How 2XKO and Invincible VS Are Fixing Fighting Game DLC

One of the accepted truths about fighting games is that they will be monetized to hell and back. Be it announcer voices, costumes, and most recently battle passes, fighting game developers have found a way to keep a game relevant for the right price. Of all the means of monetization, the one that’s always the biggest gamble is buying a character. If you’re a fanatic, you’re going to buy it because you just can’t stand the sight of a roster with gaps. If you’re competitive, you’re going to buy it because you need to know the matchups. This leaves the casual player, who doesn’t know if a character is worth the money just by watching a showcase or reading frame data. For them, buying characters can be a gamble.

Whether it’s individually or through a season pass, sometimes you just don’t know if you’re going to get characters you vibe with. With how much fighting games can change game to game, you can’t even just rely on legacy to know if you want a character. Other content can be easily reviewed, but knowing how a character feels for you is difficult to convey from person to person. What if the DLC character has mechanics that are divisive? How do you review that or feel it out for yourself? If only you could try a character before you buy them….

Street Fighter 6 sort of does this with their rental ticket system. Through the Fighter Pass, you can earn rental tickets that allow you to try characters you haven’t bought for an hour. This was a genuinely good idea, but felt more like a step in the right direction than a solution. Thankfully, you don’t have to buy the Premium Fight Pass to get these tickets, so you can just play the game and get them just fine. But as of late, there have been games that have gone a little further.

Both 2XKO and the upcoming Invincible VS will allow you to use every character in training mode before you put money down on them. I especially like this for 2XKO because that means you can use your time and money wisely. It gives you the option to grind for characters instead of spending, which means you’ll be grinding for a specific goal. What a novel concept: grinding just for characters you want. If only some other free-to-play fighting game learned that before it just up and died. Oh well.

I view this measure of letting us try before we buy as developers giving a bit of ground to the player. Fighting games these days have so many means of monetization. Stages, battle passes, premium currency, UI cosmetics, and music. A lot of those you can window shop with ease, so giving characters that same courtesy is a great move. A move I can only hope continues and becomes more widespread.

Fighting games have always been a bit of a magnet for monetization. Remember how Street Fighter 4 sold costumes? It was asinine, but I bet it made a nice chunk of change. Or how about how BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle sold half of the game’s characters in a more all-or-nothing package? Even recently, Tekken 8’s controversy with the semantics of a “Character Pass” only including characters and not stages—which, by the way, is still bullshit. Speaking of bullshit, Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 using premium currency like some mobile game is just so goddamn stupid. It may be the one thing I hate as much as the battle passes.

Given that, I think it’s great that developers are throwing us a bone here. I also hope this leads to better sales of DLC. I’m sure Season Passes are lucrative, especially since they have early character access attached to them, but those can be left for the hardcore fans and tournament TOs. For the average consumer, trying before buying is all upside. This is doubly true for Invincible VS, a game where people will be trying it based off the IP alone. Being able to try out a character instead of making them gamble on liking it or not might guarantee a sale where a tentative one once was. Besides, it also brings some good PR and goodwill.

If this practice continues, it may be one of the best innovations in the player experience since rollback netcode. Yes, in-game frame data is also really awesome, but I mean generally for casuals and those deeper in the genre. Every other change just seemed like it was made with the purpose of extracting more money from us, and it’s tiring. We’ve gone from being able to unlock costumes through gameplay to having to wish we could buy costumes with real money instead of having to buy their bullshit currency. A pro-consumer move like this should be praised, and I hope more positive changes are ahead…like getting rid of battle passes. I’d love that.