Oh, how the mighty have fallen. There have been many cases of developers and titles in the gaming industry having seemingly a “perfect” thing going, only for it to crumble under their feet due to terrible choices. Earlier in the year, Tekken 8 was released to much acclaim from both fans and critics. The story not only reached a fever pitch thanks to its focus on Kazuya and Jin Kazama, not to mention the return of Jin’s mother, but the game looked better than ever thanks to Unreal Engine 5 and the ability to truly push the visual limits of the fighting game. However, even after selling well and getting tons of praise, Bandai Namco decided that this “wasn’t enough.”
You see, about a month after the game’s release, a microtransaction store opened up, and it was very clear to fans what Bandai Namco was planning. Sure enough, the game soon became overloaded with microtransactions for things like costumes. Just to be clear, these microtransactions were different than the “Year 1 Pass” that players had to get if they wanted to receive the DLC characters that would eventually be unleashed.
That brings us to now, because one of those DLC characters was Heihachi Mishima, the man who “died” at the hands of his son in the last game. If you wanted to get him, you needed the pass, which is understandable. However, it was then revealed that a special stage would be brought in with Heihachi’s arrival…but you had to pay for that separately. That was the “last straw” for gamers, and so they went to places like Steam and made it clear via user reviews that they weren’t happy. Thus, the game that was once dubbed incredibly positive is now “mixed” on Steam.
Oh, but it gets better. You might recall recently that Katsuhiro Harada, the man behind Tekken 8 in many respects, went to Twitter to apologize for the actions of Bandai Namco. He stated he would try to help fix things in the future so that this kind of action wouldn’t be taken again. As it turns out, he deleted that tweet not long after posting it.
Was Bandai Namco the one who forced him to take it down? We can’t say for certain, but if that was the case, it would send a loud message.
Either way, it’s clear that, once again, a gaming company has taken microtransactions too far, and the fans have had enough. We’ll have to wait and see if Bandai Namco continues this path in the future.
