Hey all,
I dabble in game design, and today was reading a bit of a book about ways to monetize a game. One major way it gave was through microtransactions. For the uninitiated, this is the idea that a game would be released free to download, with profit coming from people buying in-game items. One of the hallmark examples of this is League of Legends, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (or something) where most of the character cast and costumesand whatnot can be bought, or earned if one plays the game long enough.
I thought, would people accept this for fighting games?
Here’s the example: Imagine Capcom releases AE for free (we have officially entered the realm of imagination). The catch is, only a few characters are available for regular play. Maybe it’s a set few (Ryu, Ken, Chun, and Guile, maybe) or maybe the list changes from week to week. To get other characters, you spend, to pull a number out of my ass, $4 for a character, or like $15 for a four-pack (like, you can get a Shoto four-pack of Sakura, Dan, Gouken, and Akuma). Now, you can also earn characters by means of Capcom Points or something, which you earn slowly through playing but still can buy you characters given time. Also noteworthy, to avoid buyer’s remorse, all characters are available for test drive in Training and Arcade, just not Versus or Online. Perhaps a $10 Tournament Pass would be available to authorize every character for play on a system for like a week.
I’m just throwing out ideas, not really planning on doing anything with them. I just was wondering how my fellow Fighting Game players would react to something like this.