I was referring to possibility that potential season pass buyers didn't spend the money because (a) they didn't like the season pass character roster for a given season or did not like not knowing the full roster for a given season (which happened in Season 2 with silhouettes) and/or (b) because the character release dates were poorly communicated and/or never communicated until the week prior to release.
To me my assertions make sense because the hardcore playerbase - those who compete or play online consistently - will always buy most of the new characters but more casual and/or lesser skilled players probably wouldn't since they're not looking to be super competitive in the first place. Instead those players were probably using Fight Money in Season 1 and Season 2 to cherry pick the characters they found interesting. Maybe in Season 3 as well. For example, I didn't buy the Season 2 character pass until the end of Season 2 when it was on sale for 50%+ off.
Anyway, sales data for this year and the online player match data will probably inform their next decision on how and when to sell new characters. I think its safe to assume sales people at Capcom have been observing and analyzing the sales data since SFV released. Heck, at the first post-release SFV EVO panel in 2016 Capcom USA folks went over a Power Point presentation that summarized the best selling costumes (
and also revealed the Alex and Ibuki nostalgic costumes that took many months to release) so they definitely review that data. Even the CFN Shop in-game refreshes the rankings of purchases every 2 hours. (Which is super interesting to a data nerd like me!)
By the way, I'm surprised online match data topic touched on in the interview is not something we're talking about. I mean look at this specific quote from Ono in the Eurogamer interview:
So they definitely use online matches to inform balance decisions. Woof. I hope that when they're performing analysis they're utilizing statistical methods to weed out the noise and focus on data that matters (such as giving a lot less weight to matches at the lower level of the competitive spectrum). I'd kill to have a look at their data warehouse and everything they're storing, analzying, and the reports they're making (the kind of stuff is my day job).