Street Fighter 6 is undoubtedly a fantastic fighting game, and it’s only going to get better thanks to its second line-up of DLC characters, which includes SNK guest stars Terry Bogard and Mai Shiranui. However, there does remain one point of contention: the game’s microtransactions and monetization model. Yet despite the amount of complaints lobbied against them, it sounds like Capcom has no plans to adjust the microtransactions.
Recently, Kotaku got to speak with Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama and producer Shuhei Matsumoto, and it asked them about the discontent surrounding the microtransactions. There is a lot of additional content in Street Fighter 6, such as customization items, that you can’t just buy with real money. You have to first purchase the in-game Fighter Coins currency, and those are only available in specific bundles of 250, 610, 1,250, and 2,750, meaning you’ll often find yourself with some leftover coins once you’ve purchased the in-game items you want. On top of that, there are monthly $5/£4 battle passes and the DLC character passes which cost $30/£27, roughly half the price of the full game.
The point is, even after paying roughly $60/£50 on the game (possibly even more if you bought one of the special editions), Street Fighter 6 still strongly encourages you to spend more money on its DLC and cosmetics. The sheer amount of microtransactions and Capcom’s pricing has been a sore spot since launch; I remember there being a lot of player outrage surrounding the prices of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover content, with all four costumes costing $15 a piece, making them collectively the same price as the base game. There was a similar backlash to the Outfit 3 DLC, which added new costumes for all 18 characters in the launch roster. The top comments underneath the announcement trailer on YouTube are full of people complaining about how you have to spend over $100 to get all of them.
From the sound of things, though, enough people are happily (or perhaps begrudgingly) spending money on these microtransactions for Capcom not to consider making any adjustments to Street Fighter 6‘s monetization. When pressed on the matter by Kotaku, Nakayama and Matsumoto answered:
“I mean people seem to be very interested in purchasable content especially that associates with the actual characters in the Fighting Ground Mode. And we see a lot of interest towards that so it’s something that we will continue looking into and seeing if there’s any new stuff that we can just… but in terms of the system it’s probably going to be as is.”
Street Fighter 6 is hardly the only game to draw complaints for its microtransactions; Mortal Kombat 1, for example, angered players when it offered a new Fatality for $10. Unfortunately, it’s been proven that microtransactions make game companies a lot of extra money. Sticking with the Mortal Kombat 1 example, publisher Warner Bros. revealed late last year that MK1‘s microtransactions contributed to “meaningful” growth in content revenue (via VG247). If Capcom’s ever going to reconsider its approach to monetization, it requires enough people to not pay for them, but it doesn’t look like that will ever happen any time soon.
