MY FIGHT MONEY

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With Street Fighter V patch 1.04 came the removal of the concept of Zenny and the full opening of content in the in-game store. With more content in place and a better idea of the in-game currency-to-real-money equivalents, the Capcom DLC plan is a lot more obvious now.

If I were to ask you which fighting game has been the most egregious with pricing DLC content, you’d probably come back to me and say “Dead or Alive 5: Last Round,” which up until today is exactly the same answer I would give myself. They have a lot of DLC and collecting it all costs a lot of money.

If you thought that was crazy, though? Buckle up.

DOA5LR

Let’s just get down to numbers and what you get for the money. We’ll assume:

  • You didn’t go with the Core Fighters stuff but instead bought the full game. And you bought it at release for $40.
  • You aren’t buying any DLC on sale.
  • You want everything you can get.
  • You are buying bundles whenever you can (we’ll talk about the SFV season pass later) because I don’t have the time to track all this DLC down individually.

Also, almost all costumes are available separately for $2. (Some of the packs, specifically ones that were pre-order DLC, are only available in sets.)

There are 35 characters in the base game.

Here’s the breakdown:

Add everything up:

  • Game is $40.
  • All DLC together is $531.
  • If you buy everything, you get 633 costumes and 1 character.
  • Purchasing in packs, this comes out to less than $1 a costume.

SFV

OK; pay attention, friends.

Assumptions:

  • You bought the season pass (which you should; it’s a 50% savings on the DLC characters + battle costumes).
  • You are paying full price – no sales.
  • You are not using Fight Money to buy anything. (Right now, there is a limited supply of it, especially if you don’t want to grind Survival.)
  • You want everything because maybe you are creating a setup for a tournament and you want people to be that extra bit happy.
  • You are assuming the end-of-2016 character count, which is going to be 22.

Note that other than the Season Pass, none of the content is available in bundles or packs. It’s all a la carte.

We’ll group the content together to make it easier to figure out.

  • Street Fighter V: $60
  • SFV 2016 Season Pass: $30
    • 6 characters.
    • 6 Battle Costumes.
    • 1 stage. (Guile)
  • Story Mode costumes: $44 ($2 each)
    • 22 costumes.
  • Battle Costumes: $64 ($4 each)
    • 16 costumes. (assumes you did not pre-order and get the one included for doing so but you do have the six from the Season Pass)
  • Summer Costumes: $4 ($4 each)
    • 1 costume. (so far – Karin; data mining has shown at least four more are coming)
  • Stages: $12 ($4 each)
    • 3 additional stages (assumes you have Guile stage from Season Pass)
  • Stage Variations: $6 ($2 each)
    • 3 stage recolors

Data mining has also shown at least one more series of costumes is on the way.

Add everything up:

  • Game is $60.
  • All DLC together is $160.
  • If you buy everything available, you get 6 characters, 45 costumes, 3 stages, and 3 stage recolors.
  • The average cost per costume is closer to $3 (and should edge closer to $4 over time because only Story costumes are $2).

To give you an idea, if we assume the game will have four sets of premium costumes for just the 22 characters we have now, you’d be looking at $350+ worth of DLC – and that’s before more characters show up. And it’s certain more characters are coming. And they might end up charging for colors 3-10. (We should have been more careful when we said we’d pay to unlock those.)

I might go into the Fight Money economics at some point just for fun; we’ll see. But this is a good picture of the DLC situation for SFV as it stands right now, and it stands to be expensive.