It a shame fighting games nowadays cost $150 ($60 of base game and $90 of DLC)
They should be free-to-play. Fighting games could be pulling in billions if they were F2P and reasonably priced. Very few people seem willing to do the buy in price of a fighting game. The best selling home release for a fighting game is Smash Bros. Ultimate. Nintendo announced last year that it’s sold over 32 million copies in around four and a half years. But nothing sells near that. The closest thing to Smash is Mortal Kombat, and that did 15 million is a little over three years. Everything else does less, and takes longer to do it.
But, MultiVersus had 20 million users in less than a month. That Ubisoft F2P platform fighter Brawlhalla that you never hear about... last year they announced 100 million players. I think the future of fighting games is a free to play model with much lower pricing points. This thing of going after whales, which make up an extremely low percentage of any games market, it’s fucking dumb.
Say Capcom release some new Marvel vs Capcom style fighting game tomorrow. 50 characters. MvC3 has 50 characters. It’s four vs four now...you need one more character than before. They say: We’re charging a dollar a character, you can unlock them by playing the game and getting points to unlock characters, but you can buy a character for a dollar. No sales or bundles either, just a simple low flat rate for everything. You play the game a bit, you want everyone right away, it’s $50. Basically the price of buying a new game, less even. Everyone also has 3 extra costumes right out of the gate. They’re .25¢. $37.50 for all 150 of them. Most people are probably going to think twice about spending $10 (or $5) on a digital costume in a video game, but they probably wouldn’t think twice about .25¢. A quarter is nothing. Ten bucks for one costume in a video game feels like a ripoff, ten buck for 40 costumes would seem like a deal to some people in comparison. If that game was able to get 20 million people playing it in under a month like MultiVersus did, and they were able to get just a quarter of those people to buy all the characters, and buy all the costumes, that’d be a more profitable game for Capcom (and in the first month) than MvC3 and Street Fighter 6. Something like over $100 million what Capcom made selling Street Fighter 6. If 95% of those 20 million people just bought ten characters, nothing else, that’d still be $190,000,000 in a month; if they were able to do that on a scale of 100 million people they’d just be shy of a billion dollars. If they got a quarter of a 100 million people to buy 50 characters for $50, that’d be over a billion dollars.
