Here's how Street Fighter 5: Arcade Edition's new sponsored content works
A little Fight Money for your troubles
Street Fighter 5: Arcade Edition's latest update is now officially live as the game's servers are back online. One of the biggest and most interesting additions to Capcom's mainstay fighting title in this patch is the new sponsored content feature.
To put it simply, the new sponsored content allows players to enable in-game ads, and by doing so earn extra Fight Money. Early images and explanations showed logos plastered on character costumes during matches and ads embedded into certain backgrounds.
So how does it actually work? Here's what we've found.
Sponsored content is geared toward ranked and casual matches. Though you'll see the effects of the enabled settings in other modes, like training, you'll only earn Fight Money from the two aforementioned online modes.
There are three different types of ads you can enable: costumes, loading ads, and stage ads. The "Ad Style" costumes show up as their own outfit option and are basically each character's default costume (and colors) with the ads on various areas of their bodies.
You can choose between colors 1-10 for the Ad Style costumes, and it only seems to be for the default looks at this time. It appears that sponsorships will be available only for certain periods of time, as an in-game prompt notes that if a sponsorship is not available at the time and you selected any colors from 3-10 of the Ad Style outfit in your battle settings, you will be forced to use colors 1 and 2.
The loading ads are slides that pop up during the loading time after characters and V-Triggers are selected — before the match begins. An advertisement will pop up on screen — in this case promoting Street Fighter 5's new costume bundles and latest sales — and will stay up for about 10 seconds or so.
Stage ads show up in the background of certain stages. If a sponsor is currently up and running, logos will be scattered throughout the stage.
Ads only apply to the tournament stages, meaning you'll be able to put them into effect for the Capcom Pro Tour backdrops: Ring of Destiny, Ring of Pride, and Ring of Power.
Each ad type will grant you extra Fight Money when you play ranked or casual matches, and each one has a set bonus to it. The initial sponsored content has a set amount of 4 Fight Money per ad type, which will net you 12 extra FM per match you play with an Ad Style costume, the loading ads enabled, and a CPT stage with ads on it.
Apparently, sponsored content Fight Money earnings have an upper limit, meaning at some point you'll have earned all you can from a single sponsor. At this time, we're not sure what that amount is.
12 FM per match (not set) doesn't seem like much, but assuming the ceiling for earnings here isn't too low, this seems like a good thing to set and forget for a little extra in-game cash.
