I honestly don’t understand the mindset of some people. Not to disparage any opinions, but you MUST understand that it is ALL connected. Suppporting the tournament scene IS supporting the game and supporting its content. Even if you don’t enjoy watching tournaments yourself, you should understand that tournaments are a LARGE part of marketing for FGs.
KI as it is get NO marketing push, but year after year with people going to Evo, or the KI Cup, or all the various other tournaments, and those streams being broadcast for THOUSANDS of people at a time, and then the residual watchers in the weeks, months, years, after, all work towards more people getting into the scene, playing the game, and thus putting more “resources” into KI.
That’s kind of the catch though. If they’re not giving a portion of the money away, a publisher is not going to break down what portion of the costs go to what specific in-house task. It would just be $10, with no further explanation. It may not even be that cut and dry if they wanted to. Them saying we could have charged $5, but insetaed we’re charging $10 and using half of it to make new stages, is not something they can say without it coming off as very odd. It opens up a big can of worms publishers are not going to want or be allowed to discuss with the public.
You’re telling the same thing that’s been said in other threads…I really don’t see the point in spreading this around?..When you could of kept it in one thread? Since you and those who agree with you have made your statements?
You’ve already made your point, everyone’s made their point. I get how ya feel but it hasn’t changed my mind personally. I
m fine with supporting a potential tournament for the game. You feel the price is unfair. We can agree, to disagree.
I haven’t posted in any of the topics on this, so I’ll just quickly say my piece:
$10 is too much for one character if it was all going to MS’s pocket.
$5 for the character with a mandatory donation of $5 to tournament pots is more acceptable, though I can understand why that doesn’t tickle any given person’s fancy. But at least some people can hopefully understand that tournament exposure can have positive effect on the game, even if they never watch or care about the results.
I would have preferred $5 for the character and $5 that directly funds specific aspects of improving the game that we’ve all asked for. Mainly because that is an even better way to improve the quality of the game, and for reasons Dayvo stated about it being likely that some people who have contributed to the negativity in the KI scene will get some of this money. But that would imply I know what MS’s future plans are for the game, which I do not.
MS has to be careful that they don’t charge $10 for the next two characters, though. I would have preferred a bundle, where you pay $20 for the 3 characters, and $5 goes to tournaments and $5 goes to a community fund for specific features/new content, with the remaining $10 going to MS’s pocket. That is IMO the best of all worlds, but it has the problem of how do you sell the characters individually, and assuming that MS is even interested in giving money to expand KI past these three characters. Which I hope they are, but it’s not safe to assume.
This is sort of a funny topic. You hear alot about supporting the FGC, and the game makers, but how many people that are mad at those of us who don’t like the community fund part of the $5 go out and buy used video games.
-I already got Kilgore, the minute he was avaible
-I only buy digital games, so all my money goes to developers/pubishers/whatever. I don’t buy used videogames
-I do like to support the community and tournament scene. What I don’t like it’s making it mandatory if I want Kilgore.
I haven’t buy a single skin pack(gold or terror). But if they went into releasing Kilgore for 5$ AND said that each of these packs price is goig to be for the tournament scene, I would probably buy one. Because it’s optional.
And I know that nobody points a gun to me to buy Kilgore now. But I love this game, and I want to support it. As we say in spanish, “pago pero protesto”= I pay, but I disagree to an extent
I think I’m pretty much the odd duck out here, but for whatever reason this is really what I’m stuck on. The fact that I paid to get a pseudo-currency that effectively has zero value to me personally (I don’t play Shadow Lords and have no interest in purchasing accessories for characters I don’t play), and then have extra content that I might be interested in gated so that I can’t use my pseudo-currency, really irks me on a fundamental level.
I think $10 for a single character is too much, but I love KI and would probably pay it just to support. I’d chalk up my extra $5 as a donation to IG/MS’s marketing budget, which is essentially what tournament pot bonuses are. Kilgore’s price doesn’t really bother me as such - I can afford it and want to support the dev, so whatever.
