Don’t expect to pay for extra characters in Tekken
A few developers and publishers in recent years have raised a few eyebrows from gamers by charging for DLC already on the disk.
In the case of Capcom; charging for a Vs mode that was already on the disk - effectively charging for a key to unlock it. The publisher also charged for DLC characters for Street Fighter X Tekken, what was already on the disc too.
Epic's Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinki described such practices as "an ugly truth of the games industry."
However, there are those in an opposing camp, with a different view.
Tekken series producer, Katsuhiro Harada, spoke to Edge during Namco Bandai's Global Gamer Day event inLas Vegas.
Tekken has never had DLC before and charged for it. This isn't really directed at Capcom, I have always said this, but I see the characters and their move sets as chess pieces - they are essential items necessary in the game and we would never sell any of those individually.
Now although Namco contributed to character designs and input into Street Fighter X Tekken, but had no control over Capcamo's strategy of publishing the game. Harada continued:
It's Capcom's business decision, obviously. But I expect the reason they did that was, if one player bought a character that another player didn't have, they would not be able to play against each other online.
Each player needs to have the character data on their disc - if one doesn't, they would need to download it before each match - and as that includes the character model, the data would be large, increasing the download time.
I also wonder if it's because the game has characters which are Vita-specific, and they wanted to make it so that owners would be able to use them on PS3 as well.
Capcom's official response to complaints about on-disk DLC was down the line and blunt:
While Capcom is sorry that some of its fans are not happy about the chosen method of delivery for the DLC. We believe that this method will provide more flexible and efficient gameplay throughout the game's lifecycle.
There is effectively no distinction between the DLC being 'locked' behind the disc and available for unlocking at a later date, or being available through a full download at a later date, other than delivery mechanism.
Haranda, however, did say that some charges may occur. To accommodate for their strange fanbase:
There are some strange people on Twitter who ask for really peculiar items like bikini suits for Lee Chaolan. Obviously, we wouldn't have had that in our original development plan, so if we were going to do it, we'd need to create it right now, without a budget - obviously we'd have to charge a little bit for such items.
Glad to see he's been getting my Tweets.
[via OXM]
