Capcom’s done some pretty despicable and egregious things with downloadable content, not least if which is charging people for characters that are locked on already available retail copies of games. Capcom’s treatment of fans with the Street Fighter X Tekken has caused some to worry that Namco might begin employing the same tactic with Tekken and its own street Fighter crossover.
Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada has allayed those fears, saying it’s something that’ll never happen to Tekken – because each character is essential to the balance of the game as a whole.
"Tekken has never had DLC before and charged for it," he said during Namco Bandai’s Global Gamer Day last week, reported by Edge. "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."
As the two companies are working together, Harada seemed careful to not come across as too critical of Capcom’s DLC practices, even trying to rationalise them.
"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.
Bear in mind though that Harada hasn’t ruled out paid DLC, but that it would only be used for superfluous nonsense, like vanity items.
"There are some strange people on Twitter who ask for really peculiar items like bikini suits for Lee Chaolan," he told us. "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."
There you go. Namco won’t be milking fighting fans. Now if only they could make a good fighting game…
Last Updated: April 18, 2012
