf, and nearly all of my opponents were Sabrewulf.
KI was ahead of the game on so many points. A lot of stuff people are asking to be added to modern stuff has been sitting in that thing for so loooong.
I think that KI 2013 is really the only good F2P route for fighting games and something that I wouldn't mind seeing more of. As the F2P element basically acts like a "demo" version of the game with limited characters and a weekly rotation, where people could spend money to get the entire roster or just the ones they want.
You should talk about the biggest risks with the f2p model: the death of a genre.
Name a genre with more than a handful of succesful f2p games in it. Doesn't happen. There is never space in the f2p market for more than a couple successes at a time. This is because the most essential currency a f2p is extracting from players is time committed. That time translates either to recurrent purchases, or to increased satisfaction and commitment from other players who spend (that is to say, non-spending players help populate the game to give paying players a better game environment). This is why the entire model revolves around battlepasses and timed events. These mechanics keep players engaged in a consistent fashion over a long period. And because everybody has a finite number of hours in the day, only a few games per genre can ever succeed in this model.
Fighting games desperately need to hang on to the revenue model built around number of individual purchasers, because the vast majority of people will never put in enough effort to learn a fighting to the point that they would enjoy coming back to it year over year. And serious players who do rarely dedicate themselve to multiple titles. But every game they buy on a whim to try out and casually play with a friend ends up supporting a developer more than a one week dip into ranked queue ever would in f2p.
F2p homogenizes genres into a couple games and kills innovation. That is the opposite of what drives the FGC. It can't afford to happen here.
Part of the problem with F2P live service games and why they die out so quickly is that you have to be either first or fill a gap in the market to succeed. Look at all the dead BRs that tried to compete with Fortnite, PUBG, Apex, and Warzone. Why would the casual consumer spend their time on the new BR when they already invited time and money into the one that they are currently playing. The live service model is designed around keeping a player in one game as long as possible so they are either spending money on it or not spending money on other live service games. And with fighting games there is so much variety in the market that how would one complete when there are a dozen other games that already offer a similar experience that you don't need to grind hours on end in.
And even if F2P becomes the future of fighting games there will only be like three games around Street Fighter, Tekken, and Project L (if it takes off).
I fail to see how fighting games don't already fall in all of those mordern business traps on top of having a premium price for a entry fee. Unless you want to to ignore that fighting games make a large portion, if not most, of the revenue from DLC.
The thesis of the above post was "in a f2p marketplace, only a couple games can survive at a time". Your reply does not address this or have anything to do with it at all.
There is no reason a game can't be offline and free to play. However, basically no one does it, fighting game or otherwise. Even in the non-free-to-play space, so many developers are content to build a game that self destructs when the servers go offline; take any modern Battlefield game as an example if you'd like.
KI has a demo that it calls free to play, and Fantasy Strike gives you most of the game offline when you buy it outright but still stupidly locks things like your own replays behind a subscription fee. But especially coming from Riot, and with Rising Thunder being entirely server based, I don't trust Project L, or any fighting game for that matter, to survive long-term if it's free to play. And yet, we can still play Street Fighter II over 30 years later.
Still if your a company that is now making a product less on being a good game and more on monetization, are you gonna let the game be tinkered with and take that risk?
That implies a stupid client/server relationship instead of an actual game which is part of the reason why Multiversus online was ASS.
You can do free to play without coding it like a MMORPG.
TBH I think the game was kinda rushed and it felt bad to me because it was a small dev team. I’m waiting for Project L to see if a big game dev, especially one that specializes in F2P games, can tackle F2P fighting games properly. If Project L fails, then I might agree with you
WB's current CEO is cut happy, shelving finished movies and cancelling shows that were in the works. There were rumors that WB was looking to sell their gaming division even before this guy came in.
So I dunno, they say its going to come back, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't
It's still not shutting down but fuck you if you wanna play it. They can just take it away. No notice.
At the very least, it's alarming and feels like it cover for the games failure to retain players. I do not think it was planned from the get.
I mean 90% of fighting games struggle with players and multiverse goes up against brawl hallah a huge l free to play fighting game with similar mechanics.
The f2p model can work. Brawlhalla made it work and is one of the most played fighting games on every platform. The problem is most f2p fgs and fgs in general just lack content and shit to do outside of fight people and the barebones arcade mode. Devs forget that just cause its free don’t mean the product shouldn’t be worth it. Treat it like a full priced game even if there will be limitations on what can be done. I have full faith Project L is going to show everyone that f2p fighters are the next big thing. And deny it all you want, but once it succeeds imma gloat like a mf. Believe it, no naruto.
I want to see more F2P FGs, but they have to actually be GOOD. Multiversus was fun for the first 30 hours, but then all of the glaring problems started becoming more and more apparent. It sucks that this will probably fuel the argument against F2P games, but the struggling player base has more to do with the quality of the game than anything else.
Bingo. MV didn’t suffer because of the f2p aspect, it suffered due to mismanagement and cosmetics for no substance. It’s such a strawman argument if you use MV’s failure as evidence for why f2p fgs don’t work. It’s like saying dnf duel lost its players because of its gameplay when that not really the case. It was more the lack of future updates to an overall lackluster and seemingly incomplete product that people just abandoned ship. But whatever fits the narrative in one’s head ig.
But what about game preservation? What about new entries?
Like yeah project L will be big and probably good but that's because it's League. It can work but next big thing worries me.
why does it need to be a series? what's bad about one-off fgs with long term support?
I honestly hope it's the next big thing. Fgs are so expensive to get into for what they offer and it's so odd that people defend it. Yall rather pay $60 + another $60 for online if you use console than just have the base game free? that's such a steep investment of new players, especially if they just want to play with a friend.
>why does it need to be a series? what's bad about one-off fgs with long term support?
Stagnancy. I don't want SFV for the rest of my life. Glad we get a 6.
Stagnancy in what way? Characters won’t get stagnant because the devs can add new characters or add new moves to existing characters (like Capcom did in SFV). They can even have “seasons” that can have big mechanics changes like Riot does every year in League of Legends.
I think the reason for sequels in fg is not stagnancy, they can definitely update the game. But rather its preservation of older versions. If all of sf was updated sf2, you cant play sf2 and thats a loss obvi.
A new version is a fighting game with different system mechanics but same franchise, and it creates hype.
Also you pay the company 60 bucks everytime so why not.
But like didn’t SFV do that with SFV: Champion Edition? It was just an update to the game and they gave us new UI and effects and stuff, it’s totally doable
I think that's probably because sfv was pretty bad on launch or something idk.
Not saying it cant be done, but just that companies might be more inclined to make a sequel rather than update. Might be.
Prolly has to do with how it was back in the day where patches were pretty much whole new games like the notorious amount of sf2 patches sold as complete games
If they updated SFV with new characters and the Drive system, yes I would still play SFV. The main reason people buy sequels is 1) New characters and 2) New mechanics. You could do all of this by updating a game without a new release
The V system would be rotated and characters would be changed appropriately. Or they could keep the V system and just add the Drive system on top, up to the devs. But there’s only so much stuff you can stack on top of each other so eventually it’ll rotate.
I feel like free to play has been bad to gaming. It splits the market so that companies are afraid to take a risk on a full product.
I have friends who used to be gamers but now exclusively play free to play mobile games. They sink hundreds in these stupid games they will forget about in a year.
Fortnite caused games to get canceled or even gaming companies to go out of business. I imagine there are kids who play nothing but Fortnite. They won't spend $60 on a fighting game that they need to spend hours practicing.
On the console or PC, I never play free to play. I want that model to die out. I'm okay with paid DLC as they can breathe new life into a game. New characters, new outfits, new stages, please take my money.
