Pay to win in fighting games??

[DeftMonk]

Again, Leroy wasn't banned anywhere, and in the grand scheme of fucked Tekken characters, he didn't even rank that high because T7 overall has pretty spectacular balance.

Bruh leroy smith was so busted on release mk has nothing in comparison. Ok so he didn't have an infinite or anything like that but he had so much damage and the best version of every move in the game pretty much. Even the best parry tied with jin I suppose. Everything tracked d1+2 was rediculous. I dunno where to even begin when talking about that rediculous attempt at a character.

 

[Evil Canadian]

Shao Kahn is pay-to-lose pre-order dlc

 

[Marlow]

So in the world of fighting games, has pay to win ever existed or do we imagine it becoming more common in the future (eg paying for cosmetics which make your character stronger)?

I don't think it's going to become common, especially not in any type of online ranked mode. I think it goes against some of the core concepts of a fighting game, and I don't think devs would mess with something like that.

However, with the way video games seemed to be financed these days I think there will continue to be more ways to try and entice people to want to participate in micro transactions. And some of that might end up bleeding over into single player elements.

 

[Wrenchfarm]

If not "pay to win", MK9 Kenshi, and MKX Alien/Tanya were at least "Pay for S+ Tier"

 

[John Grizzly]

Aside from broken DLC characters, there's only one true "pay to win" fighter that I can recall:

The free to play Tekken: Revolution

You could buy in-game currency with real money and enhance your characters. I never played much of this game because it was so fucked. You would regularly see piss easy death combos simply because someone had power leveled their character so much. Here's a quick video:

I'm not sure what the purpose of this game was (aside from Eliza being basically a beta test for the 2D characters added in Tekken 7), but I'm so happy they didn't go this route for Tekken 7.