Street Fighter V’s launch was an extremely rocky one, and just as it seemed as if the game was finding its footing Capcom decided it was time to peel back a lot of the progress made.
Capcom is introducing “sponsored content” into Street Fighter V that currently advertises in-game costumes, bundles, and the Capcom Pro Tour.
While it is possible to disable the advertisements, players who do so will be punished by not receiving as much Fight Money as players who have ads enabled.
The advertisements aren’t hidden away either. They are extremely in your face and distracting from the game’s normal aesthetic.
These ads are just another example of a huge problem with Triple A games. So many of them are trying to force more ways to monetize within their games, and it usually just ends up hurting the company and the game.
We can easily see this decline happen with EA’s attempt to cash in on the Star Wars Battlefront series, and with Turtle Rock Studio’s disaster that was Evolve’s pre-order packages and micro-transactions.
It seems that the grind for more cash will continue to cloud the vision of big game makers, but at least it seems that players are controlling the fate of games now more than ever.