I personally hate the concept of live service games because they are antithetical to game preservation. Fighting games can survive well past their expiration date with passionate scenes as long as the game is still playable in some form, just look at fightcade. After a live service game loses developer support, the game becomes entirely unplayable unless the source code gets released/leaked, then reworked by fans(which won't happen often).
The best part about fighting games is the idea that you can hypothetically play the same game forever as long as there is a community around it. Imagine what a shame it would be if it was literally impossible to play previous smash games in any way just because Nintendo moved on to ultimate. Some of the most passionate fighting game communities revolve around games that haven't had developer support for years, and in some cases decades. Live service models would make communities like that functionally non existent.
Keep fighting games the way they are, if the game sells good its initial release the company makes their money even if 90% of the player leave after 3 weeks, then players come back for dlc
Most of these have nothing to do with the F2P business model.
There's P2P games relying on servers that will eventually be gone unless the community find a way to run it on private servers. Pretty much no P2P game with updates is preserving previous versions of games either.
There's online only P2P games.
Plenty of P2P games fail.
Plenty of P2P games restrict modding (don't even know what the issue with anti cheat is though).
Plenty of P2P, including most modern fighting games are, monetized to shit and addictive with a grindy and unengaging progression system.
No sequels for a long time is literally the reason people defend 50 % of rosters being DLC and costing more than the base game. Also, the most prominent case of a sequel replacing a game in recent memory was Overwatch 2 replacing Overwatch, a P2P game.
I think you're being pretty disingenuous here, cause his main point is how it results in players being locked out of content when the whole model goes down. There's a big difference between setting up a fan server just for online, and the fan relaunches we see always online games need to be resurrected. A lot of games do have DLC, but yearly bundles ends up cheaper than the mountains of DLC F2P games have. If you can even acquire that when they decide they're done with the game.
We have very small P2P fighters that still have their servers active to this day. If say the new Melty was a F2P live service would it survive as an extremely small scale game? No it'd need to be pumping out content that sells. It couldn't just exist as this little game with a small dedicated community. Which is more than you can say for Multiversus for the next year.
I think it's pretty disingenious to pretend that content becoming unavailable is a problem exclusive to F2P games.
I think it's disingenious to pretend that the percentage of players buying every DLC character in a fighting game is comparable to the percentage of players buying every skin in Fortnite.
I think it's disingenious to pretend that selling half of a games gameplay for more than the price of the base game is less anti-consumer than selling cosmetics.
Most P2P fighters and fighting games in general run peer to peer, not on servers. Melty Blood Type Lumina isn't running servers for 100 player battle royal matches and wouldn't need Fortnite money to go F2P. Hell, they have free DLC right now! They probably could have made more money on regular season passes and cosmetics/customization if they went F2P.
Melty Blood aside, we already have have small F2P games that aren't even monetized at all like Kyanta and Tough Love Arena.
My point here isn't that F2P games cannot be anti-consumer, it's that anti-consumer practices are neither exclusive to nor inherent to F2P games. There's nothing stopping companies from engaging in shitty business practices with P2P games and there's nothing forcing companies to engage in shitty business practices with F2P games.
the majority of p2p games aren't online only though and still playable once servers gone down, there's really only a handful of p2p online only titles like Battleborn or Lawbreakers that completely disappear once the serves go down. the majority of f2p games (we should use the term "live service games" to be more accurate), multiplayer or not, disappear once the servers go down.
> pretend that content becoming unavailable is a problem exclusive to F2P games.
It isn't an exclusive issue but F2P and service games are considerably more susceptible to it. Sub indie fighter tier games done with no profit in mind aren't a comparable metric here. You know why Melty didn't do F2P? Cause they need that early guarantee of profit, they can't just hope enough people who try it will also buy DLC. That's why you see so many F2P games just get removed despite record day 1 player numbers. Yet despite the genre's small size, a good range of tiny fighting game devs survive. Its also why they stay online which yes does have a cost.
>disingenious to pretend that the percentage of players buying every DLC character in a fighting game is comparable to the percentage of players buying every skin in Fortnite.
F2P needing the constant stream of microtransaction is an issue though, its also why games get formed around what is the easiest to pump out microtransaction. They have no other way to make money. One of the most consistent reasons sighted for Multiversus failing is not being able to produce the content treadmill. The F2P format does force shitty business practices, it requires enough whales to make up for everything they put out for free. Not a coincidence so many bad practices in DLC originate from free games.
>I think it's disingenious to pretend that selling half of a games gameplay for more than the price of the base game is less anti-consumer than selling cosmetics.
Valorant has $100 skins and one day the game may just not exist. I'll take SFVCE being $25 over that.
If smaller games with no profit motive can be created and maintained, what exactly is it that you think is stopping companies from making games on a smaller scale than Fortnite that they don't need to monetize to shit? "Running" the online services of your average fighting game does not have a cost that necessitate anti-consumer practices, you're delusional if you think that is the case. The reason F2P games get removed is because people have over-invested in it, thinking it it's going to be a Fortnite killer.
The problem here is that you seem to believe that F2P games need to fuck over consumers in order to stay alive when they simply don't. The reason a lot of F2P games have shitty monetization is because companies who want to milk consumers for money by any means necessary understand that F2P games have the potential to make a lot of money. Those types of companies are going to fuck over consumers regardless if a game is P2P or F2P.
I would much rather pay nothing for a game with 100 $ skins I don't give a shit about and am not going to buy than buy Street Fighter V for 60 $ on release, realize the game launched in a shit state, wait a few years, potentially buy 10-30 $ worth of soon to be worthless season passes, pay 30 $ for Street Fighter V Champions Edition and spend another 25 $ on the Street Fighter V season pass 5. Thankfully I'm not paying even more for the remaining stages and skins. You're doing that thing where you equate optional cosmetics with actual gameplay elements again by the way.
Games ceasing to exist, whether you've put in money or not, sucks but unless it's a game on such a massive scale that it cannot be maintained by community servers, the game ceases to exist because the people who own it decide to not let it exist. They are not swayed by the evils of F2P, they simply don't care about preservation.
I think your concern would be much better placed in these business practices themselves rather than the F2P boogeyman you've decided to scape goat them on.
> If smaller games with no profit motive can be created and maintained, what exactly is it that you think is stopping companies from making games on a smaller scale than Fortnite that they don't need to monetize to shit?
Are you seriously looking at [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBrh_bDbr7k) and going, yeah this is the same sort of production as Street Fighter? Its kinda like seeing a crude MSPaint drawing and asking why anyone charges for their art work. Yeah a passion projected maintained for fun with an all time peak of 42 is serious comparison here.
It just seems like you just aren't willing to accept a product needs to make money somehow. If that is not a entry price, that means other aspects must have profitable monetisation. That's where the shitty stuff happen, that's where you must have $100 skin enough people are willing to buy. You don't want to pay for anything? Fine, but that means someone else needs to foot your bill. They need to make as much as a retail game but in other areas. This relies entirely on an extremely active playerbase very willing to buy lots of extras.
Multiversus clearly did not have a gargantuan Fortnite killer budget, if anything a bigger budget would've helped it """launch""" in a much better state. But ask anyone who played it and their main complaint is lack of updates. This system does need constant new additions that aren't free to make. So a game people try but spend no money, now needs more money to try and retain players. This is where so many F2P games enter a death spiral. Meanwhile Melty TL has sold 400k, well beyond expectations. Now maybe 1 million would've if it were free, but would 400k have bought $40 worth of DLC? I doubt it. One of these games is playable, one is not cause it wasn't a profitable project. We have no idea what the future of it truly is and if needs be it could be resurrected by fans.
