The fact that Riptor may or may not be slightly lower tier doesn’t impact how KI’s free to play model is run. They aren’t intentionally making Riptor weak so that people will “need” to buy other characters to compete at the game. Riptor isn’t the permanent free to play character anyway; maybe they’ll give you whoever you think is the toppest of the top tier for a few weeks.
KI’s model is literally just a game demo. Here’s the whole game, but you can only play with one character until you buy more. Like what you see? Please buy the game and support us. Happy with just the one rotating character? That’s cool too. The cost of owning all the S1 and S2 characters is $40, less than the cost of many big-name games on the market (certainly less than MKX and SFV will be).
I wouldn’t think that it would be an issue. I mean, compare it to League of Legends.
I could pay $20 in KI, and get 8-9 characters, each with 9 colors and a few dozen accessories.
My brother used $20 for Riot Points. He got a few skins.
Comparatively, I’d say that KI’s model is relatively fair. Especially compared to the place where it matters; other competitive fighting games like MKX and SFV
"Oh, you can try out our game, if you drive out to an event 2 states over and/or preorder."
Plus, the pricing for the full game is much better.
I paid $90 for the full MKX package. That gave me one game and 4 extra characters.
I paid $80 for both KI Ultra packs. That gave me 3 games, a retro skin with 3 sets of accessories for all 16 base characters, a premium skin for every character, and functional net code.
And then there’s my friend Jimmy. He paid $5 for Sabrewulf and was plenty competitive.
And before I bought the game, I still managed to kick his ■■■ with freebie characters if I used my head.
All things considered, I think KI’s pricing seems pretty fair. Maybe not Steam Summer sale fair. But still better than some other options.
As much as I love steam summer/winter sales (and regularly buy stuff from them), I think they are doing some damage to what people expect as a fair price to pay for a videogame. People are starting to complain about $20 for a game that will get them 30 hours of fun, and they’ll wait for the steam sale in 2 years when it’s $3.99 and the devs are broke.
Not to make people feel guilty for not paying full price for a videogame, especially one that you weren’t planning on buying anyway, but I know far too many people now who are actually really interested in playing a game but aren’t interested in paying the actual price of the game. I’m not really sure how the industry will keep itself afloat long term if steam sales become the standard for pricing. :\
I was mostly using it (Steam Summer Sales) as a general example, really. Steam Sales are often used as examples of a pro consumer pricing model.
For the amount of entertainment I’ve gotten from KI (over 700 hours and counting) I am MORE than satisfied with the price I paid for it. Same goes for Fallout or Doom games and even some Call of Duty games. I put stupid amounts of time into those games, because they’re really satisfying experiences and provide a wealth of content to enjoy. What bothers me is games like The Order 1886, Evolve, Destiny, or Titanfall with far less content or replay value being put up for the same price as games with a metric butt ton of content.
Personally, I’m perfectly fine with paying full price for games. Most of my game catalogue was paid for at full price… Well, I say that, but I got Valve’s entire catalogue (Portal, Left4Dead, Half Life, etc) for about $30 in a flash sale, but otherwise I’m content with paying regular price for a game if it’s worth the money.
Yeah, I just wanted to make a little rant about it, that’s all. lol
Steam sales can do really good things for indie publishers as well, since they can get their games into the hands of people who wouldn’t otherwise have cared, but I’m just a little worried about what it’s doing to the public perception of game prices.
Game pricing is always a huge topic of conversation though, because there’s tons of other factors… like you mentioned, you could talk about how some games charge you $90 for a game that lasts 5 hours and is largely cutscenes (The Order 1886, eg) because their development process got massively bloated and their end product isn’t very good. So that does a lot of damage towards gamers’ perceptions of game prices too.
I’m in the same boat as Infil where I would definitely enjoy a PC beta but they are probably building it with Season 3 in mind. I think with all the disastrous PC ports of games lately a test before the global release would be very important. With that being said though I’m sure they already have a playable version of the game on PC just for season 2 I’m sure by now. They still are probably working on Cross-play, online, and DirectX 12 features though.
