Discussing Alternate Pricing Models for Fighting Games
What the pros and cons of F2P models could look like
The most predatory fighting game I’ve purchased in recent history was probably Granblue Fantasy Versus. While it now has a majorly reduced price for both the base game and the Legendary Edition that includes the entire past two years of content for $50, at the time of its launch I had spent over $100 on a game that had two seasons of content within its first year of development, including DLC characters that were out at launch, and didn’t even debut with rollback right before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had bought the game initially thinking it would be a fun game to play at locals while waiting for Strive, but I ended up dropping a lot of money on a game that launched with only half of its roster and no working online. You could obviously argue that I spent the same amount of money on other fighting games prior to GBVS, like Pokken, Smash Bros., and DBFZ, but those games also had thriving offline scenes and clearly planned development cycles, so I felt like I was getting my money’s worth. For the same reason, even though I’ve probably spent about as much money on GBVS as I have GGST, I feel like it was worth it for GGST since I’ve played the game for over 500 hours and it launched with more features than GBVS did- obviously including rollback- and had a clear development cycle in mind post-launch.
Fighting game pricing models have always been a hotly contested debate, and the discussion about how much they should cost players circles back around every time a new game comes out at full price while another announces a free-to-play model. The fighting game that probably did the most for pushing alternative pricing models was Killer Instinct back in 2013, where it launched with a free-to-play model where you didn’t have to pay for additional content or DLC if you didn’t intend on using it; you could simply claim your main character and play KI forever. While this was unexpected and controversial at the time for players who wanted to just buy the game once and have all the content, this is ironically the kind of model players advocate for now. F2P models in games like League of Legends and the upcoming MultiVersus allow players to download the game and try a handful of free characters on a rotation before either buying the content they like with real-world currency or earning in-game points to unlock more characters.
Of course, the pricing models for fighting games with traditional initial purchase entry can change throughout their release cycles. GGST, for instance, recently announced a new Starter Edition that folds the Season 1 DLC into its base price, and Street Fighter V Champion Edition includes all content from Seasons 1 thru 4 (excepting Capcom Pro Tour stages) for a $40 price tag. This also leads to other questions — what incentive is there for early adopters to buy the game if it’s just going to get its price reduced after launch, or if it’s going to have some ‘final edition’ later? This is a growing trend endemic in the games industry beyond the fighting game genre, especially in a world where games that were only recently developed end up with remakes or remasters that promise additional content, such as The Last of Us Part 1. Usually, the incentive to play the game at launch is because you don’t want to wait for a long time to try a game or play chicken with the developer, and often there will be things like pre-order or early adopter bonuses for buying the game within the launch window. GGST had the Sol and Ky bonus palettes, and KOFXV had the extra outfits for Terry and Leona- the former went away entirely after the launch window, and the latter were free but became paid DLC after the launch window.
Still, even if paid games have incentives that let you avoid purchase regret regardless of the launch cycle, you could avoid the game of chicken entirely by just having a F2P model and letting players jump in whenever they want. The motivation for downloading the game could be a new mode, character, or event- while it wasn’t F2P at the time, I bought Team Fortress 2 after the Mac Update, and I downloaded League of Legends after the Get Jinxed! music video. Updates like these can bring players into your games for extremely low commitment, allow them to try the content, and even if they don’t stick around, you’ve increased your total download count and maybe gotten them to spend a bit of money for the time they were there. When TF2 finally went F2P, I was rewarded for owning the game prior by having my items promoted to a new quality of rarity. I may not play League anymore, but Riot certainly ran off with a lot of the cash I spent on Leona skins.
Those same exclusive events can be a double-edged sword, however. Timed exclusive releases in F2P games are often relegated to seasonable, permanently missed content that may never be cycled back in for players who show up late, in much the same fashion as those that may exist in games with initial purchase models. This can be exacerbated by live-service F2P games that introduce battle passes as a method of rolling out content. While most F2P games make their money off character skins or often-criticized lootboxes, battle passes as an additional layer of content that you must work towards after purchasing can be frustrating since it makes gameplay feel like a chore. Furthermore, if you can’t complete the battle pass by the time it ends, you may end up missing out on content you paid for. This can be especially the case if, like in early Halo Infinite, the battle pass takes too long to make progress on relative to the amount of time put into completing it. The fact that battle passes also exist in tandem to existing daily/weekly/monthly missions that players are forced to grind out to earn content can lead to burning out from playing a game very quickly and is one of the most reviled aspects of live-service models.
This doesn’t mean that pay-to-play games don’t also have these payment models- Rainbow Six Siege has a paid battle pass, Overwatch has free and paid lootboxes, and several MMOs have expansion passes, monthly subscriptions, and more. However, games with pay-to-play models have less of these features and usually make their money off the initial purchase of the game, and any future development is often funded by season passes. This has been the model that most modern fighting games have subscribed to, and they still find success with them- see GGST, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Tekken 7, all of which have playerbases comparable to SFVCE. (Prior to its compilation releases, SFV did have a system for post-launch content like some F2P games where you could earn in-game currency and exchange it for most DLC, excluding things like the content that funds CPT. However, SFV also featured traditional season pass alternatives, and still does for SVCE Season 5.)