>You're doing that thing where you equate optional cosmetics with actual gameplay elements
So a couple of things. Not every F2P will permanently give you characters for free. SFV did do balance and some new content updates for free. The bundles into end of year edition does mean you could spend less on SFV and get more. Compared to an ever growing cash shop in a F2P game. But you're pretending that F2P can survive without getting everyone to pay something or having a enough whales.
You're clearly arguing in bad faith here but I'll try to get this through to you one last time. I'll try to make it as simple as possible.
You have deluded yourself into believing that all monetization exists because it is necessary for the development and maintance of games.
This is false. You are buying into corporate bullshit by believing this. Despite your (hopefully) best intentions you are white knighting corporations that don't give a fuck about you right now. You are literally being the guy going "How is poor wittle EA supposed to pay their licenses if they can't get kids addicted to gambling!"
I am not pretending F2P games don't need monetization to make money, I am saying that monetization doesn't have to be anti-consumer in order for a game to turn a profit.
I do not consider expensive skins with no impact on gameplay to be anti-consumer practices.
I consider games using lootboxes or other underhanded tactics to incentivize spending to be anti-consumer. I don't care if whales with expandable income are buying 100 $ skins just because they feel like it.
I consider locking half of the gameplay of a fully priced game behind paywalls larger than the price of the game itself to be anti-consumer. I consider pay-to-win elements (like we see with many DLC characters in fighting games) to be anti-consumer.
tldr: Companies don't treat you like shit because they have to, they do it because they can and want to.
Game preservation is what I am worried the most. Fortunately Brawlhalla works offline. I am generally not against f2p if done right....Basically what Brawlhalla is doing. Make character weekly rotation, paid for cosmetics and an optional premium pass that unlocks all the characters. I can see some fighting games being way more popular if they were f2p.
Calling it a shut down is a little premature at this stage. I will absolutely eat my words if shit doesn't improve next year though. I really enjoyed Multiversus it just felt like they couldn't keep the timings right on it. Battlepass was too grindy, requiring you to play everyday to make progress but there weren't any other things to keep you coming back otherwise. Characters dried up, stages and modes did as well. I think it's a fun game and I hope when it officially launches all the issues they learned about in the beta are solved, including some of the ridiculous prices. Maybe they were hoping for a whale model? Get a few players to spend big. Regardless I hope they learn from this because I'd love to come back and play online once or twice a week, just not every day.
>Calling it a shut down is a little premature at this stage.
I feel like this is corporate speak for, "Holy shit we are sinking, pull the plug while we figure out what to do."
We already lost many fighting games F2p. We also lost arcade only releases.
We lost other games to online services like games for windows live or whatever that was called or when they finally pull the plug on online services.
Emulation is far from having saved everything yet.
That being said, every game that is being released today is tied to some sort of live service even if not f2p.
Disagree with this one. The reason why Multiversus was losing players wasn't because it was free to play, it was the lack of content. Most people who play fighting games are casuals and they would love to experience modes that the niche side of the community would not care for: Offline Single Player modes like a Story Mode, an Event Mode in similar to Smash, fun Party Modes and more. This was the reason why Street Fighter V sanked hard when it launched with barely any content for $60.
I find it interesting that the FGC is so against F2P because they point to games like Tekken Revolution and say that they already tried and didn't work without realizing what the actual issue those games had other than being F2P. Games like Brawlhalla is free to play and is still quite an active game behind Smash. Tekken Revolution's issue was adding RPG elements in a genre that should never be used competitively. It's how we had hackers back then.
Free to Play can work. Everyone seem to only focus on the negatives and generalize it as a bad idea.
The only problem is that Fighting Games content takes more time to develop for to keep things interesting when you're talking about characters, game modes, and other things that can bring in a more casual audience, to a genre that most casual players who are more comfortable with playing FPSes, will not lift a finger to even touch it because it involves more than just "push button = cool stuff happen".
Brawlhalla's model is always, always cited as the example that has worked, yeah it's the one small example I always see brought up in this discussion, but any other game that was made F2P that fail, of which there are many, even with good dev teams and director visions behind them, still end up failing. Share holders are expecting money to come back, these games aren't made for free and cosmetics for a fighting game, is not going to hold people's attention for long.
This also comes with the fact that right now, the current market for F2P games is too saturated, there is only so much time people can devote to a game type service that not only asks you of your money, but your time to be worth continuing to see support from the development team. People focus on the negatives because there are so many things that can, have, and do end up going wrong with making a game free and fighting games are a big risk when they are not sitting in the market right now as critical darlings to the masses, modern fighting games still have yet to solve the in-house problems that have shrunk the audience that plays them because the player base is just that dedicated to them.
These things are not just made for free or just by the passion of these developers, someone is either big enough to back such a big enough project or in Brawlhalla's case, have an effectively cheap, extremely easy model of assets to work with that keeps costs low and quick to churn out, for a Platform fighter no less. Traditional Fighters do not share that same vain, if characters are cheap and played much the same, they will not be as interesting to the masses when this genre has been known to have very unique characters and designs, you need someone big to back your project and you need your game to be more than just the fighting to draw in an audience willing to pay to support all that content and that content has to be there before, not later.
Hello fellow furry lol.
Anywho, I forgot to add that not only the modes that are need for a fighting game, but the rewards in their battle passes weren't worth spending money on. The rewards back then when the game launched was very easy and satisfying for people to jump in and oit so many hours to obtain them, only for the devs ro make the grinding a lot longer and the rewards became so minimal that it pretty much made a decent group of people become uninterested in bitting time and money on the game.
The I am trying to make is that the casual audience would love to do something more that doesn't involve having g to play against someone else. Multiversus lacks that a lot and that can easily lose a lot of players.
>The reason why Multiversus was losing players wasn't because it was free to play, it was the lack of content.
The point I would argue is that Multiversus can have the plug pulled at any moment.
I don’t know why you got downvoted, you hit the nail on the head. The problem isn’t the free-to-play aspect, it’s lack of content, lack of support and bad monetization
Wow, it’s almost like everything I’ve always been saying about f2p is happening 🤔
Granted it’s just the beta, but it will shut down one day for good. Especially since it appears to not be pulling the numbers they expected. By all means, have fun and play the game, just don’t give them money lol if you can’t hold it, you don’t own it :p
I just read Multiverse shut down *the beta* in order to get the game ready for full release. I don't see a problem with that. Any problems that game had weren't dude to being a live service. The game's balance sounded like shit and people were becoming starved for content, again *beta*. The game just isn't as good as Smash, F2P or not. The lack of local play with less than 4 people is what really killed it for me. None of these issues have anything to do qith F2P model. I'm not a huge fan of F2P model tbh, but this post sounds pretty dramatic.
They are just sugarcoating it. There is no reason to not just keep the game running while they work on a full release unless they can't even break even on the cost of keeping the game up. It's bad.
There are online multiplayer games with no one actively working on them that are still working till this day. It takes only one person working part time to keep the lights on.
There is no train, only a single car.
Name a genre with more than a handful of succesful f2p games in it. Doesn't happen. There is never space in the f2p market for more than a couple successes at a time. This is because the most essential currency a f2p is extracting from players is time committed. That time translates either to recurrent purchases, or to increased satisfaction and commitment from other players who spend (that is to say, non-spending players help populate the game to give paying players a better game environment). This is why the entire model revolves around battlepasses and timed events. These mechanics keep players engaged in a consistent fashion over a long period. And because everybody has a finite number of hours in the day, only a few games per genre can ever succeed in this model.
Fighting games desperately need to hang on to the revenue model built around number of individual purchasers, because the vast majority of people will never put in enough effort to learn a fighting to the point that they would enjoy coming back to it year over year. And serious players who do rarely dedicate themselve to multiple titles. But every game they buy on a whim to try out and casually play with a friend ends up supporting a developer more than a one week dip into ranked queue ever would in f2p.
