One thing I’ve suggested is multiple games in the contract for licensing the characters
but overall as long as the third party politics remain good and there’s no bad blood all of a sudden, the third parties should be safe at least
Yeah. Overall, that only works if Sakurai knows another game is coming and has some details to give the IP holders. They trust him cause he has a good track record, but an unknown game he can't really get a licensing for anyway. It just causes issues if it gets cancelled.
If you look at 4 to Ultimate, there's no way a lot of stuff was licensed for both games. The Mii Costumes clearly were not 3rd party-wise, outside of maybe some of the way later ones, when Ultimate's development concepts started. There's the rumor Cloud was licensed for both, which timing-wise is not impossible, but it's clear that even if some costumes were okayed for base, that changed down the line anyway.
For instance, Ryu is way too early, so he'd obviously have to have been re-licensed. Right now, we're under the impression Fighter's Pass 2 was licensed around 2 years ago. That means it's unlikely any of them were licensed for an all new game that wasn't decided upon yet, even some small ideas. Thus, re-licensing it all would happen. It's possible some stuff was licensed far later as is, including some Mii Costumes, so they might be able to license them for two games. But for the most part, the content wouldn't have been licensed beyond Ultimate. You can't actually say "future games" as is. That's fine for 1st party stuff, since Nintendo is the one who hired him to make the game. That's a bit different. And even what the point behind the Ballot was, but anything third party is a lot more complicated. I could see Bayonetta and Pac-Man falling under that, due to Nintendo publishing Bayonetta and Bandai-Namco being a co-developer for Smash(you could also throw Sonic in there, maybe, but being he almost didn't make it in Brawl, and there's rumors he had issues coming back during 4, wellllll... no), but who knows if other ones are even possible. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff. Other ones maybe I could see could be Steve/Alex due to Nintendo and Microsoft being very buddy buddy about Minecraft, possibly Banjo since Phil Spencer really has an appreciation for the character, but beyond that, I'm doubtful. Considering the sparsity of FFVII content, SE I'd say isn't that open to the idea.
...I probably used a wrong negative somewhere. >.<;