Tekken head Katsuhiro Harada has taken to Twitter to talk to fans about why Tekken 8 has introduced microtransactions.
Tekken 8, which released over a month ago and has already sold two million units, is facing a controversy of sorts, that Harada had to immediately take care of. However, we will need to step back a bit to explain what the controversy is even about.
Last week, Bandai Namco’s Tekken team revealed in a livestreamed event that Tekken 8 would soon be introducing an item shop that would come with their own microtransactions. In fact, they introduced some of those upcoming items on the stream itself:
- Jin Kazama’s Tekken 4 blue flames hoodie outfit
- Ling Xiaoyu’s Tekken 4 pink sundress outfit
- Jun Kazama’s Tekken Tag Tournament 2 non-canonical outfit
- Kazuya’s Tekken 6 military outfit
These are, of course, great nostalgia outfits, that fans would definitely want to get their hands on. Unfortunately, the fact that they are being introduced as microtransactions starts a problem, that’s core to Tekken’s own history.
Tekken, launching in 1994 in arcades, was around long enough that the things that gamers are now used to buying as microtransactions, or even gacha or lootbox items, were originally just bundled in as part of the games. This goes back to the time when content was unlocked using secret codes, or simply time unlocked, as Tekken itself did in the arcades.
So, there may be some younger gamers with garden variety complaints about the monetization, but there will be older gamers who remember when things were completely different. Now, those gamers were sold on the Season Pass model that Tekken 7 employed, but one can see how a microtransactions shop would be taken completely differently.
And so, you can understand why Harada would have such a detailed explanation. We will quote his full remarks from Twitter below, in response to a broader conversation about the new microtransactions:
“Development costs are now 10 times more expensive than in the 90’s and more than double or nearly triple the cost of Tekken 7. Even the Fight Lounge servers are costly to maintain.
In the past there weren’t so many specs and there wasn’t online. Plus they didn’t have such high resolution and high definition. Now, So many people want the game to run and be supported for a long time. It costs money to continually update the game for that reason.
However, he probably only keeps good memories of the old games he experienced as a boy and does not pay attention to these changing times and increasing costs. The economic situation and everything else is changing.
If we simply do nothing as he suggests, the game will simply stop running in a few months. I think that is what he wants. So there is no point in talking to him about these realities. He wants us to stop economic activity and stop updating and supporting the game.”
As Harada pointed out, Tekken has evolved alongside the industry as a whole. We may not like the recent changes that the franchise has gone through (Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Wii U Edition famously flopped, in spite of having the most content any game in the franchise had bundled in), but if Bandai Namco didn’t do them, the franchise might be in the same position as its once peers, like Virtua Fighter and Bloody Roar.
Moreover, the reality of increased development costs is true not just of Tekken 8, but of all video games currently in production. Harada is absolutely credible when he claims that Team Tekken needs to shift to new monetization models, to keep money going in, and make the game successful in the long term.
It’s also a clear, if understated, acknowledgement that Team Tekken is mindful of the limited potential the game has in finding a new audience. They have to get the current fanbase to keep spending, and that’s why legacy costumes were particularly put up as microtransactions.
But of course, Bandai Namco need to be mindful that they need to manage their audience’s expectations as well. If the Tekken 8 fanbase doesn’t like how these changes are communicated to them, they will bow out. We will see in the coming months if Team Tekken is able to manage this particular conundrum to everyone’s satisfaction.