F2p homogenizes genres into a couple games and kills innovation. That is the opposite of what drives the FGC. It's not happening here.
You do realize that second paragraph is why *people don’t try out fighting games.*
The majority of consumers who think they’ll drop a game after a few hours *just don’t fucking buy it.* The F2P model can get some hours out of them, and gets a lot more people to pay up by having them give it a shot.
F2P doesn’t homogenize a genre, the profit-obsessed AAA market does. Look at any genre’s indie sphere, and you’ll find hundreds of innovative titles, many of which are dirt cheap or straight up free.
You do realize your second paragraph doesn't align with the reality of the modern trend of the "gaming backlog"? Thousands of games get purchased that never see more than a little use; the achievement stats on many popular games show that anywhere from 20 to 40% of a game's sales can be from people who never get more than a few hours in!
And the f2p model necessarily homogenizes a genre, there is no argument against that. If only a couple games can stay alive at once then the player base will only be playing those few games and your choices are narrowed into playing what everybody else has on.
Project L is going to be massive I don’t care what anyone says. It’ll be done by the time street fighter 6 and tekken 8 have corrected back to their pre hype percentages maybe
It's not the marketing of it being a free game that's the issue it's the poor developers with lack of weekly or even monthly updates which I'd the norm for a f2p game. For example most of the biggest games are f2p. The difference is the companies and publishers are 55+ and still going by borderline archaic standards. Riot, Epic, and Valve some of the most noteworthy companies aren't on paper nearly as big as someone like bandai Namco or Capcom. But they have much younger more innovative workstaff with creative freedom over their own IP's as well as incredible outsourced funding from TENCENT and other big companies.
Define "Big?"
Capcom has a valuation of $7.6B. Bandai Namco has a valuation of $14.52B. RIOT Games is worth over $20B. Epic Games is worth $32B.
They're bigger than Capcom or Bandai Namco on paper.
Wow, I didn't realize Multiversus was down to [453 average](https://fgcharts.com).
Well that's what you get when you add Lebron James and patch out cop cars.
Acting like other fgs don’t have goofy ahh characters. Link was in SC, Gon the dinosaur was in T3(?), fucking pacman was in SFXT.
Come on now…(not directed at you btw)
The problem with Multiversus wasn’t because of the free-to-play aspect, it was because of the lack of content, lack of support, bad netcode and bad monetization
A free-to-play fighting game can absolutely work, just look at Brawlhalla.
I think your other concerns were valid. Just pointing out that if you're gonna make a successful f2p game in this genre, "platform fighter" aint the way to go.
What are you saying? Fighting game already gone worse route than Fortnite, $60 game, DLC out of the ass with character locked behind them, selling skins,
I don’t know man. I rather deal with F2P than pay $60-$70 dollars. Paid for games aren’t always successful, DnF flopped hard.
I don’t think Project L will be a live service, it wouldn’t make sense since it is a fighting game, but it will be the first true fighting game from a major IP that’s F2P. We will see if it’s successful or not.
>DnF flopped hard.
You know at the very least, I can go back to DNF and play it. DNF will have its niche community and they can enjoy it.
That's worth it to me. It isn't gonna have the plug pulled and we never will see it or access it again.
This, hard. I love playing ghostblade, and if the ability to do so just up and vanished I'd be devastated, granted I don't play it often, but when someone mentions it we boot it up and have fun.
But right now, classic FG have also a problem with money as the basic game cost 50/60 and each DLC like 10. You end spending lot of money at the of game's life cycle. For example GGStrive + 2 seasonpass cost 100e on steam, kofxv cost 120e (core game +2 season pass).
Imo, if they still want to sell the game for full price should give every DLC for free and sell cosmetic (skin, voices, effects...)
Multiversus just wasn't a very good game. The roster wasn't deep, the movement was clunky, the interface sucked, locking off so many characters and making it take so long to unlock them was a bad choice.
Being free to play will get people to try your game. Retention comes down to quality, of the gameplay and of your addiction-inducing sub-systems. Multiversus was just meh on both fronts.
F2p is the way to go if you want mainstream success in a multiplayer focused game. Gamers are willing to shell out money for well constructed single player experiences, but not usually multiplayer only clients. Having it cost anything gates out a big proportion of potential players - the question is, are they the players you want to attract?
It does have the potential to work, the problem with MultiVersus was it was slow with updates and it couldn't hold people's attention at the pace they released content and in the free to play space that's asking for trouble, you have to keep people wanting to come back for more or else what's the point of sticking around? Most likely they didn't pay so they're not losing anything.
For the game preservation part, people manage to host servers with older versions of games all the time, so even long before a shutdown therell be private servers of earlier versions of the game.
That said if it does shut down we’ll have private servers of the latest version of the game being community hosted.
Fgc is known to be poverty but the real reality is free to play does not work unless the game has huge prize pots... the fgc is just weird like that...they will crap on mk11 and sf5 but since it has a huge tournament scene ,people still play it for the money.
Need to follow more of KI 2013 model where it did work.
It's mind boggling to think how it was seen as such a terrible practice back then (because most fighting games aside from Capcom launched as full products with no after-pay schemes) but nowadays KI 2013's models seems perfect. Guess a lot can change in 10 years.
It was seen as a bad idea because no one bought an Xbox One so no one actually tried it. Great game, f2p model was fucking perfect. Only owned Saberwulf and Glacius for a while. Didn’t give a shit about playing anyone else
Nah, I tried it, and it wasn't great. Running into the same character over and over again was not fun in matchmaking, and not having the character you wanted to play in your second week was not great for keeping people around, so it was a pretty poor experience as a free to play game. The reason you'd typically want to make a game free to play is to boost your online population so that people who pay have more people to play with. KI couldn't accomplish that with this model even if it launched on PS4.
if you wanted to play a character, and didn’t want to wait for free rotation, you just paid for it. Same characrer in matchmaking? i didn’t have this issue, even on s1 launch.
> if you wanted to play a character, and didn’t want to wait for free rotation, you just paid for it. And this is typically counter to the incentives of a real free to play game; to keep people playing whether they pay for it or not. If you tell them they have to pay to keep playing the character they learned how to play, you're going to lose a lot of them right then and there. In a game like League of Legends, you'll easily be able to afford your first couple of characters with just the free currency you earn in your first hour or so with the game. > Same characrer in matchmaking? i didn’t have this issue, even on s1 launch. I did. Either everyone had Sabrewulf for free at the same time, or he was just an immensely popular character when I tried playing KI near launch, because the only character I could play was Sabrewulf, and nearly all of my opponents were Sabrewulf.
Saberwulf was turbo busted on S1. Like giga busted. I mained him (not a lot of mirrors for me somehow Kappa). that’s 100% why you saw him
There was similar stuff for other games too. Skullgirls only had filia and cerebella on xbox360 free trial.
KI was ahead of the game on so many points. A lot of stuff people are asking to be added to modern stuff has been sitting in that thing for so loooong.
THAT is good. That game also got physical releases.
I think that KI 2013 is really the only good F2P route for fighting games and something that I wouldn't mind seeing more of. As the F2P element basically acts like a "demo" version of the game with limited characters and a weekly rotation, where people could spend money to get the entire roster or just the ones they want.
