The big day has finally come; Street Fighter 6 has just officially received its first wave of DLC costumes and they are now available for purchase. Capcom took several months to hype the new Outfit 3 for all 18 launch characters up, and just last week finally let the cat out of the bag with an official trailer showing the new costumes in action and sharing their release date.
The company was mum when it came to pricing, however, and it quickly became clear that we’d have to wait until they launched to find out how much these costumes would cost. Now that they’re here, we have learned that Street Fighter 6’s Outfit 3 alternate costumes are just as expensive as fans feared, and pouring some salt in the wound, the buying options for them are even more limited than we’d hoped.
There has been a lot of controversy surrounding additional content prices in modern fighting games over the last handful of months. Mortal Kombat 1 has come under fire several times for hiked up prices on alternate skins, announcer packs, and the infamous seasonal Halloween Fatality that initially ran players $10 — for one finisher — before backlash pushed Warner Bros. Games and NetherRealm Studios to provide a solution and grant three seasonal Fatalities for that same price tag.
Street Fighter 6 has also been a bad offender when it comes to added content prices. Right at launch, we took a look at what it would cost for players to purchase all of the colors for all 18 characters’ default looks, as well as their Outfit 2, and the total came out to a staggering $121.95 USD (before taxes).
Now, Outfit 2 did grant a little bit of breathing room for players as you are completely capable of unlocking this outfit for everyone on the roster (including the DLC characters) by playing through the game’s single-player World Tour mode. However, for those who wanted to go right to the competitive side of Street Fighter 6 and get access to Outfit 2, their best option was to suck it up and lay down the money for whichever costume they wanted.
Outfit 3, however, follows the same pricing structure as Outfit 2 did, but is more limited in the ways you can get it and feels a bit more predatory. For starters, Capcom has confirmed that you cannot unlock Outfit 3 by playing World Tour, so that option is completely off the table.
This means that you have to buy them with in-game Fighter Coins (FC), which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but Capcom absolutely took a misstep here with Outfit 3 that they simply should not have taken.
You see, back in Street Fighter 5, costume packs generally featured around 3 – 6 alternate outfits per pack and were for various characters. Outside of the initial Story and Battle costumes that were already in the game at launch, we never saw Capcom release a full batch of costumes that gave every playable character new digs all at once.
This practice, like we’re seeing with Outfit 3 in Street Fighter 6, is far more reminiscent of the Street Fighter 4 series’ DLC costume packs of the past. Back in those days, Capcom would release a full set of costumes for everyone that you could purchase as one giant bundle or in smaller, individual packs for certain characters.
Yet, here we are in 2023 with the first full set of costumes a Street Fighter game has seen in years, and there is no large bundle that offers all of the Outfit 3 costumes for a discounted price. While Capcom never made mention of this or promised it, the fact that they left it out seems to point to them favoring a system where people need to buy costumes individually and spend top dollar.
So we can’t unlock Outfit 3 through World Tour and there’s no bundle to get them all and save some money. Fine. Again, Capcom made no promises on either front, so we have to hold that.
That being said, adding fuel to the “needing to spend top dollar” fire is Street Fighter 6’s current Fighter Coins system. Much like you’d see with any premium in-game currency, players are expected to spend real world money to buy in-game tokens to use on additional content.
Fighter Coins can be unlocked by playing the game, but opportunities to do so and amounts you are rewarded are extremely limited. This means that the average player will have to buy Fighter Coins if they want to use the in-game shop.
Each character’s Outfit 3 in Street Fighter 6 costs 300 Fighter Coins. This translates to about $6 USD.
What makes Street Fighter 6’s Fighter Coins system particularly limited is that players are unable to pay the difference or pay exact amounts for items in the shop. To get Fighter Coins, you need to purchase one of the four set bundle options in the game, and they break down like this:
250 Fighter Coins – $4.99 USD
610 Fighter Coins – $11.99 USD
1,250 Fighter Coins – $23.99 USD
2,750 Fighter Coins – $49.99 USD
Alternate costumes for playable characters in Street Fighter 6 cost 300 Fighter Coins, and the cheapest bundle of Fighter Coins you can buy grants you 250 of them. You can likely already see how this is an issue…
With those bundle prices and the cost of costumes, players are literally forced to buy the second bundle option just to be able to purchase one single DLC outfit. I faced this exact scenario this morning where I had 45 Fighter Coins in my balance and buying the cheapest bundle would only bring me to 295 FC, which isn’t enough for the individual Lily costume I wanted to purchase.
No, I had to spend $11.99 USD up front just for the ability to buy one costume. I’m not sure what Capcom is thinking with this one, but demanding this much from players just to buy a single costume is not a good practice and feels like an incredibly bad faith move.
Speaking of these Fighter Coin bundles, if you wanted to be able to buy all 18 of the new Outfit 3 costumes in Street Fighter 6, you would have to purchase the most expensive bundle not once, but twice. Picking up the 2,750 Fighter Coins option twice would grant you 5,500 FC, and you’ll need 5,400 total for all 18 costumes.
Doing some quick math, two of the biggest bundle of Fighter Coins will run you $99.98 (before taxes) — nearly $100 for 18 costumes.
Adding this number to the initial cost for all default costume colors and Outfit 2 brings us to a total of $221.93. This is on top of the retail price of the game coming in at $59.99 USD for the standard version, and as much as $104.99 for the Ultimate Edition.
Street Fighter 6’s new Outfit 3 set of costumes, overall, appear to be a hit with the fighting game community. The prices on them and the limited buying options definitely are not, however, and there are numerous players, fans, and prominent community members on social media right now sharing their dislike for the costs.
Capcom has been great at patching out game-breaking bugs in short order and making improvements to the game that fans have been asking for. We can only hope that they take a closer look at these DLC release prices and practices and come up with something that’s not as strict and demanding on the consumer as what we currently have.
At the very least, there needs to be an option to buy 300 Fighter Coins directly so that players can afford individual costumes outright. This is a massive oversight and it is something that should be rectified as soon as possible.
