Street Fighter x Tekken was the last straw.
In general, most gamers don’t mind the idea of DLC – it’s content you can experience after you’ve finished everything else, and it’s a way for the developer to keep making money off their product. Day-one DLC is slightly more controversial but still accepted, because it’s usually developed after work on the “main” game has started to wind up. But for many gamers, DLC that’s already on the shipped disc is unforgivable. It was completed! It’s right there on the disc! So why can’t I play it?
In March, gamers discovered that Capcom’s Street Fighter X Tekken had a roster of 12 additional fighters on the game’s disc who were currently unplayable – characters who would later be purchasable as DLC after the release of the PS Vita version. While Capcom justified it as necessary so that people who hadn’t bought the characters could play against them online, fans weren’t having it. The publisher attempted to defend itself to the Better Business Bureau by arguing that there was essentially no distinction between DLC already on a disc and DLC you have to download, except for the part where it’s called “downloadable” content and not “already on the disc” content.
Either way, though, Capcom says those days are at an end. In a post on the Capcom Unity blog, Capcom USA senior VP Chris Svensson said that the publisher would be “re-evaluating how [DLC] is delivered in the future.” Svensson admitted that there were some games, like the upcoming Dragon’s Dogma (out May 25th), that were too close to release to make drastic changes to DLC plans. Still, he said, gamers’ voices and complaints “are being heard.”
One can only hope that Capcom’s actions will match its words. Because while DLC in general can be pretty cool, it’s never fun to make a purchase and then discover that all you’re downloading was a couple of kilobytes’ worth of unlock code.
Source: Edge
Published: May 15, 2012 05:16 pm