It’s somewhere along the lines of seeing more than the trailer of SW: TFA, like the first 30mins of the movie. Then what? You run around and see what the maps are like, how engine mechanics like different blasters behave, etc. The beta allowed you to fight other players and see what the game would actually be like. If you think about Star Wars: Battlefront… the game is only multiplayer. But as I said, it’s a minor enabler.Īctually you started this by saying I was wrong, like your viewpoint is the only correct thing in the world? Let me reiterate in point format so you might understand this time:ġ. Someone reads the article, downloads the beta, practices their $#!+ and perfects their one frame links or whatever, enjoys the game and buys it to stay competitive, gets their friends into it, goes to Evo and beats Poongko or whoever. Removing the links won’t stop someone who wants to do that. The article is more damaging than the links. The damage isn’t from the direct links the damage comes from knowing that it exists. They get their kick out of the pirated beta and decide not to buy the game. A permanent version of the game that people could download and play for free for a few days anyway. Let’s assume a casual player/reader of Kotaku reads this article and decides to download the pirated BETA. It’s not justifying piracy, it’s just saying it’s hard to tell.

Maybe sales will be lost as a result of this. The ACTUAL damage comes from how many sales are lost. Maybe some casual people will just enjoy some short-term fun fighting the computer, but they could do that in the beta anyway. In a competitive fighter, people will need to buy a copy to stay competitive. Ono has already announced new characters that are scheduled to be released post-launch. With fighting games, it’s about fighting other players. Closer to 20, and probably more than that.

I have played fighting games for over 10 years. Also it’s not hard to find things on the internet, so directly posting a link is only a minor enabler considering that you can achieve the same thing with a couple of seconds in Google. The negative presumption of a pirated copy is that it might take sales away from the video game company, but in this case I think it would just whet the appetite of the people that get it… like a demo or the beta that it actually is. And even if it were, the end goal is still to fight other players… and so a dodgy version which has disabled online functionality is still going to be unappealing in the long term. From my understanding of this leaked beta… this isn’t an option. Unlike the VS series, the combos aren’t extravagantly long, and so there’s even more of a focus on player vs player. My friends and I are hardcore fighting game enthusiasts, and as Alex says the beta is essentially practising combos/beating up the AI(and exploring the engine). I’m going to be the devil’s advocate here and say that this isn’t so bad.

Street fighter 5 slow motion