Tekken 8 releases in two weeks but that hasn’t stopped Bandai Namco from announcing the first DLC for the game.
Longtime Tekken character Eddy will be the games first DLC to release in Spring 2024 and will be followed by 3 more characters during the year.
Maybe I’m just being old fashioned but if DLC is announced before a game launches isn’t that just an admission that the game isn’t finished?
I’m a firm believer that any DLC that is announced prior to launch or worse, is included on the disc but locked until you hand over more cash should be included in the full game.
In the announcement they’re showing a character that’s still a work in progress.
You’re saying they should push back the release of a fully functional game because they’re gonna get 1 more character ready somewhere near the beginning of March?
Based on what was shown, they’re fully redoing the mocap of a character with a 100+ moveset. This is a lot of work.
DLC is entirely sound when your goal is to support the game post-launch for years. This income justifies a slew of balance patches, large esports event funding as well as the addition of more characters.
You could argue that the Day 1 DLC of golden suit skins is a cashgrab or the retro t-shirts. This would be more valid, as they indeed are repackaging ready content as DLC. However, it’s just a golden suit and should be considered a tip to the developers.
They could release the game and add Eddy for free instead of delaying the whole release.
Releasing something you make outside of the budget of the main project for free is something a profit-seeking company will be very unlikely to do as it needs justification for months of work.
Sure, they could do goodwill in the hopes of a return of investment in the form of increased sales from being such good guys.
We’re looking an international entertainment giant here, not a small indie. They need to meet their profit margins or it’s time to fire some of the workforce.
Just because a character needs work after the target role was date does not mean it was outside the budget. Are quality of life upgrades after release outside the budget? What about adding support for ultra wide screens after release?
No need to simp for a corporation. They are clearly releasing characters slowly for more profit compared to several past releases that had dozens of characters included.
If it has a separate price tag, it was outside of the main budget.
If nobody buys the DLC it will not make any money and time invested in it will be at a loss.
This is also perfectly fine. This is the free market. We have the right as a collective to decide the DLC’s value to us.
If nobody buys subscriptions, DLC or expansions, it will ultimately not get made. We will return to the good old days of games where patches are only made to reach new target markets (previously unsupported devices, resolutions, platforms or translations), never to serve the existing audience unless it’s a marketing gambit.
Games as live services will cease. This isn’t inherently bad either. It’s just a question of what you as a customer value.
I value game franchises that I love being treated well and developed by passionate people. You can see the love the Tekken team has put on display for the past 4-5 years in particular. While their track record remains good, I am a happy repeat customer.
There is nothing wrong with being picky with your purchases either. You don’t have to spend 20 bucks to get Eddy + the other 3 unannounced characters if you don’t assign it value. If there are more people like you out there, the devs will plan accordingly.
This is how we got only 36 characters at console/pc launch for Tekken 7, after Tekken Tag 2 despite its immense 61 character roster bombed.
People didn’t find value in Tag 2, so Bamco budgeted T7 accordingly. Luckily they made one smart choice, which was launching for PC and Xbox and got immense sales due to new untapped markets.
Admittedly T8 rolls out with less than T7 on non-arcade release, but it’s worth noting T7 had 2 years in the arcades with a starting roster of 20. However T8 skips arcades entirely and has reanimated much of the character roster, which is a rare treat considering they’ve been reusing animations made even as far back as 1995 in T7 still.
Either way, I hope you get the gist of what I’m going for here.
The focus of the devs before launch should be making the game and any day one patch as good as it can possibly be.
DLC work shouldn’t start and definitely should not be announced before release.
It’s not a good look that they planned to release an incomplete game. Clearly Eddy was in their plans from the get go but they decided to hold him back for extra cash knowing people will pay more for a legacy character.
You don’t work on a game two weeks before release. The game is already finished (gold) then and you work on day 1 patch stuff (QA and programmers) and DLC stuff (designers, artists, programmers) if applicable.
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This is unrealistic. The process from start to a fully finished character is huge, and if you didn’t start until the game shipped then you’d be bitching that there was too big a gap with no interesting updates after the game came out.
Also a lot of the people working on this content won’t be the same people working on the last remaining bugs. As you get closer to release, you have a smaller and smaller group of people fixing things otherwise it causes too much churn and you start introducing more bugs.
“Clearly Eddy was in their plans from the get go but they decided to hold him back for extra cash knowing people will pay more for a legacy character.”
This is literally all an incorrect assumption.
Lol okay, because this isn’t the correct model for fighting games or anything
Eddy will have been planned as a DLC as part of, as you mentioned, the standard dlc release model that basically all fighting games follow. That means he wasn’t held back from the main game as he was never planned to be part of it, only a DLC. Not liking the model doesn’t mean Eddy was taken out of the main game to be sold as DLC, nor does them planning a DLC in advance.
None of this has anything to do with liking or not liking the model.
And yes it was pre-planned DLC planned in advance, which means they chose not to put it in the main game. Therefore they chose to hold it back. How do you not get that’s the same thing. I just guess zoomers will never understand how we used to get free updates with that kind of stuff
Not a zoomer, for one.
Which part are you having trouble with? He was never part of the main game. Do you just have an issue with them planning in advance? You want them to finish development with no idea what was they were going to do next and then start planning? Just have Devs sat around doing nothing because their part in development of the main game is done? Even though a game’s longetivity is affected by how quickly additional support releases? It’s a completely absurd position to take.
Holy crap, people replying sanely.
I feel like I’m constantly wading through raw brain damage from how often I see lines like “selling an unfinished game” repeated.
Singleplayer games with stories get “finished”. Sometimes, they get ideas for other small little, less important stories to tell in addition. Fighting games and pretty much all competitive online games are not that.