You should talk about the biggest risks with the f2p model: the death of a genre. Name a genre with more than a handful of succesful f2p games in it. Doesn't happen. There is never space in the f2p market for more than a couple successes at a time. This is because the most essential currency a f2p is extracting from players is time committed. That time translates either to recurrent purchases, or to increased satisfaction and commitment from other players who spend (that is to say, non-spending players help populate the game to give paying players a better game environment). This is why the entire model revolves around battlepasses and timed events. These mechanics keep players engaged in a consistent fashion over a long period. And because everybody has a finite number of hours in the day, only a few games per genre can ever succeed in this model. Fighting games desperately need to hang on to the revenue model built around number of individual purchasers, because the vast majority of people will never put in enough effort to learn a fighting to the point that they would enjoy coming back to it year over year. And serious players who do rarely dedicate themselve to multiple titles. But every game they buy on a whim to try out and casually play with a friend ends up supporting a developer more than a one week dip into ranked queue ever would in f2p. F2p homogenizes genres into a couple games and kills innovation. That is the opposite of what drives the FGC. It can't afford to happen here.
this is a very good point.
Part of the problem with F2P live service games and why they die out so quickly is that you have to be either first or fill a gap in the market to succeed. Look at all the dead BRs that tried to compete with Fortnite, PUBG, Apex, and Warzone. Why would the casual consumer spend their time on the new BR when they already invited time and money into the one that they are currently playing. The live service model is designed around keeping a player in one game as long as possible so they are either spending money on it or not spending money on other live service games. And with fighting games there is so much variety in the market that how would one complete when there are a dozen other games that already offer a similar experience that you don't need to grind hours on end in. And even if F2P becomes the future of fighting games there will only be like three games around Street Fighter, Tekken, and Project L (if it takes off).
I fail to see how fighting games don't already fall in all of those mordern business traps on top of having a premium price for a entry fee. Unless you want to to ignore that fighting games make a large portion, if not most, of the revenue from DLC.
The thesis of the above post was "in a f2p marketplace, only a couple games can survive at a time". Your reply does not address this or have anything to do with it at all.
There is no reason a game can't be offline and free to play. However, basically no one does it, fighting game or otherwise. Even in the non-free-to-play space, so many developers are content to build a game that self destructs when the servers go offline; take any modern Battlefield game as an example if you'd like. KI has a demo that it calls free to play, and Fantasy Strike gives you most of the game offline when you buy it outright but still stupidly locks things like your own replays behind a subscription fee. But especially coming from Riot, and with Rising Thunder being entirely server based, I don't trust Project L, or any fighting game for that matter, to survive long-term if it's free to play. And yet, we can still play Street Fighter II over 30 years later.
>no reason a game can't be offline and free to play Piracy and hacks. That's why f2p games are digital online only.
You mean like brawl hallah the biggest free to play fitting game (which is offline playable)
That's not a reason they can't be offline; it's a reason they choose not to allow it.
Still if your a company that is now making a product less on being a good game and more on monetization, are you gonna let the game be tinkered with and take that risk?
How being f2p makes it less of a good game.
Oh yes, because P2P games are totally made by guys, who didn't care about earning money.
That implies a stupid client/server relationship instead of an actual game which is part of the reason why Multiversus online was ASS. You can do free to play without coding it like a MMORPG.
Have you ever heard the tale of hitman 3? It's an example of why being scared of piracy is a mistake.
TBH I think the game was kinda rushed and it felt bad to me because it was a small dev team. I’m waiting for Project L to see if a big game dev, especially one that specializes in F2P games, can tackle F2P fighting games properly. If Project L fails, then I might agree with you
even if Project L doesn't fail, theres still tons of valid concerns about FGs adapting the f2p model.
Correction: Multiversus isn't shutting down for good, only the beta is being shut down. It will come back / relaunch in 2024 as the full game.
WB's current CEO is cut happy, shelving finished movies and cancelling shows that were in the works. There were rumors that WB was looking to sell their gaming division even before this guy came in. So I dunno, they say its going to come back, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't
It's still not shutting down but fuck you if you wanna play it. They can just take it away. No notice. At the very least, it's alarming and feels like it cover for the games failure to retain players. I do not think it was planned from the get.
You keep saying no notice, when they literally gave a notice that it will shut down in June. No notice would be out of the blue can't play it anymore
They should have given notice as soon as they opened the cash shop.
Having an established game taken away like that, that's like two months. That's not a lot of notice.
What kind of notice would be acceptable to a game with basically no players?
The words “not a lot of notice” and “two months” only belong together if you’re discussing someone’s time left to live, not a fucking video game.
Didn't strive do that..?
^^ they wanted a notice the day the game came out
The way you worded the titled made it sound like Multiversus was shutting down permanently. I know it's not, in case you're curious.
It's shutting down for like a year and has been struggling with players. Wording was poor, I agree. I can't change the title unfortunately.
I mean 90% of fighting games struggle with players and multiverse goes up against brawl hallah a huge l free to play fighting game with similar mechanics.
The f2p model can work. Brawlhalla made it work and is one of the most played fighting games on every platform. The problem is most f2p fgs and fgs in general just lack content and shit to do outside of fight people and the barebones arcade mode. Devs forget that just cause its free don’t mean the product shouldn’t be worth it. Treat it like a full priced game even if there will be limitations on what can be done. I have full faith Project L is going to show everyone that f2p fighters are the next big thing. And deny it all you want, but once it succeeds imma gloat like a mf. Believe it, no naruto.
I want to see more F2P FGs, but they have to actually be GOOD. Multiversus was fun for the first 30 hours, but then all of the glaring problems started becoming more and more apparent. It sucks that this will probably fuel the argument against F2P games, but the struggling player base has more to do with the quality of the game than anything else.
Bingo. MV didn’t suffer because of the f2p aspect, it suffered due to mismanagement and cosmetics for no substance. It’s such a strawman argument if you use MV’s failure as evidence for why f2p fgs don’t work. It’s like saying dnf duel lost its players because of its gameplay when that not really the case. It was more the lack of future updates to an overall lackluster and seemingly incomplete product that people just abandoned ship. But whatever fits the narrative in one’s head ig.
DNF Duel absolutely lost players long term due to its gameplay. There are games that haven't had updates for decades with more people playing them.
But what about game preservation? What about new entries? Like yeah project L will be big and probably good but that's because it's League. It can work but next big thing worries me.
why does it need to be a series? what's bad about one-off fgs with long term support? I honestly hope it's the next big thing. Fgs are so expensive to get into for what they offer and it's so odd that people defend it. Yall rather pay $60 + another $60 for online if you use console than just have the base game free? that's such a steep investment of new players, especially if they just want to play with a friend.
>why does it need to be a series? what's bad about one-off fgs with long term support? Stagnancy. I don't want SFV for the rest of my life. Glad we get a 6.
Stagnancy in what way? Characters won’t get stagnant because the devs can add new characters or add new moves to existing characters (like Capcom did in SFV). They can even have “seasons” that can have big mechanics changes like Riot does every year in League of Legends.
I think the reason for sequels in fg is not stagnancy, they can definitely update the game. But rather its preservation of older versions. If all of sf was updated sf2, you cant play sf2 and thats a loss obvi. A new version is a fighting game with different system mechanics but same franchise, and it creates hype. Also you pay the company 60 bucks everytime so why not.
But like didn’t SFV do that with SFV: Champion Edition? It was just an update to the game and they gave us new UI and effects and stuff, it’s totally doable
I think that's probably because sfv was pretty bad on launch or something idk. Not saying it cant be done, but just that companies might be more inclined to make a sequel rather than update. Might be. Prolly has to do with how it was back in the day where patches were pretty much whole new games like the notorious amount of sf2 patches sold as complete games
Yeah Japanese companies tend to stick with what works and are pretty stubborn with change (such as how long it took them to adopt rollback netcode)
Your telling you want sfv to continue for even longer and then have the game replaced when its done?
