Tekken 8 has been out in the wild for just under a month now already, and it seems to be doing just about everything right by the fighting game community thus far.
That includes a pretty generous amount of in-game content, but now there’s some worry things could soon be changing in a not as good of a way.
Bandai Namco previously revealed that they’ll be adding a Tekken Shop feature to the game in the next update, which is bringing on concerns after what we’ve seen in other recent AAA fighting games like Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1.
They haven’t said what is going to be included in the store, but with the ESRB rating changing to include the “interactive element of in-game purchases,” it’ll almost certainly include microtransactions with real money.
Microtransactions are nothing new in the gaming sphere, but they’re becoming more prevalent in areas of fighting games we wouldn’t expect as much before.
More than that, however, is how much more expensive than they were over the past generation and feeling more like a “macrotransaction” than a microtransaction.
In SF6 and MK1 (plus some others like MultiVersus), we’ve consistently seen cosmetic pieces of DLC that would have likely been priced around $2–5 before now being sold for $7–15 or even sometimes upwards of $20, which puts a strain on the amount of content most players can obtain or even afford.
Who could forget the Seasonal Fatalities bundle Warner Bros. had to seemingly walk back or the $15 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles avatar outfits in SF6, which aren’t even the most expensive things you can buy in the shop now.
Up to this point, Tekken 8 has been pretty darn generous in comparison with four default costumes available for every character that can be purchased with in-game Fight Money as well as an extra costume for beating special Super Ghost Battles to unlock — aside from Jin and Asuka, who have two more outfits.
That’s on top of the hundreds of character customization costume and accessory pieces plus all of that for the player avatars in Arcade Quest and online lobbies too.
We can’t forget the jukebox either.
This has us wondering what’s even going to be included in the Tekken Shop beyond old missing customization items, new additions and maybe some user interface and meter options.
It also remains to be seen if the featured DLC is going to be purchasable outright with dollars, or if Bandai Namco will implement a premium in-game currency that we’ll be forced to use like SF6’s Fighter Coins and MK1’s Dragon Krystals.
They’ve been doing basically everything right to offer players a complete package thus far, which is greatly appreciated in this current climate, so we’ll see how they walk along this tight rope of DLC coming in.
We’ll be hopefully learning more about what the Tekken Shop will actually entail later tonight with the Tekken Talk Live broadcast for the post-release roadmap hosted by the main development team.