Dead or Alive developer kills off DLC idea
Wednesday, June 20, 2012 4:06 PM
The boss of the developer of the forthcoming Dead or Alive 5 has savaged the idea of disc-locked content (DLC) appearing on the game.
Speaking to VideoGamer during the recent E3 conference, Team Ninja boss Yosuke Hayashi rejected any suggestions of DLC being employed as a commercial strategy for the fighting game. "We have no plans to sell characters as downloadable content," he stated.
Capcom has taken some serious stick for its approach with Street Fighter X Tekken, for which it locked away ready-to-play characters on the game's disc, and Hayashi will no doubt win a lot of fans for the stance he has taken on the matter.
"We don't feel that it's right for fighting games," he said in a thinly-veiled attack on Capcom's approach with Street Fighter X Tekken.
"We feel like this is a kind of sport, and you don't change the rules for sports. Everybody plays by the same rules. You don't have a 14-player soccer game versus an 11-player soccer game. That's just not fair.
"If certain people have all these characters and others don't … it makes it an unfair game and we don't think that's the right way to go for fighting games."
Hayashi also believes that releasing additional characters makes developing a game an even harder task than it already is.
"Even with over 20 characters that's still a real challenge. If we had 50, how much more time would need to balance the game? It gets that much harder to get it right and it's already very difficult to get right."
As for Capcom, last month its senior vice-president Christian Svensson took the company's official blog to assure fans that it had "begun the process of re-evaluating how such additional game content is delivered in the future".
However, this review will come too late for Dragon's Dogma which was already well in development when the furore erupted.