Well, you do have to pay if you want to get champions other than the weekly free selection in LoL or play an insane amount of games to get IP and buy them. It's similar in Hearthstone you can get gold from playing a lot and completing quests, but it would take ages for you to have all the competitive cards without paying. I agree that LoL does it better though.

Were the complaints about the HW DLC really about price? The last DLC pack (Twilight Princess) raised the level cap to 150 and the included adventure map pretty much required characters that are 80+, plus the damage output of enemies was significantly increased while the ranking conditions for damage taken remained unchanged. So for one, there's basically a hole between the DLC packs that requires a lot of grinding in content you've already played, so a lot of hours needed to be invested to properly play the latest DLC. And two, there was a lot of frustration because you basically can't afford to get hit anymore for an A rank.

It would be really strange to complain about the price because each map should amount to at least 20 hours of additional playtime (assuming someone has already grinded in anticipation and therefore can clear the missions fast and A-rank most of them on the first attempt).

I meant insane amount to buy all of them, but it's true you can compete at the highest level by only owning a few. It's better than HS in that regard.

Useless post that adds nothing to the discussion.

Splatoon won't have microtransactions, the direct specified ingame money. Fear mongering thread based on nothing. How you thought this thread was a good idea is beyond me.

They didn't, though they did have Reggie pimping those microtransactions awfully hard on a Nintendo Direct.

I've heard nothing but praise for MK8's DLC, but the reception to Hyrule Warriors' seems more mixed... but maybe the complainers are people who were too dumb to just buy the season pass, so I dunno. It did look like less of a money grab than your typical Warriors DLC to me. But it's always a ratchet effect with this kind of thing. Nintendo only fairly recently breached the paid DLC issue. A lot of Nintendo fans had previously been very vocal that paid DLC amounted to ripping out chunks of the game to sell it separately, so I think they're still treading rather carefully. Probably more importantly than that, Nintendo's own self image required them to put their best foot forward. However, once you cross that psychological barrier by doing something for the first time, it's always easier to do it again and you're invariably less thoughtful about how you do it. They did just recently take out the extra content from Fantasy Life Link for the western release in order to sell it separately, so while they're still far from Forza 5 territory I think the trend is definitely toward them maximizing revenue to whatever extent they think they can get away with it.

Same thing with paid online. After reading Dan Adelman's interview about how slow moving and clueless a lot of Nintendo's higher ups are I'm sure there are factions who would like to do it, but between those who are just extremely resistant to any sort of change and those who know that the Nintendo Network simply isn't competitive, it hasn't happened yet. But with every other company on the planet trying to figure out how to turn its product into a service and rope consumers into paying a subscription fee it only seems a matter of time before Nintendo shrugs and follows along, although with Nintendo being Nintendo that could be a very long time indeed. I think if they do ever do it, they'll pull a Sony and introduce it in such a way that it's tied to something like PS+ games to make it more palatable (again, as much to themselves as to customers).