Taking a stab at Capcom’s microtransaction and rewards system for Street Fighter V

What in the world are Fight Coins?

Fight Coins or Fight Money is Street Fighter V’s new in-game currency obtained by finishing various in-game challenges such as story quests, survival quests, and by winning matches online, knowing that it is currency, you can also buy a “premium” form of Fight Money, dubbed as Zenny, which are worth roughly up to a thousand times more than actual Fight Coins.

How do I use them?

For in-game purchases, duh. Basically, Fight Money is used for unlocking in-game characters, and as well as purchasing cosmetics, such as story mode and premium costumes.

So I’m paying to unlock Characters in Street Fighter now?

Technically you aren’t, earning Fight Coins just adds another layer of the current “Achieve this to unlock this” feature most common in many fighting games. With the existence of Fight Money or Fight Coins, players need only spend real cash on cosmetics, while being able to allocate their Fight Coins into more sensible stuff such as building your character pools and leveling them up, making you spend less out of your pocket, unless you really aim to unlock every character available.

So far, so good?

The current stance by most people is actually Neutral to say the least, a lot of AAA titles have been plagues by microtransactions such as DLCs, an additional features which supposedly should be part of the base game. Capcom’s move with Fight Coins would be more of adding one more level of difficulty in getting what you wanna get for free when compared to previous “achieve x to unlock y” feature in Fighting Games (or in any video game for that matter) back in the ‘good ‘ol days’. It’s still way too early to give verdict to Capcom’s decision regarding implementing this microtransaction system although they have promised to make the feature “praise worthy” to all players. Perhaps the biggest negative impact that I could think of for now is for non-spenders to put a limit to their character pool depending on how many Fight Coins they can earn, that or they’d just have to spam Ryu and hadoukens in online matches.