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Tekken 8 wins King of the Iron Grift | This Week in Business
23.02.2024 - 17:41 / gamesindustry.biz
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
Earlier this week, Bandai Namco unveiled the post-release product roadmap for the recently launched Tekken 8 in a livestreamed presentation, in the process unveiling its plans to add an in-game shop where players can buy customization items and throwback character costumes for real money.
It was clear from the livestream that they knew this might not go over well with a certain part of the audience.
QUOTE | "We hear that some people might have some kind of allergic reaction when they hear the word 'shop,' etc., but it's more trying to update the game and keep it fresh with new customization items." – Tekken 8 chief producer Naoya Yasuda says during the roadmap stream that the developers aren't doing this to make money; they're only trying to "provide a better experience overall."
It's hard to read Yasuda's comments about "some kind of allergic reaction" as anything but dismissive here. But a developer being a little bit dismissive to a segment of the player base isn't my problem here; I actually wish developers were a little bit more dismissive of paying customers in general whenever it came time to put toxic elements of the audience in their place.
My problem here is that Tekken 8 came out barely a few weeks ago, and I'm pretty certain this shop didn't just occur to them the day after launch. They've been planning on putting it into the game for some time now, and decided not to share that information with customers until after the game launched, the first wave of preorders were filled, the reviews were written, and the word of mouth around the game had formed. After all, they didn't want people with "some kind of allergic reaction" to the game's actual business model to impact any of that.
To extend the metaphor a bit, it's like going to a restaurant, ordering your meal, and then being told partway through the main course that there's a bunch of peanuts and shellfish in there that they never mentioned on the menu. It might not a big deal for most people, sure, but that doesn't make it OK to do.
The stakes aren't quite life-or-death with Tekken 8's in-game store, for sure, but it's still a crappy move to pull on customers and a complete bait-and-switch, selling them a product without the thing they hate, knowing full well you're going to force the thing they hate into it a few weeks later.
"But what's the big deal," you might be saying. "They're just adding this thing and if I don't want to buy the stuff, I can simply ignore it."
As one of the aforementioned
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