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Gamestop Interview with Harada
Q: Last week, Capcom stated that part of the reason Street Fighter X Tekken's performance "lagged" was because of "cannibalism" in the fighting game genre. Do you believe cannibalism could impact the performance of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and, in the future, Tekken X Street Fighter?
A: I'm not in a position to speak about the performance of Capcom's titles, so it's a difficult question to answer. However, I do know that besides [cannibalism], there were other factors that led to that outcome with SFXT. For example, the condition of several retailers in Europe was not good at all, and their expected sales had accounted for a large part of the expected forecast. So the timing in general was not very good, and quite unlucky.
I actually took some staff with me to look into the conditions of the European market directly, and we couldn't find even one copy of the game on shelves at several major retailers. Especially in the UK, we spent a day and a half scouring London for a copy and found none. Even though Internet sales account for a larger share recently, we are still quite dependent on actual retailers for a large share of our sales. I feel that the market circumstances were a large factor in the case of SFXT.
TAG2 isn't to be released until September, but I am currently formulating a strategy to avoid the situation of not having any copies on the shelves of major retailers. That being said, not only is there SFXT this year, there is also Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, Dead or Alive 5, and a few 2D fighters as well, so I'm sure it is fair to say the genre is quite saturated and quite possibly eating into the sales of each other. However, for TAG2 we will include game features to appeal to not only hardcore Tekken fans, but also to more mainstream gamers as well.
Q: What is your stance on downloadable content in fighting games, and how to implement it without causing consumers to feel as if they purchased an incomplete product?
A: No matter what method you employ for paid DLC, there are always going to be people in the community who see the game as an incomplete product, so I think this is unavoidable.
There may be some people who say, "I have no complaints with the DLC for this game." There are always people who will disagree. I think whatever you do, there will always be debate about this, and there will always be some who are dissatisfied.
On the other hand, are there really no complaints if you don't do DLC? For example, we didn't have any paid DLC for Tekken 6, and several months after release, I did receive a lot of feedback. People were telling me they wanted more content, even if it were paid content: "I would gladly pay an extra $10 if you added something to mode X or mode Z" and etc. It is difficult to add content because it does incur development cost, and often we already have to start work on the next project, so any profit that we made on the previous title would disappear quickly. The company and the shareholders it represents expect a profit, and it's hard to justify as a separate entity. I still think that maybe we can avoid a lot of negative feedback and please more of the fan base if the content was clearly developed after the original game. I'm sure there would still be complaints though, if the content is paid.
I personally think there has to be a line drawn when thinking about paid DLC for fighting games. The line the Tekken team has chosen regarding this is that stages, characters, and moves shouldn't be added as paid DLC. If they are to be added, they should be free. If you look at interviews I have done years ago, you can see I have mentioned this quite a long time ago. It's because these are necessary elements to a fighting game. Much like chess pieces to a game of chess, they shouldn't be charged for separately.
If I were to do paid DLC, I guess it would be something similar to iTunes; you could maybe buy more music to use in-game. That's something I would want personally, as well. Also, maybe some idea that was popular within the community on Twitter or Facebook, and to take that and actually put it in the game as DLC. People were joking that they wanted to see swimsuits for Ganryu and Kuma, so I'm thinking of doing that for real!
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