Invincible VS skips PC open beta and other fighting games may follow

Invincible VS, a tie-in fighting game for Amazon's Invincible Prime Video adaptation of the comic book series, will launch cross-platform on April 30th—but the open beta which runs from April 9th to April 11th will be locked to consoles. It's unfortunate news for PC players, and no official explanation has been given, but those well-versed in the fighting game community know exactly why this is happening.

In short: open betas and other test builds made publicly available on PC end up cracked and played offline, sometimes months ahead of the full game's release. Not only does this open up the final release to piracy, but it negatively impacts the competitive scene as well, since free access to a pre-release build is a major competitive advantage. A number of competitive players at the time of the Tekken 8 Closed Network Test engaged with these cracked builds, as did players of Street Fighter 6. That's two of the most major fighting game releases of the generation, with multi-million dollar competitive scenes attached to each, plagued by a lack of competitive integrity.

Thankfully, legitimate PC players shouldn't be harmed very much by a modest 2 week delay. Since consoles are tournament standard machines for fighting games at large anyways, chances are a fair number of that population will still have access to machines playing the Open Beta, perhaps even during a bracket if Offline VS is permitted by the Open Beta. Some of these beta releases are solely for testing network capabilities—in the case of Tekken 8's Closed Network Test, this was the case, but cracks did eventually enable offline play as well.

In the long-term, though, the move is a little concerning for PC players of fighting games. While PC is in many ways the best place to play fighting games (thanks to high refresh rate displays, G-Sync Pulsar, lower input lag, etc), it's no secret that developers have historically had trouble with PC support in the past. The fear of data-miners could drive more fighting games to skip PC entirely, at least until the full release. But on the same note, improving cross-play capabilities for fighting games has proven to boost sales and activity across platforms, so some games may not take the same approach.

Another major licensed fighting game set to release this year, Avatar Legends, has proven PC-friendly so far, with its Closed Global Alpha even being Steam-exclusive. So, it's clear that not all developers are worried about what may happen to their games on PC, but those genuinely worried about preventing content leaks or outright cheating may see fit to take extreme measures.