Stellar Blade’s director has made a solemn promise to their growing fanbase.
As shared on Twitter by Genki_JPN, director Kim Hyung Tae revealed in an interview with Ruliweb that Shift Up will not overload the game with microtransactions.
Genki provides this translation of his statement:
“We want to make it clear at this point that Stellar Blade will not require any additional expenses that gamers are not aware of beyond what they paid for the package. The only exception is if we create collaboration costumes with another company’s IP, those may be sold for a fee.
Also, there is no New Game+ in the launch version, so please look forward to it being updated very soon.”
As you may be well aware if you’ve been following gamers on Twitter, a growing fandom has emerged for Stellar Blade online, thanks to its upfront fan service. On this end, Stellar Blade isn’t particularly unique; fan service games like it are essentially a classic genre in Japan at this point.
One can argue the first such games came out on Japanese computers like the PC-8801 in the 1980s, but the modern day archetype for this genre was likely formed by Tecmo Koei’s Dead or Alive franchise. The Dead or Alive fighting games in particular were also treated seriously, as Tecmo’s studio did produce a high quality title with great graphics and gameplay, competitive with contemporaries like Tekken and Virtua Fighter.
More recent entries in this genre include Senran Kagura, notoriously published on the child-friendly Nintendo Switch. But we think most fans will agree that Dead or Alive set a standard on breaking through as a mainstream title, and being the most popular in this genre.
Which is why Dead or Alive became particularly notorious for their DLC and microtransactions, which felt like they were taking advantage of their fanbase, and their, uhm, interests. As noted in this article from 2017, Tecmo made so much costume DLC for Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, that it would cost over $ 1000 to buy them all. And then, in 2019, Tecmo made the mistake of making hair color microtransactions for their next game, Dead or Alive 6.
These games may have questionable content for many players, but there is an audience and a market for it, and that means there’s another way for game developers to make money by making games for that audience.
Maybe there are Stellar Blade fans who really want to play this title based on the merits of what they’ve seen in the gameplay. But based on the online noise, there was another audience for it too, and that audience looks like they could have been vulnerable for Dead or Alive style DLC. So it’s a strange relief that Shift Up doesn’t plan to do something similar with their title. At least, seeing the variety of costumes that Eve can actually wear in-game, and now the director’s statement, it doesn’t seem that way for now.
Stellar Blade will be released exclusively on the PlayStation 5 on April 26, 2024.
