The fighting game based on a mobile game has a reasonable battle pass, while Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 expect you to take up a part-time job

Nobody likes battle passes, but they’re tremendously psychologically effective. Players in a battle pass game are dished out a cookie-crumb trail of little tiny in-game prizes the more they play the game. The “premium”, as in paid, battle pass hits players with FOMO over some attractive grand prize; if you play enough without paying, it’s like you already “earned” the prize, but you won’t unlock it. Pay up or miss out! After all, if you complete the whole battle pass, you’ll get your money back to spend on the next one!

For developers this is a win-win; for players it is an obnoxious obligation and a minimum allotment of busywork. But gamers can’t resist an obnoxious obligation or busywork, so it works really well!

This means that like everything else in video games that nobody likes, battle passes are coming to you, wherever you are, whether you want them or not.

The first fighting game I’m aware of to run a battle pass was Granblue Fantasy Versus. This made sense, coming as it did from the Granblue Fantasy mobile RPG, whose savvy developers at Cygames use a clever combination of good-cop and bad-cop monetization practices to retain its massive audience.

But the original GBVS battle pass wasn’t clever or savvy at all: it simply asked players to pay money and commit to playing the game a lot for meager rewards. It was easy to ignore, and players did so.

But that obviously wasn’t the end of the battle pass; Cygames weren’t the only ones thinking about it. “AAA” fighting games, Street Fighter and Tekken, both look towards modern monetization techniques to make up their massive budgets, from lavishly animated character skins to ridiculously priced Party-City-ass paid avatar wear to, yes, battle passes.

Now that three modern fighting games are running battle passes— more than ever before!— I wanted to compare them. Are any of the battle passes reasonable? Fair? The short answer is that one is, and it’s actually Granblue, the game that blew it the first time. For the rest, read on.

Street Fighter 6

Capcom famously bungled “fighting game as service” with Street Fighter V, a game that married the $30/season DLC character expansion plan with all the stinginess of a mobile game, and on top of that forgot to include anything casual fans could enjoy.

Skipping all that, SF6 had to do a lot to win back trust, which is why nobody said there would be a battle pass until everyone had already bought it. This is a common tactic because, again, nobody likes battle passes.

In its battle pass, Capcom offers mostly elements for the social Battle Hub part of the game. The major prizes are generally pieces of an exclusive costume for the social lobby (ala Fortnite) and the smaller prizes are things like emotes, custom chat stickers (like on messaging apps such as Line) and so on. Free players get a pitiful selection of items that isn’t worth any effort: Capcom's stingy streak from SFV continues to stick out.

Players who don’t care at all about this aspect— the tournament-playing FGC base— can easily ignore it, but the first bit of fan-bait on the pass is always something potent: if you pay up for a premium battle pass, you get a classic Capcom arcade game to play right away in the game’s “Game Center” mode. The bigger titles you can get in Capcom’s classic collections— they’re quite good at reselling their past— but obscurities like Exed Exes or rarities like the Mega Man arcade games probably pulled a couple of hardcore Capcom fans.

The price of a SF6 battle pass is about $2.50, but you have to buy “Fighter Coins” in amounts of $5. This is another common trick meant to leave the change in players’ pockets so they’ll buy some other small item piecemeal, like maybe a new costume.

The difficulty of the Street Fighter 6 battle pass is very high; the Tekken pass might be a little harder in terms of time you have to play, but this one is more annoying. Daily missions give players a pitiful amount of “Kudos”, the insulting currency of the battle pass, but actually playing matches gives players even less. It's 30 Kudos a match and 15000 Kudos to complete the pass; missions give Kudos in the 100-300 range.

Capcom expects players to play SF6 like it’s their job— and often, forces them to play unranked matches in the Battle Hub just to keep the place busy— if they want to see their battle pass prizes.

You’ll have to stay on top of rotating busy-work daily missions and grind out matches hard to actually reach the end of the battle pass, which is the point where you actually get your “money” back in Fighter coins. Miss your dailies and it just won’t be possible anymore. I completed SF6 battle passes only when I was already playing the game very hard, around the time of release. Since then I’ve all but forgotten about them.