The success of most modern fighting game IPs still pales in comparison to how massively popular Brawlhalla has become. A F2P platform fighter, Brawlhalla holds massive concurrent numbers, with over six times the amount of active players on Steam as Tekken 7 and GGST- 18,000 versus 3,000 each, and 80 million players as of April 2022. Many onlookers credit this accomplishment to the game’s pricing model, as even if only a small portion of those 80 million players stick around, the F2P aspect of the game encourages anyone who wants to try the game to do so on a whim. There are other contributing factors to Brawlhalla’s success- mobile versions, cross-platform play, good netcode, and the platform fighter sub-genre being easily accessible- but as other titles catch up in those areas, the pricing model of modern fighting games may be the last barrier that makes the genre as successful or accessible as other competitive genres like shooters and MOBAs. On the other hand, F2P doesn’t necessarily guarantee success- we can look at Icons: Combat Arena as an example of a game that had a F2P model that was unable to last long enough to recoup money spent on development. This combined with other aspects such as a highly narrow appeal and lack of content to spend real money on out of the gate led to the Wavedash Games team shuttering development totally.
Even if the core contingent of the fighting game audience pushes aside arguments about whether the genre even needs to match the success of other titles, there’s no denying that the monetary cost of entry for fighting games is incredibly high, much higher than the other examples given. Between the hardware platform, the game and future DLC, the controller or fightstick you may be using, the subscription cost for a service like PS+, and expenses for entering offline tournaments, fighting games are a major money pit matched by very few other games- perhaps by physical TCGs, MMOs, and gacha games. In fact, the main impetus for this article was the money I’ve spent on fighting games in the past year: a copy of GGST for Steam and another for my PS4 so I could take it to locals, MBTL on Steam, a second copy of BBTAG for Steam after the rollback patch, KOFXV on Steam, the P4AU Steam remaster after they announced rollback, new buttons for my fightstick, an Evo competitive pass and entry into the MBTL bracket (and then the money I’ll be spending on hotel and travel,) and soon I will probably be playing DNF Duel and the Capcom Fighting Collection. When you pay for tournaments and for a bunch of different fighting games for full price, it starts to add up.
In defense of the developers- fighting games are an expensive genre to develop. During discussion of the development for Skullgirls DLC, the estimate for how much Squigly would cost was roughly $150,000, with the base roster costing around $250k per character. (Squigly cost lest because the development team at Lab Zero at the time voluntarily took pay cuts and she had already partially been completed by the time they were laid off from Reverge.) Then-CEO of Lab Zero, Peter Bartholow, speculated that SFIV characters at the time cost over $1 million to develop. So if a single fighting game character costs between a quarter and a cool million dollars to develop, imagine how much it may cost to develop the engine (or make the pre-fab engine work for you,) systems, matchmaking, cross-play, online netcode, stages, additional modes, alternate costumes and colors, and so on. Since fighting games are also an especially niche genre, it may not be cost-effective for every title to have cheaper or free pricing models at their outset, since developers and publishers can’t guarantee they’ll make their money back on the title. While developers like Microsoft, Ubisoft, Capcom, and Bandai Namco might be able to afford to charge less for some titles, or even make games like KI free, that may not be the case for developers like SNK and Arc System Works who, while prolific, primarily develop niche arcade games and don’t have much success outside of those genres.
This brings me to my final point and an important counterexample- Melty Blood Type Lumina. MBTL launched last October with a $50 price tag and, since then, has released four DLC characters totally for free, in addition to balance patches, new character colors, and singleplayer modes like Boss Rush. This can be surprising for anyone familiar with developer French Bread’s history as a doujin circle- essentially a Japanese indie developer. While their previous titles, Melty Blood and Under Night In-Birth, had several release versions, the community playing those games was exceptionally small even for the already niche anime fighter scene- to put it bluntly, it was never like French Bread was rolling in money. Presumably, the funding from working with the Type Moon license allowed French Bread to work on post-launch development for MBTL without charging the players for future DLC. This has also made MBTL one of the most affordable new fighting games on the market right now, barring games like P4AU that are just remasters or rereleases. GGST has a second season of DLC on the way, and KOFXV is halfway done with its first. Being able to pick up MBTL for a flat price, slightly cheaper than most other new titles, and get post-launch content that would be $20 or more in any other game is a surprisingly good deal for an indie developer that you wouldn’t expect to be able to afford to make those decisions.
The Melty Blood example serves to illustrate that developers can figure out ways to price their games and post-launch content affordably for players even if they aren’t F2P games. We also have examples of games like GGST and KOFXV that have found large audiences despite their traditional pricing models. While the success of these games doesn’t compare to the F2P success of Brawlhalla, the failure of Icons also serves as a cautionary tale for developers who can’t afford to finance a F2P title. Even if traditional purchase models can lead to certain games being expensive, especially for early adopters, F2P games treated as a live service with things like exclusive events, daily missions, and battle passes can be equally predatory and make the game feel like work or an obligation. Of course, developers and publishers that can afford to make their games F2P and accessible (or make future content free or cheap) should be encouraged to do so, as the value of making any competitive online game easy to get into cannot be understated. After all, with the proliferation of the genre as esports and the advancement of titles in other areas such as online quality of life, F2P- if done right- could be the next step that games like Street Fighter 6 or Riot’s Project L take to make it even bigger.