But the way the KI Gold situation is being handled grates on me. If I could use my Gold for the Terror and Gold skins and future characters, I’d pay for all of them with my Gold (even the packs for characters I’ve no intention of ever playing), and once I’d exhausted the Gold I’d buy more and keep on going, buying up whatever silly little skins or accessories they wanted to offer. But I really dislike the idea that someone made the call to gate certain content off from something that for a very long time was billed as the official way to buy your in-game content. It’s put a bad taste in my mouth, and that’s something that this game has rarely done for me.
I had been going back and forth about buying Kilgore, but where I am now I won’t. I’m probably blowing it out of proportion, but I think I’m done giving money just to support. I’ll buy the new characters if they interest me personally or a better deal or bundle comes along, but I’m done paying full price for content I don’t use just as a way to try and help a smaller dev’s bottom line.
I do feel your pain. It was like a slap in the face of everyone who bought KI gold when they started giving it away. There should have been some form of credit for people before they started using it as a daily reward.
I don’t need a credit or anything like that. KI is technically a Free To Play game, and F2P games often give out whatever their special variety of grindy pseudo-currency is to dedicated players, with the intent that the given amount is so small that it takes forever to unlock things so people just pay for it. That’s just the model, and I’m ok with that.
My only issue is the idea that Gold isn’t a “real” pseudo-currency anymore, and that there now exists content for which it has no use, even though it very much was billed, again and again, as “real money.” I understand the business reasons why they’re going with what they’re doing now, but I find the bait and switch shady and distasteful, and I’m not going to support it.
I bought Kilgore, but I don’t want more seasons (I don’t want a KoF KI is not about a lot of characters and more characters will bring unbalances). I’m ok with the final characters they will be adding, wouldn’t mind other content (accesories, stages) balancing and polishing is something important.
If you listen closely, you can hear MS use both sides. One minute it is “we have 6 million KI players”, a few minutes later it is “if you want the KI community to grow then it needs supported”. If the game has 6 million players, then the support is great. If it needs help, then it is far from a 6 million player base.
I have noticed that most people for the Kilgore thing are the ones who go to tournaments. I get it it works out great for them. They need to understand that there is those of us who will never see any benefit from this.
If MS want the community to grow, they could use the Friday Major Nelson thing and plug the game. Currently all the Major Nelson thing is now is weekly updates of Halo, Gears, and Forza.
I get that we need to support the game, but at some point so does MS
Just to be clear, most of the offline community, including those who have been vocally supporting this fund, know that they have little to no chance of ever seeing personal benefit from whatever prize pot bonuses wind up happening. Most people who go to tournaments go because they love the game and want to compete and hang out with other people who share their passion, not because they have any expectation of being compensated financially for their travels.
Don’t mistake support for the fund idea as de facto self-dealing or pure self-interest. For a lot of these guys, that’s really not what it’s about at all.
I think people mist my point I was saying I rather have my Money I spent on Kilgore to go towards the game and not some randome persone who I don’t know or care about. This is a low budget game right? So why not use the fund to encrese the budget instead of wasting it on people who just happen to win a Tournament because them winning and getting the money really isnt going to help the game make more sales. People who buy game buy them for whats on the game itself to have fun with more content means more to have fun with which means more sales and a lot of the people who buy games don’t even know things like Tournaments exist. You have to really be into gaming to know this stuff and a lot of people are casuals who don’t look into that stuff so why would they want to spend a exstra $5 on something they have never herd of they don’t know Tournaments are thing all they see is a character who for some reason is more expensive then the others.
This is me. I haven’t bought any skin pack…but I REALLY want to. They are just too expensive for me at this moment, BUT I bought the Kilgore character right away.
If the skin packs were a part of the community fund I might be more inclined to get them, but also if they were all in a single package, maybe discounted, I’d be inclined to get them too.
