This F2P model...it's interesting. I'm not fully against it...in other franchises. However from KI I resent it. It's like they want people to like F2P, so they're kind of easing them in with a franchise that has a lot of expectations to it.
Their argument is that most people who play fighting games tend to stick to a few characters. However, what they don't seem to understand is that this is because of two lines of thinking. "I've gotten really good with this character" and "this character has a great advantage over all the others".
The former comes from experimentation. Most casual players will generall stick with a Ryu type character that's mostly balanced while learning the ropes, and by the end they'll only pick the Ryu type because that's the one they learnt to use. In this game, those people will pick Jago, get good with him, buy nothing.
The later are either a smaller minority if fight game aficionados, or people who went online and looked that Magneto, Sentinel and Storm are broken. In MVC2 like 90 percent of teams I met included either those, or Cable. So I guess if MVC2 where in this model the average player would spend 15 dollars on the game. HOWEVER... KI is not a 3character tag team game. As soon as it develops that one character is irreparably broken, then most people will only be willing to buy that one. I guess Double Helix COULD nerf the offending character. Hey theorically they could make a character ridiculously powerful, then as he peaks in buyage nerf him, driving up sales for other characters!