I admit that I am not a professional Smash fighter in any stretch of the imagination but I can at least imagine for those who are that it can be very frustrating to lose a fight to the next broken "pay-only character". Now, I'm not sure if this has happened yet, but I'd rather Nintendo not wait until it does happen and Smash's sale numbers fatally dwindle as a result of this clear imbalance, especially since this is one of Nintendo's most popular titles. If Nintendo were to implement the change I imposed in the title card, I feel players would still have enough of a reason to buy a DLC character they really enjoy as a purchase would still be needed to play as the character in any single-player or local wireless mode of play. Additionally, Nintendo has already shown they can do this with DLC stages by including it in a shared collection pool among all players even if one of the players has not purchased any DLC stages, so further implementing this for DLC characters would not be hard for the company. The final reason I feel this change would be good for all players is it could act as a kind of "try before you buy" fighter demo and this business practice has already been proven multiple times to be effective by numerous other companies in the past.
Honestly, I’m not even sure why the DLC characters are locked in online mode in the first place. It’s just annoying and really takes away from the experience. I feel like this would have been a good idea with little to no backfiring had they implemented it before releasing the characters, but now that they’ve already done it the way they have I don’t think they’ll change anything sadly. It’s a great idea though and something they should definitely do for the next installment in order to keep players enticed.
DLC is technically a business move in order to make more money, faster, by adding on "additions" to games that otherwise would have been implemented in the original product, but were cut for these reasons.
Nintendo knows that Smash is a game people instantly buy or purchase without second thought, just like with most Nintendo games. They know that regardless of the content given, fans will ultimately buy the fighter pass or eventually purchase the DLC because it does a multiple number of things to said consumer.
One of those things is feeling like your game is incomplete and another is the competitive edge DLC can bring or have over said player and because of this, DLC somewhat forces players to want to buy said character that is locked behind a pay wall in order to feel complete and/or not "left out" from other players as they watch their friends talk about the new character. (FOMO also plays a role strongly with millennials nowadays) It is a real shame, but it is a psychological mind game to say the least and Nintendo knows that they don't loose either way.
Nintendo now is just like any other multubillion dollar game company in order to keep up with the times aka competition. The days in which "free wifi" no DLC, no gotcha games and no pay to win are over. Everything is about the money. I lost a lot of respect personally for a lot of game companies (and companies in general) over the years, but Nintendo dissapoints me more from their latest endeavors.
I wouldn't mind it just to remove the whole "pay to win" mindset. The DLC characters are very beatable. I have gotten my ass handed to me numerous occasions online. I just enjoy playing them a lot because they have some of the most fun and unique movesets in the game. Though the downside to making them free is it gives less incentive for people to purchase them if they're mainly going to be playing online anyways. I'd be for it if it didn't impact Nintendo's profits/motivation to continue adding more characters into the game. I think in general though the way they spread the characters apart from one another and only charge $6 for the character/stage it isn't that much. Especially if you only want to play a specific character. I think that's another reason Sakurai does those character showcases so people get an idea of the character before they buy them.
Honestly, I can't really agree with that. What's the point of buying a character if you can just play them online? Some characters are almost unplayable in lag, but that's not my point.
On the other hand, I would like if these characters were available in a training mode, because there's so many character-specific little things I need to know. Like the knockback on their moves, the percentage they will be KOd with some attacks, how to properly DI their kill moves, etc.
5 bucks or something isn't too much for a whole new playable character, a stage and additional music tracks IMO. Plus you're not obligated to buy them, you can have fun with the game without having all the DLCs, and there's no "pay to win" aspect, because I think all of the DLC characters are pretty balanced in their own way and totally beatable. I'm not saying that it's fun to play against all of them(I'm looking at you, Steve and Min-Min), but that's, well, a personal preference.
I think that ruins the entire point of the DLC. SSBU definitely isn’t lacking in content, so I think it’s perfectly fine for a small handful of character to be locked behind a paywall.
I do think it would make sense for the games to have some sort of training demo of each character to get a better fee for them, though. I’m thinking of that one practice mode with the sandbag. That way, you can see how different characters feel before purchasing. I’m not the biggest fan of how Steve plays even though I love his inclusion in the game.
