These days the battle pass is seeping into almost every genre of game. Fighting games, once a genre slow to adapt to any industry change and focused on satisfying its niche community, are joining the BP craze with Tekken 8 recently instilling one with its new update. The reaction from fans? So far not so good. Not necessarily because they hate the idea of a battle pass being involved at all. In fact, fans have asked for more paid DLC for years. People wanted a wider variety of costumes/customization and weren’t afraid to pay for it. However, both Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 are now being shit on for answering the call. Why? Because they answered the call half asleep with lazy battle passes.
When the fighting game community is asking for customization, what they mean is they want more shit to slap on their favorite fighters. Cool collab skins come to mind, like a Yor Forger skin for Chun-Li. Unfortunately, these games are making battle passes with boring rewards like customization for player avatars and shit like stickers for their player cards. Street Fighter 6 has continuously done amazingly cool collaborations (they got the damn Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles???) and yet they don’t make character costumes for the collab, they make shitty avatar costumes that look horrendous. And even if they looked awesome, almost nobody would buy them because 90% or more of your time is spent in the real game, fighting with an established character such as Ryu or Cammy. Not SquidMonster69’s Cthulhu-looking avatar. It’s like these companies saw that battle passes generate a bunch of extra money without stopping to figure out why.
This is not quite what we had in mind.
Love it or hate, Fortnite popularized the battle pass concept a ton… and for good reason. It’s simply a decent deal. Fortnite’s BP can be completed with relative ease. I play it with a friend once a week or so, and we still manage to finish the basic pass almost every season as long as we make time to do the quests that pop up. Not only is the pass not that demanding of your time, it also has rewards that the majority of the community actually want. A pass grants you around 8-10 skins for your character, plus other goodies. But the most lucrative part for the player is that the pass refunds itself most seasons. In other words, beating the pass gives you enough in-game currency to buy the next pass. So with $10, if you stay on top of your (pretty easy) grind, you can effectively get the BP each season and have that $10 generate a huge amount of skins for your account over time. That’s why the Fortnite BP is so successful and why players don’t generally take much issue with it.
At this point I think $10 has gotten my account over 40 skins.
In my eyes for a BP to be great, it needs to be fairly easy to beat by playing the game, not that expensive, contain desirable rewards for the majority of the player base, and gives you a good portion of funds required to buy the next BP should you complete it. So many games, especially the big fighters right now, fail to accomplish even 2/4 of these objectives. Players are fed up with companies asking for more transactions in full-priced games without offering a worthwhile pass. Have you heard about the backlash for the Tekken 8 pass? Are companies failing to properly understand what makes a good battle pass? Can the battle pass be a good incentive for gamers, or is it too easy to fuck up and should die out of the industry? Buy a pass, earn some headphones for an avatar you never see, and regret the purchase in the comments below!