The quality of the rewards is not really worth this level of commitment unless you care a lot about the retro game being given out, use the Battle Hub/avatar a lot, or really love the costume currently up for offer: for example, I’m sure Mega Man fans paid up for the battle pass with the costume of that character. Ultimately, the Street Fighter 6 battle pass is skippable.

Tekken 8

Tekken 8 introduced monetization very similar to that of SF6: costumes for avatars and fighters alike. Contrary to Street Fighter’s bespoke paid character skins, Tekken has long featured full dress-up customization for its characters, making it a natural for paid a la carte DLC. Tekken 8, a game which I should note costs $70, introduces players to the uncomfortable experience of picking out a cool new hairstyle for your character only to find out it costs 5 bucks. All games are mobile games.

The price of a Tekken 8 battle pass is about $6, but here Namco also uses the trick of only allowing players to buy $5 or $10 in currency.

The Tekken 8 battle pass- there has thus far only been one— offers a weird smattering of random items as opposed to SF6’s themed collection, but there’s also a lot more and better stuff for both free and paying players than the rather stingy SF6 pass. Will I ever use the zebra-striped cowboy hat? I dunno, but pretty soon there was a new weird item of clothing I had to wonder if I would ever use.

However, there are also more levels, more XP points, and more grind. The missions are all directly related to playing online ranked matches. This is more straightforward than referring to SF6’s irritating checklist of chores every day, but it’s still a pretty titanic amount of play if you’re not naturally a ranked grinder.

I completed the Tekken 8 battle pass, and that’s probably because I first bought the game around the time it was implemented. When you buy a new fighting game you play it like a maniac trying to learn all the basics, but even from that position I felt like it was taking absolutely forever to get to the end of this pass.

I wasn’t timing myself to see how many hours a SF6 pass took versus a Tekken pass, but I’m going to say that Tekken felt longer.

This is also a battle pass that expects you to play the game like it’s your job. I will say to its credit that I don't get the sheer disdain of the SF6 battle pass from this one. As I am at best a tourist in Tekken– still haven't made those purple ranks yet– I will probably not buy another.

Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising

The first Granblue Fantasy Versus’ attempted battle pass gave out pretty lousy in-game rewards. Rising, the updated version, gives out pretty lousy in-game rewards too! Except for the big one.

Rising ties its character costumes to the premium battle pass. Everything you receive as you grind your way up the battle pass is total junk, but for your time and money you get an exclusive new costume for a character. If you don’t care about the character, you don’t spend the eight bucks (flat! No coin bullshit!), but Granblue is in the business of character love. I’m still deeply regretful that I wasn’t playing the game and had no idea when the battle pass for the above Zeta outfit was active.

The grind for the Granblue battle pass is reasonable; the only way you can get points for it is to complete missions, which are basic in-game tasks that you will naturally complete by playing matches in the game. Things like “Hit with basic attack A”, that any player can and will do.

Once you are done with your missions for the day/week/month, there’s no way to grind out even a single more point. You’ll get your dailies done just by playing the game for 20 minutes, and then you can come back the next day. Unlike Tekken or Street Fighter, the game never makes you feel obligated to grind out a ton of matches to get your prize.

The battle pass lasts about a month, and so long as you don’t completely forget to play the game during that time, you’ll probably get what you want. I have two weeks left on the current pass and I am only a few days away from unlocking the big costume (which is, to my absolute delight, Halloween Witch Beatrix.)

If you want a fancy costume for your fave, the Granblue battle pass is fair and reasonable, and otherwise it's easy to ignore. Owing perhaps to Cygames’ previous failure with this system, it is the only “good” battle pass I have yet encountered.

What can we take away from this?

As players: shit we all hate coming to our favorite games is inevitable, and as we get older and video game design inevitably gets more predatory, maybe we all need to move out into the country, live in a shack, and just concentrate on how many times we can loop Gradius II.

To designers: For players to welcome, rather than scorn, the battle pass, I think games need to lay off a little bit on the obligations. Granblue Rising makes things very easy, and though it's making an upsell on me I don't really resent it because the prize is worth it and the process isn't difficult. Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8, on the other hand, seem to think that I should be thrilled to pay them to play the game for a part-time job. And if I wanted that shit, I'd be on Twitch.

Video games all play us psychologically and emotionally– that's entertainment!– but when we actually feel played, we're going to resent the game... and walk away from it.