Capcom's Svensson Sort Of Addresses Street Fighter X Tekken DLC Fallout

This article is one of those times where I would have just wished Capcom would have kept quiet about the issue just to keep some additional fuel from being tossed on an already raging fire.

Speaking about DLC, Capcom's Christian Svensson (oftentimes referred to as Sven) unleashed a barrage of unfiltered comments about the "whiners", the "moaners", the "cryers" and the "entitled gamers" regarding the business decisions involving DLC.

Event Hubs managed to pick up the quote from Capcom's Unity Website, where Sevensson says...

This is one of those loaded PR responses used to give supporters and fanboys fuel to say "Yeah, you gamers are just ungrateful, entitled whiners! STFU!" when in reality the situation is far more complex than people whining about Super Duper Herp Derp Edition X5 or feeling entitled to everything already locked away on the disc.

The reality is that there are core fans who will eat up everything a company throws their way because they love the product. The main issue, though, is when consumers feel cheated. When you release one iteration after another too soon, yes, some people can feel cheated. When you store disc-locked content on a disc only to charge for it later even though it's already on the disc, yes, people can feel cheated.

When your loyal fanbase feels cheated because they have to pay more for something they already paid for there's no way really around it. It's a general rule that you respect your consumers not by finding ways to gouge them out of their hard earned money but by squeezing as much content onto the disc as possible before a game goes gold and selling for the price associated with the play experience most consumers are comfortable with paying (for this gen it's $60). I believe Namco has done a perfect job of finding this balance with the Tekken series, having appropriate iterations released in a timely fashion without ever including DLC that leaves anyone feeling a knot in their stomach as if they've just been wallet raped. As such, if Namco can do it I'm sure Capcom can, too.

Debating inflation and development costs boils down to semantics. We don't know exactly how much Street Fighter X Tekken cost to make. However we do know that it runs on a modified Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition engine and we do know many of Capcom's fighters were ported from the aforementioned game. So we can safely assume this did not have the same budget as say Mass Effect 3, Skyrim or to some bloated extreme case, Grand Theft Auto IV which tallied up to a whopping $100 million.

For the most part gamers are always willing to pay more if more is offered, however assuming gamers are willing to pay more for what they already paid for seems far reaching.

In the case of the Super Herp Derp Extreme Editions, the main thing to consider is that Joe X will definitely feel cheated if three to six months prior he bought Herp Derp Extreme Edition only to find out that the Super version contains four extra characters and two stages. Where-as Joe Y feels that the Super edition is a great value because he didn't buy the original version. Using the Joe Xs as an excuse is in poor taste because the same can be said for the people who bought the Star Wars Trilogy DVD pack only to find out that the Star Wars Six-Movie DVD pack would arrive at a later date. It happens across every medium. It's the nature of the beast.

What Capcom should be doing is focus on how to please the people that made them famous, the core audience that posts positive reviews on websites like Amazon and Metacritic, as well as the FGC tournament organizers who help make the fighting game scene a spectator sport and a financially lucrative e-sport.

Adding disc-locked content that was finished before a game goes gold looks poor all the way around. Furthermore, no one from Capcom has yet to answer the obvious question: Why was completed content not accessible from the get go if it was completed?