A PC port isn’t hard to do, the past few failures were just because the developers were lazy. I highly doubt that the KI Developers are lazy. They already have one of the best netcodes to gloat about, I don’t think they will disappoint. The only people who will experience issues are those who will try to get the most out of their toaster. KI will have some decent hardware requirements I would assume but they won’t be extreme since fighting games don’t have a whole lot to process compared to open world games. Since they are planning on cross play, I’m assuming that’s why it will require windows 10. Since they know the hardware of windows 10, and that’s what the X1 uses, I’m pretty sure that if your pc has the same specs as the X1, playing from PC vs X1 will be no different. The net code will run the same, but if I can play from my PC without a Gold subscription, consider my X1 gone =)
I know you can’t see the opponent’s pick before the match starts (I played the game too). But I analyze the problem just considering 2 important things:
The actual situation of ranked
A little-modest income of PC players that won’t change drastically the situation in mid - long terms.
We know that usually you meet the same, usual people for multiple times per day, even consecutively. So you should know for sure which character that a freebie is going to play and you can counter it, because he can’t choose. I make you a fair example: I played against a person called OriginalCK for 7 consecutive times. He used Sabrewulf and Riptor while I was playing TJ Kombo. After 5 times I defeated him, he picked Kan Ra with the result of winning the other 2 remaining matches. Tj Kombo suffers from long range attacks after all, at least the ol’ pre-nerf boxer.
So, under this point of view, having cash gives a little advantage. Of course, if you’re good and the other is a noob, you can win even against a Sadira by using a Riptor on steroids.
Another important note: if the number of PC players, for a miraculous reason, should be very very high, this part can be considered archived and closed.
Btw, I shot a bullet and you took it. By answering, you increased the visibility of this topic, so now it gets the attention he deserved. Another like for you.
From what I’ve heard, PC gamers won’t pay for the gold subscription for sure. Somebody corrects me if I’m wrong
There are some intricacies though. IG are not as familiar with the engine as the creators, which makes porting considerably harder. The game has to run at 90 fps under the hood (at least that’s what the devs say) and it is quite a high framerate, a lot of PCs can’t even handle 60.
I’m interested to see how are they going to weed out people who play on potato sack level computers. I’ve heard that some SF title had a hardware threshold and you couldn’t play online if you were below that.
Seriously, wееd, is that the word you don’t like, forum engine?
Can we pleeeeease get some response from the forum creators (@Rukizzel) about this “profanity” whitelist? I volunteer to go through the whitelist personally, word by word, and submit a new list with the “normal” words removed. I like to think I can be considered trustworthy.
It’s extremely over-aggressive and impacting our ability to write perfectly normal English sentences.
Yes, it’s censoring basic English words that are not being used as profanity because they might have some slightly offensive connotation 1 out of 10 times, maybe. When the forums first launched, they had “kill” on their censor list (so we couldn’t even talk about the title of the game). They’ve removed a few of the super bad cases but the list is still way too aggressive.
You don’t know who is playing the free rotating character and who owns the game. There’s no indication in the game. Since most people pick a single character to play in ranked, the same could apply to everyone.
Yep, you’re right. But as I told you, we have to consider the two oversaid factors. And it’s quite understandable who’s playing the rotating character because he can’t choose. However, with more and more people, this problem won’t persist because you aren’t going to face the same opponent multiple times.
Unfortunately the fact a little modest part of people is playing KI put some flaws in the ranked system, like the repeated match with unequal grades.
They may not be willing to share any information on this topic right now, but if you actually want a response, your best bet is to tag a developer like @TempusChaoti.
EDIT: Did it a couple of days ago and sent a message to one of the community managers. Waiting for the answer now. As they say, asking is legit, answering is politeness. But I guess there isn’t enough time to read it, but to declare the winner of friday contest yes.