This is partly the reason why games like League of Legends and Dota 2 are so popular.
They’re basically free and you can run them on a toaster. This helps with their adoption in Eastern markets, where those games get a lot of their popularity because they’re downloaded for free and played in PC cafes or ‘PC bangs’:
It’s possible KI could do for fighting games what LoL and Dota 2 have done for MOBA’s.
I agree, it invites a wider range of possible newbies, without making people feel like they have to have pro set up or be pros
Ki is not free to play, not really. You only get one character on a rotation for free (plus single player modes, but that’s not the point here). Rising Thunder was better positioned to do what you describe, but since Riot bought the developers and closed that project, I expect a F2P “League of Fighters” game announcement some time in the future.
Yeah, I’m surprised at how many people mistake this game in the free-to-play category of games.
You have a full game playable for free, but only for one character at a time. If you want the total freedom and control of your game, you buy the character content and you get to use it anytime you want. The free version of KI is basically a much less restricted, glorified demo version of the full game, you get full functionality and achievements, just one character at a time and not of your control.
The free-to-play style is you have a small amount of options which can grow by grinding and earning stuff in game to advance your progress or microtransactions to skip some of the tedium to move up in your gameplay. Generally, you can unlock everything within the game for free, but the time spent grinding to do so may not be worth it. Sort of the first taste is free kind of thing.
I’ve seen a lot of people bash KI on youtube for what they call the most terrible free to play model. Since day 1 that KI’s sales model has been announced, Ken Lobb himself had to correct people by telling them “it’s not free to play.” So it shows how a lot of people will bash something because it’s popular rather than doing their research for the truth.
Back on point, the game isn’t really a free to play experience, just to clarify, but it’s a more modest, approachable sales model, especially in comparison to some of the things Capcom has tried in recent years. I’m still chapped over Street Fighter x Tekken.
However, I’m thinking it could quite possibly bring in a great deal of new players to the game and really give the game a second wind.
KI is a “try before you buy” style of F2P. Also, it’s not going to appeal to mouse and keyboard players because that’s not a great way to play the game. So I doubt it will be a hot topic in PC bangs.
I really can’t say that I think KI is going to get a huge surge unpopularity due to the PC release. We will see. A lot of the FGC guys really pulled for this, but their idea is more to get competitive FGC players into the game. That may be high profile but the numbers are tiny.
I don’t think KI can do what those other examples have done, at least not simply based on the premise of having “low PC specs”. Having “low specs” aren’t why LoL and Dota succeeded, though I’m sure it is a boon for them at the end of the day. The fact that they are free played a bigger role, on top of the fact that they are easy to play, and within that space there wasn’t a huge breadth of competition (please correct if I’m wrong on this).
I don’t really know enough about the MOBA scene to make any real informed comment, but I think that when you compare the MOBA scene with the FG scene that there are a lot of other differences that may be being over looked.
In my child hood I used to live in Korea Town in Los Angeles. We used to go to an arcade their every so often and then it was turned into those PC bang places. Needless to say I was dissapointed I’d never get to play MvC ever again. Still, I got into Counter Strike for a while it was kind of fun.
As for F2P. People will try it out of curiosity but the game really isn’t f2p. You can’t earn characters by playing alot.
Yeah, no. It’s not truly F2P, will never run on a complete toaster because you still need to maintain 60 fps, locked behind W10 and W store. No way it will spawn the same LAN cafe culture as ARTS games.
I agree with your sentiment in general, but I would dispute this particular claim. Granted, I do not play on keyboard, but I did try keyboard Rising Thunder and it played very well. That’s because it had one-button special moves, but if you look at KI, it has very simple inputs as well. There are no half circles, 360s or 720s; it’s just qcf/qcb or bf or du. That is perfectly doable.
I don’t believe the scene has anything to do with, but the genre does. Fighting games, on the surface, are the perfect casual game to play while having a beer with your buddies, but I’ve yet to see that generate any sort of more-than-passing interest. If you do get interested in fighting games, like I did when I was looking for something competitive that was faster paced than SC2 and not an FPS, you quickly realise that they are a tough genre to get into more than just glazing the surface.
In that respect, KI is one of the hardest games to play in my opinion. While USF4 or MK9/MKX certainly have a ton of technical intricacies, I’ve played both with my non-FGC friends and they were able to catch on pretty quickly and not just spaz out. But have you tried explaining the KI combo system to a complete noob? I have. It’s impossible. You have to give them a general lecture on how fighting games work, and then tell them “KI is different than that” and explain a weird-■■■■ combo system. When you get to counter-breakers, most people just say “nah, that’s not for me, too complicated”. The combo assist mode makes easing into the system just a little bit earlier, but I still think the barrier of entry is prihibitively high.
Basically, you have to be a fighting game fan already to get into KI - you won’t turn anyone solely on its merits. Which is a shame, but what can you do?