Any reason why Keeper isn’t on the list? Is it bad?

You’re totally on point. Lemmy has a lot of people stuck in the past. It’s a significant bias.

The store will garner good sales and the Tekken devs will eat well. This will be enabled by people who see value in their work and happily pay for it.

It really doesn’t matter what a vocal minority thinks, when the valuable non-vocal minority is out there paying big bucks for Kazuya in a fundoshi.

In order to reach new heights as a game service, Tekken needs all the money it can get.

People also seem to forget that Tekken started off in arcades. These arcade releases were far more aggressive in their monetization, especially in Korea and Japan. You would have people paying 5-10$ for a couple of hours. Players would also have to pay for their online player IDs.

Tekken 7 still had this business model. The game released for arcade in 2015. 2017 for all platforms.

The game was thoroughly milked before it was more accessible.

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.

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.

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.

I believe Spotify did this back in the day in order to hide as much of their AB testing from Apple who is essentially a competitor due to iTunes.

Having much of the UI delivered via web also makes it easier to deploy updates as no software update is necessary.

Somehow this reads like a Mars Volta song and I’m here for it.