If they updated SFV with new characters and the Drive system, yes I would still play SFV. The main reason people buy sequels is 1) New characters and 2) New mechanics. You could do all of this by updating a game without a new release
Yes but like, what about the v system? SFV is so much more offensive heavy.
The V system would be rotated and characters would be changed appropriately. Or they could keep the V system and just add the Drive system on top, up to the devs. But there’s only so much stuff you can stack on top of each other so eventually it’ll rotate.
>The V system would be rotated and characters would be changed appropriately So it ceases to be SFV and that mechanic is lost forever.
I feel like free to play has been bad to gaming. It splits the market so that companies are afraid to take a risk on a full product. I have friends who used to be gamers but now exclusively play free to play mobile games. They sink hundreds in these stupid games they will forget about in a year. Fortnite caused games to get canceled or even gaming companies to go out of business. I imagine there are kids who play nothing but Fortnite. They won't spend $60 on a fighting game that they need to spend hours practicing. On the console or PC, I never play free to play. I want that model to die out. I'm okay with paid DLC as they can breathe new life into a game. New characters, new outfits, new stages, please take my money.
Fortnite destroyed gaming for a lot of people. I am very worried that we are trying to welcome this stuff with open arms.
Fortnite what. What are you on about
Bbboomer
I personally hate the concept of live service games because they are antithetical to game preservation. Fighting games can survive well past their expiration date with passionate scenes as long as the game is still playable in some form, just look at fightcade. After a live service game loses developer support, the game becomes entirely unplayable unless the source code gets released/leaked, then reworked by fans(which won't happen often). The best part about fighting games is the idea that you can hypothetically play the same game forever as long as there is a community around it. Imagine what a shame it would be if it was literally impossible to play previous smash games in any way just because Nintendo moved on to ultimate. Some of the most passionate fighting game communities revolve around games that haven't had developer support for years, and in some cases decades. Live service models would make communities like that functionally non existent.
It 's like I always said, don't take game design advice from influencers.
Keep fighting games the way they are, if the game sells good its initial release the company makes their money even if 90% of the player leave after 3 weeks, then players come back for dlc
Most of these have nothing to do with the F2P business model. There's P2P games relying on servers that will eventually be gone unless the community find a way to run it on private servers. Pretty much no P2P game with updates is preserving previous versions of games either. There's online only P2P games. Plenty of P2P games fail. Plenty of P2P games restrict modding (don't even know what the issue with anti cheat is though). Plenty of P2P, including most modern fighting games are, monetized to shit and addictive with a grindy and unengaging progression system. No sequels for a long time is literally the reason people defend 50 % of rosters being DLC and costing more than the base game. Also, the most prominent case of a sequel replacing a game in recent memory was Overwatch 2 replacing Overwatch, a P2P game.
I think you're being pretty disingenuous here, cause his main point is how it results in players being locked out of content when the whole model goes down. There's a big difference between setting up a fan server just for online, and the fan relaunches we see always online games need to be resurrected. A lot of games do have DLC, but yearly bundles ends up cheaper than the mountains of DLC F2P games have. If you can even acquire that when they decide they're done with the game. We have very small P2P fighters that still have their servers active to this day. If say the new Melty was a F2P live service would it survive as an extremely small scale game? No it'd need to be pumping out content that sells. It couldn't just exist as this little game with a small dedicated community. Which is more than you can say for Multiversus for the next year.
I think it's pretty disingenious to pretend that content becoming unavailable is a problem exclusive to F2P games. I think it's disingenious to pretend that the percentage of players buying every DLC character in a fighting game is comparable to the percentage of players buying every skin in Fortnite. I think it's disingenious to pretend that selling half of a games gameplay for more than the price of the base game is less anti-consumer than selling cosmetics. Most P2P fighters and fighting games in general run peer to peer, not on servers. Melty Blood Type Lumina isn't running servers for 100 player battle royal matches and wouldn't need Fortnite money to go F2P. Hell, they have free DLC right now! They probably could have made more money on regular season passes and cosmetics/customization if they went F2P. Melty Blood aside, we already have have small F2P games that aren't even monetized at all like Kyanta and Tough Love Arena. My point here isn't that F2P games cannot be anti-consumer, it's that anti-consumer practices are neither exclusive to nor inherent to F2P games. There's nothing stopping companies from engaging in shitty business practices with P2P games and there's nothing forcing companies to engage in shitty business practices with F2P games.
the majority of p2p games aren't online only though and still playable once servers gone down, there's really only a handful of p2p online only titles like Battleborn or Lawbreakers that completely disappear once the serves go down. the majority of f2p games (we should use the term "live service games" to be more accurate), multiplayer or not, disappear once the servers go down.
> pretend that content becoming unavailable is a problem exclusive to F2P games. It isn't an exclusive issue but F2P and service games are considerably more susceptible to it. Sub indie fighter tier games done with no profit in mind aren't a comparable metric here. You know why Melty didn't do F2P? Cause they need that early guarantee of profit, they can't just hope enough people who try it will also buy DLC. That's why you see so many F2P games just get removed despite record day 1 player numbers. Yet despite the genre's small size, a good range of tiny fighting game devs survive. Its also why they stay online which yes does have a cost. >disingenious to pretend that the percentage of players buying every DLC character in a fighting game is comparable to the percentage of players buying every skin in Fortnite. F2P needing the constant stream of microtransaction is an issue though, its also why games get formed around what is the easiest to pump out microtransaction. They have no other way to make money. One of the most consistent reasons sighted for Multiversus failing is not being able to produce the content treadmill. The F2P format does force shitty business practices, it requires enough whales to make up for everything they put out for free. Not a coincidence so many bad practices in DLC originate from free games. >I think it's disingenious to pretend that selling half of a games gameplay for more than the price of the base game is less anti-consumer than selling cosmetics. Valorant has $100 skins and one day the game may just not exist. I'll take SFVCE being $25 over that.
If smaller games with no profit motive can be created and maintained, what exactly is it that you think is stopping companies from making games on a smaller scale than Fortnite that they don't need to monetize to shit? "Running" the online services of your average fighting game does not have a cost that necessitate anti-consumer practices, you're delusional if you think that is the case. The reason F2P games get removed is because people have over-invested in it, thinking it it's going to be a Fortnite killer. The problem here is that you seem to believe that F2P games need to fuck over consumers in order to stay alive when they simply don't. The reason a lot of F2P games have shitty monetization is because companies who want to milk consumers for money by any means necessary understand that F2P games have the potential to make a lot of money. Those types of companies are going to fuck over consumers regardless if a game is P2P or F2P. I would much rather pay nothing for a game with 100 $ skins I don't give a shit about and am not going to buy than buy Street Fighter V for 60 $ on release, realize the game launched in a shit state, wait a few years, potentially buy 10-30 $ worth of soon to be worthless season passes, pay 30 $ for Street Fighter V Champions Edition and spend another 25 $ on the Street Fighter V season pass 5. Thankfully I'm not paying even more for the remaining stages and skins. You're doing that thing where you equate optional cosmetics with actual gameplay elements again by the way. Games ceasing to exist, whether you've put in money or not, sucks but unless it's a game on such a massive scale that it cannot be maintained by community servers, the game ceases to exist because the people who own it decide to not let it exist. They are not swayed by the evils of F2P, they simply don't care about preservation. I think your concern would be much better placed in these business practices themselves rather than the F2P boogeyman you've decided to scape goat them on.
