Killer Instinct Steam Version and its Availability

First of all i am really happy that you managed to push your game to steam platform. Killer Instinct is one of my beloved fighting games and i hope that community will grow bigger because steam has biggest potential to get a lot of people into this game.
But i do not understand why did you not choose free to play with microtransactions model like it is on Windows Store?
Yes, 33 euro for KI with full content is cheaper than on Windows Store and totally worth its money, but this way you cut off players who are unfamiliar with this game and would like to try it out before buying.
Atleast there should be some time limited demo available.

i do find it unfortunate that there isn’t a free to play option too but i also do see people who react negatively towards the current model on the other platforms. Plus, theres many different versions of the title out there that it is very confusing for new players. I constantly see people asking which version should they get, which is the newest etc. I think MS just decided to release it this way as its the most straightforward. Heres ONE version of KI. It has EVERYTHING and its at a discounted price.

I just hope that it won’t be born dead like other fighting games on steam. :disappointed:

i hope so too. Hopefully sooner rather than later IG can implement a passcode feature to its lobby system to make it easy for players cross platform to find each other like @Infilament keeps campaigning for :heart:

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Yeah, @Infilament posts are on point.
I was surprised about game lacking advertisement too. It is very important. There are a lot of twitch streamers that like to grab new released games and just play them.
Just look at PUGB online stats, it have over one million active players because of streamer hype trains.
And lets be real, from technical standpoint PUGB is very crappy right now. A bare bones game with a lot of cheaters, glitches, exploits, crashes and other technical issues. Yet a lot of players playing it.

My guess is that the negotiation over who gets how much of each micro transaction for micro transaction purchases in the Steam version was an intractable negotiation. So instead they opted for a single lump sum for all the content. I have shared my complaints about the Steam version but I actually think this is pretty smart. KI on Xbox/Windows has been plagued by version confusion practically since day one. Also, because Steam so frequently puts games on sale (KI is already 25% off for the next week), having multiple versions was going to be a hassle.

As far as advertisement, the game immediately popped up in my Steam queue because it knows I like fighting games. While I sometimes wish that MS had done more to lush KI as a flagship franchise, I think the “MS does nothing to market this game” sawhorse is probably pretty unfair. For years it’s been on the Xbox One box, it is often prominent in the digital store etc. It has certainly been advertised as well or better than say, MvCI. No one complains that Capcom doesn’t advertise. PUBG is a fad game. Who can explain why such things become popular? But it certainly wasn’t because of a huge advertising campaign.

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While I agree the Steam release was uniquely poor in terms of advertisement (they literally dropped it without any warning on the broader community, and weren’t able to give any real timeline to the fans who would’ve helped push it), I agree that the “MS does NOTHING to advertise this game” complaint is pretty untrue.

KI got stage time at E3, MS sponsored Evo in its inaugural year (and weirdly got blasted for it), hosted lots of tournaments for it at local Microsoft stores, and put money into its tournament scene. KI may not have gotten a major multimillion dollar television/YouTube/fast food ad campaign, but it honestly got a whole lot more core support than most games and franchises. Could Microsoft have done more? Sure. They also could have done much, much, less.

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Keep in mind that whenever there is a new feature, KI is always used to help promote it. Arena? They almost always used KI to promote it for example. Saying MS doesn’t advertise KI is simply false. Sure they don’t do it with the traditional multimillion dollar ad campaigns, but I feel like even if they did, it wouldn’t do anything.

When most people look at KI, they see it as either a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat ripoff. It’s not true but that’s how people see it sadly. A KI ad campaign wouldn’t do much. Using KI to help promote MS features benefits KI a lot more than just having ads imo.

For example, Microsoft is advertising the Arena tournament feature. People want to try it out so they ask how do they use it. A solid answer is to download KI for free, and you can try out the Arena function for yourself! Now the same thing is happening with Steam crossplay. They are advertising Steam crossplay by using KI. I would argue that doing it like this is more beneficial for KI than just doing a bunch of ads.

Heck, KI was used in a Dell PC ad, not even directly related to Microsoft or Xbox; the advertising got out there.

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