I’m not one to like to be “nickeled and dimed,” BUT I see Kilgore differently.
That being said, there is the potential for me to be sort of salty if they next two characters aren’t handled in the right way.
That’s where I am too.
I am very curious to see how they handle the next two characters.
I think their last couple pricing decisions have had some fair criticism, and they need to be very careful.
Well, shucks. Looks like this is where the rational discussion around the community fund landed.
@STORM179 I hear you about the KI gold. I’m staring at something in the neighborhood of 18,000 KI gold (from S3 Ultra and Shago CF) that I’m basically hoarding Scrooge McDuck style because I’m waiting for something worthwhile to spend it on, meanwhile I’ve bought $20 worth of content since Dec. 1. I’m also suffering from currency fatigue. In addition to KI gold, we have player and character EXP, astral gems, astral energy, shadow points and of course real money - all of which can be used to obtain content in the game, some directly converted into each other, or even better converted at random in SL card packs and others seperate but used to get content that can also be bought with KI gold… I know options are good but imagine trying to explain to someone how you unlock content in KI. I would need a PowerPoint presentation.
@SadisticRage76 I generally agree with you on this, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily useful to hold them accountable for things that are pretty standard marketing. “We’re growing exponentially!! We need your help to expand!!!” Is a pretty standard marketing paradox. I know that a good part of these decisions are being made by someone whose job it is to set the dial to “max profits,” and in a world where my nephew took the $100 of Xbox Live credit I gave him to buy games for Christmas and spent it all (!!!) on Black Ops III in game purchases I don’t expect them to produce content out of the goodness of their hearts for KI. I would just like to maintain the illusion for myself that they are having a bit more consideration for the player base than “what do you think we can soak them for on this one?”
@Infilament I was really curious what you thought about this, so thanks for posting here. I’m actually assuming $10 a piece for the other two characters at this point. Maybe I will be surprised. One of the unfortunate effects is that I’ve been pretty profligate in buying the cosmetics - to support more development on these. But if I’m expecting to get hit for $20 more in additional characters I’ll put the breaks on that. Up until this point I’ve basically felt like “if you release it, I will buy it” when it comes to content for KI. But there’s a limit to everything. As it is, I spent two hours on Monday sanding a block of wood to put under my fightstick (with $50 custom KI art and buttons) so that it can rest at a comfortable angle on top of the arcade base I bought to go with the low latency monitor I bought just to use with KI. A game where I lose about 2/3 of my Killer ranked matches. More than once I’ve thought “maybe I should go see a professional about this,” lol. The point being, if I’m feeling discouraged by the price point probably other less obsessed people are too.
This is definitely the conventional wisdom, and I guess the “everybody is doing it so it must be good” argument has some validity. But one of the curious side effects of having a community fund for this is that (at least for me) it kind of begs the question 1. if it’s such good marketing why isn’t MS doing it without my help? 2. Is this the best way for me to spend my money to get the things out of the game that I want? I really don’t see much concrete evidence that raising pot money (if that is indeed what this CF will do) has a direct correlation with growing the overall player base. With the Shago fund, it was very clear that we were being polled, essentially, to see how much community support there was for more KI. Real or imagined I had (and I think others had) a sense that if we hit a home run on that fund it would have an impact on MS’s future directions for the game. It was a bundle, and there was something for everyone in the bundle with the tournament fund as just part of the larger package. I know I’m just repeating stuff over and over again, but this feels very different.
@SonicDolphin117, and @STORM179 I have no doubt there’s a ton of great guys who are very altruistic in their support of building a tournament scene that have no interest or chance of claiming any of the money. I feel bad for those folks that so many of the prominent players have kind of mismanaged their own relationship with the larger community so that people are resentful about it. I’d love to see some of those high profile guys actually learn something about how to engage with the public better as a result, but in the age of Twitch chat and Twitter as means of communication it seems really unlikely.
TL:DR thanks guys for a good discussion of a thorny topic