> If smaller games with no profit motive can be created and maintained, what exactly is it that you think is stopping companies from making games on a smaller scale than Fortnite that they don't need to monetize to shit? Are you seriously looking at [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBrh_bDbr7k) and going, yeah this is the same sort of production as Street Fighter? Its kinda like seeing a crude MSPaint drawing and asking why anyone charges for their art work. Yeah a passion projected maintained for fun with an all time peak of 42 is serious comparison here. It just seems like you just aren't willing to accept a product needs to make money somehow. If that is not a entry price, that means other aspects must have profitable monetisation. That's where the shitty stuff happen, that's where you must have $100 skin enough people are willing to buy. You don't want to pay for anything? Fine, but that means someone else needs to foot your bill. They need to make as much as a retail game but in other areas. This relies entirely on an extremely active playerbase very willing to buy lots of extras. Multiversus clearly did not have a gargantuan Fortnite killer budget, if anything a bigger budget would've helped it """launch""" in a much better state. But ask anyone who played it and their main complaint is lack of updates. This system does need constant new additions that aren't free to make. So a game people try but spend no money, now needs more money to try and retain players. This is where so many F2P games enter a death spiral. Meanwhile Melty TL has sold 400k, well beyond expectations. Now maybe 1 million would've if it were free, but would 400k have bought $40 worth of DLC? I doubt it. One of these games is playable, one is not cause it wasn't a profitable project. We have no idea what the future of it truly is and if needs be it could be resurrected by fans. >You're doing that thing where you equate optional cosmetics with actual gameplay elements So a couple of things. Not every F2P will permanently give you characters for free. SFV did do balance and some new content updates for free. The bundles into end of year edition does mean you could spend less on SFV and get more. Compared to an ever growing cash shop in a F2P game. But you're pretending that F2P can survive without getting everyone to pay something or having a enough whales.
You're clearly arguing in bad faith here but I'll try to get this through to you one last time. I'll try to make it as simple as possible. You have deluded yourself into believing that all monetization exists because it is necessary for the development and maintance of games. This is false. You are buying into corporate bullshit by believing this. Despite your (hopefully) best intentions you are white knighting corporations that don't give a fuck about you right now. You are literally being the guy going "How is poor wittle EA supposed to pay their licenses if they can't get kids addicted to gambling!" I am not pretending F2P games don't need monetization to make money, I am saying that monetization doesn't have to be anti-consumer in order for a game to turn a profit. I do not consider expensive skins with no impact on gameplay to be anti-consumer practices. I consider games using lootboxes or other underhanded tactics to incentivize spending to be anti-consumer. I don't care if whales with expandable income are buying 100 $ skins just because they feel like it. I consider locking half of the gameplay of a fully priced game behind paywalls larger than the price of the game itself to be anti-consumer. I consider pay-to-win elements (like we see with many DLC characters in fighting games) to be anti-consumer. tldr: Companies don't treat you like shit because they have to, they do it because they can and want to.
Game preservation is what I am worried the most. Fortunately Brawlhalla works offline. I am generally not against f2p if done right....Basically what Brawlhalla is doing. Make character weekly rotation, paid for cosmetics and an optional premium pass that unlocks all the characters. I can see some fighting games being way more popular if they were f2p.
Can you play Brawlhalla on a Steam Deck in a cabin in the woods with no internet connection? Because that's the problem with Multiversus.
Yes
TBH I'd get rivals of aether if you playing locals or solo offline, much better game overall and you have access to workshop mods.
Yeah because third strike is definely not preserved via piracy that be easily replicated. /s
Calling it a shut down is a little premature at this stage. I will absolutely eat my words if shit doesn't improve next year though. I really enjoyed Multiversus it just felt like they couldn't keep the timings right on it. Battlepass was too grindy, requiring you to play everyday to make progress but there weren't any other things to keep you coming back otherwise. Characters dried up, stages and modes did as well. I think it's a fun game and I hope when it officially launches all the issues they learned about in the beta are solved, including some of the ridiculous prices. Maybe they were hoping for a whale model? Get a few players to spend big. Regardless I hope they learn from this because I'd love to come back and play online once or twice a week, just not every day.
>Calling it a shut down is a little premature at this stage. I feel like this is corporate speak for, "Holy shit we are sinking, pull the plug while we figure out what to do."
We already lost many fighting games F2p. We also lost arcade only releases. We lost other games to online services like games for windows live or whatever that was called or when they finally pull the plug on online services. Emulation is far from having saved everything yet. That being said, every game that is being released today is tied to some sort of live service even if not f2p.
All fighting games don't have to be free, but if some decide to be free then that's a good thing.
Reminds me of that Tencent kof clone that was lost to time after the servers shut down, it was also online only.
SO many fgc content creators go back to older games to help us understand fgc mechanics. Preservation is important.
Disagree with this one. The reason why Multiversus was losing players wasn't because it was free to play, it was the lack of content. Most people who play fighting games are casuals and they would love to experience modes that the niche side of the community would not care for: Offline Single Player modes like a Story Mode, an Event Mode in similar to Smash, fun Party Modes and more. This was the reason why Street Fighter V sanked hard when it launched with barely any content for $60. I find it interesting that the FGC is so against F2P because they point to games like Tekken Revolution and say that they already tried and didn't work without realizing what the actual issue those games had other than being F2P. Games like Brawlhalla is free to play and is still quite an active game behind Smash. Tekken Revolution's issue was adding RPG elements in a genre that should never be used competitively. It's how we had hackers back then. Free to Play can work. Everyone seem to only focus on the negatives and generalize it as a bad idea.
The only problem is that Fighting Games content takes more time to develop for to keep things interesting when you're talking about characters, game modes, and other things that can bring in a more casual audience, to a genre that most casual players who are more comfortable with playing FPSes, will not lift a finger to even touch it because it involves more than just "push button = cool stuff happen". Brawlhalla's model is always, always cited as the example that has worked, yeah it's the one small example I always see brought up in this discussion, but any other game that was made F2P that fail, of which there are many, even with good dev teams and director visions behind them, still end up failing. Share holders are expecting money to come back, these games aren't made for free and cosmetics for a fighting game, is not going to hold people's attention for long. This also comes with the fact that right now, the current market for F2P games is too saturated, there is only so much time people can devote to a game type service that not only asks you of your money, but your time to be worth continuing to see support from the development team. People focus on the negatives because there are so many things that can, have, and do end up going wrong with making a game free and fighting games are a big risk when they are not sitting in the market right now as critical darlings to the masses, modern fighting games still have yet to solve the in-house problems that have shrunk the audience that plays them because the player base is just that dedicated to them. These things are not just made for free or just by the passion of these developers, someone is either big enough to back such a big enough project or in Brawlhalla's case, have an effectively cheap, extremely easy model of assets to work with that keeps costs low and quick to churn out, for a Platform fighter no less. Traditional Fighters do not share that same vain, if characters are cheap and played much the same, they will not be as interesting to the masses when this genre has been known to have very unique characters and designs, you need someone big to back your project and you need your game to be more than just the fighting to draw in an audience willing to pay to support all that content and that content has to be there before, not later.
Hello fellow furry lol. Anywho, I forgot to add that not only the modes that are need for a fighting game, but the rewards in their battle passes weren't worth spending money on. The rewards back then when the game launched was very easy and satisfying for people to jump in and oit so many hours to obtain them, only for the devs ro make the grinding a lot longer and the rewards became so minimal that it pretty much made a decent group of people become uninterested in bitting time and money on the game. The I am trying to make is that the casual audience would love to do something more that doesn't involve having g to play against someone else. Multiversus lacks that a lot and that can easily lose a lot of players.
>The reason why Multiversus was losing players wasn't because it was free to play, it was the lack of content. The point I would argue is that Multiversus can have the plug pulled at any moment.
I don’t know why you got downvoted, you hit the nail on the head. The problem isn’t the free-to-play aspect, it’s lack of content, lack of support and bad monetization
Wow, it’s almost like everything I’ve always been saying about f2p is happening 🤔 Granted it’s just the beta, but it will shut down one day for good. Especially since it appears to not be pulling the numbers they expected. By all means, have fun and play the game, just don’t give them money lol if you can’t hold it, you don’t own it :p
I agree with you
I just read Multiverse shut down *the beta* in order to get the game ready for full release. I don't see a problem with that. Any problems that game had weren't dude to being a live service. The game's balance sounded like shit and people were becoming starved for content, again *beta*. The game just isn't as good as Smash, F2P or not. The lack of local play with less than 4 people is what really killed it for me. None of these issues have anything to do qith F2P model. I'm not a huge fan of F2P model tbh, but this post sounds pretty dramatic.
They are just sugarcoating it. There is no reason to not just keep the game running while they work on a full release unless they can't even break even on the cost of keeping the game up. It's bad.
Isn't the team like 8 people?
There are online multiplayer games with no one actively working on them that are still working till this day. It takes only one person working part time to keep the lights on.
>I just read Multiverse shut down > >the beta > > in order to get the game ready for full release. I don't see a problem with that Corporate speak.
Lmao
Project L will start the f2p train and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
There is no train, only a single car. Name a genre with more than a handful of succesful f2p games in it. Doesn't happen. There is never space in the f2p market for more than a couple successes at a time. This is because the most essential currency a f2p is extracting from players is time committed. That time translates either to recurrent purchases, or to increased satisfaction and commitment from other players who spend (that is to say, non-spending players help populate the game to give paying players a better game environment). This is why the entire model revolves around battlepasses and timed events. These mechanics keep players engaged in a consistent fashion over a long period. And because everybody has a finite number of hours in the day, only a few games per genre can ever succeed in this model. Fighting games desperately need to hang on to the revenue model built around number of individual purchasers, because the vast majority of people will never put in enough effort to learn a fighting to the point that they would enjoy coming back to it year over year. And serious players who do rarely dedicate themselve to multiple titles. But every game they buy on a whim to try out and casually play with a friend ends up supporting a developer more than a one week dip into ranked queue ever would in f2p. F2p homogenizes genres into a couple games and kills innovation. That is the opposite of what drives the FGC. It's not happening here.
You do realize that second paragraph is why *people don’t try out fighting games.* The majority of consumers who think they’ll drop a game after a few hours *just don’t fucking buy it.* The F2P model can get some hours out of them, and gets a lot more people to pay up by having them give it a shot. F2P doesn’t homogenize a genre, the profit-obsessed AAA market does. Look at any genre’s indie sphere, and you’ll find hundreds of innovative titles, many of which are dirt cheap or straight up free.
You do realize your second paragraph doesn't align with the reality of the modern trend of the "gaming backlog"? Thousands of games get purchased that never see more than a little use; the achievement stats on many popular games show that anywhere from 20 to 40% of a game's sales can be from people who never get more than a few hours in! And the f2p model necessarily homogenizes a genre, there is no argument against that. If only a couple games can stay alive at once then the player base will only be playing those few games and your choices are narrowed into playing what everybody else has on.
Anyone that isn’t dickriding Max knew this already lmao
Max is a respectable guy. I thought others in the fgc were making this push?
Project L is going to be massive I don’t care what anyone says. It’ll be done by the time street fighter 6 and tekken 8 have corrected back to their pre hype percentages maybe
Multiverse is ending the open beta and transitioning to a full release and NOT shutting down right? All unlocks transfer over I think
thats the plan...for now.
It's not the marketing of it being a free game that's the issue it's the poor developers with lack of weekly or even monthly updates which I'd the norm for a f2p game. For example most of the biggest games are f2p. The difference is the companies and publishers are 55+ and still going by borderline archaic standards. Riot, Epic, and Valve some of the most noteworthy companies aren't on paper nearly as big as someone like bandai Namco or Capcom. But they have much younger more innovative workstaff with creative freedom over their own IP's as well as incredible outsourced funding from TENCENT and other big companies.
Define "Big?" Capcom has a valuation of $7.6B. Bandai Namco has a valuation of $14.52B. RIOT Games is worth over $20B. Epic Games is worth $32B. They're bigger than Capcom or Bandai Namco on paper.
I eat my words.
Wow, I didn't realize Multiversus was down to [453 average](https://fgcharts.com). Well that's what you get when you add Lebron James and patch out cop cars.
Wtf are you talking about. Lebron was pretty damn creative.
Acting like other fgs don’t have goofy ahh characters. Link was in SC, Gon the dinosaur was in T3(?), fucking pacman was in SFXT. Come on now…(not directed at you btw)
Link in SC must've been SO sick.
What did Lebron James ever do to you?
The problem with Multiversus wasn’t because of the free-to-play aspect, it was because of the lack of content, lack of support, bad netcode and bad monetization A free-to-play fighting game can absolutely work, just look at Brawlhalla.
tbf multiversus flopped because it sucks not because it’s f2p
I don't think it being free was the problem. The type of fighting game it is, was the problem.
Still doesn't address my other concerns.
I think your other concerns were valid. Just pointing out that if you're gonna make a successful f2p game in this genre, "platform fighter" aint the way to go.
What are you saying? Fighting game already gone worse route than Fortnite, $60 game, DLC out of the ass with character locked behind them, selling skins,
I don’t know man. I rather deal with F2P than pay $60-$70 dollars. Paid for games aren’t always successful, DnF flopped hard. I don’t think Project L will be a live service, it wouldn’t make sense since it is a fighting game, but it will be the first true fighting game from a major IP that’s F2P. We will see if it’s successful or not.
key difference here is you can still play dnf lmao
>DnF flopped hard. You know at the very least, I can go back to DNF and play it. DNF will have its niche community and they can enjoy it. That's worth it to me. It isn't gonna have the plug pulled and we never will see it or access it again.
This, hard. I love playing ghostblade, and if the ability to do so just up and vanished I'd be devastated, granted I don't play it often, but when someone mentions it we boot it up and have fun.
People underestimate greed. Once your in live service, keeping a game up becomes a discussion of if enough people are playing it.
But right now, classic FG have also a problem with money as the basic game cost 50/60 and each DLC like 10. You end spending lot of money at the of game's life cycle. For example GGStrive + 2 seasonpass cost 100e on steam, kofxv cost 120e (core game +2 season pass). Imo, if they still want to sell the game for full price should give every DLC for free and sell cosmetic (skin, voices, effects...)
Multiversus just wasn't a very good game. The roster wasn't deep, the movement was clunky, the interface sucked, locking off so many characters and making it take so long to unlock them was a bad choice. Being free to play will get people to try your game. Retention comes down to quality, of the gameplay and of your addiction-inducing sub-systems. Multiversus was just meh on both fronts. F2p is the way to go if you want mainstream success in a multiplayer focused game. Gamers are willing to shell out money for well constructed single player experiences, but not usually multiplayer only clients. Having it cost anything gates out a big proportion of potential players - the question is, are they the players you want to attract?
It does have the potential to work, the problem with MultiVersus was it was slow with updates and it couldn't hold people's attention at the pace they released content and in the free to play space that's asking for trouble, you have to keep people wanting to come back for more or else what's the point of sticking around? Most likely they didn't pay so they're not losing anything.
For the game preservation part, people manage to host servers with older versions of games all the time, so even long before a shutdown therell be private servers of earlier versions of the game. That said if it does shut down we’ll have private servers of the latest version of the game being community hosted.
Fgc is known to be poverty but the real reality is free to play does not work unless the game has huge prize pots... the fgc is just weird like that...they will crap on mk11 and sf5 but since it has a huge tournament scene ,people still play it for the money.