Not all players have welcomed the introduction of the Tekken Shop Tekken 8, which is the game's internal shop where it is possible to purchase costumes and various elements to customize the characters with premium currency. Katsuhiro Harada himself intervened on the issue and explained that microtransactions are a necessary evil in a live service title, given between development, post-launch content and server costs have practically increased tenfold compared to the 1990s and almost tripled compared to those of Tekken 7 in 2015.
“Development costs are now 10 times higher than in the 1990s and more than double or almost triple the cost of Tekken 7. Fight Lounge servers are also expensive to maintain. In the past there weren't as many specs and there wasn't online. They also didn't have such high resolution and high definition,” said the director of the series in a post on 8.
Harada subsequently explained that times have changed and development costs have grown substantially and at rates far greater than those of the expansion of potential consumers, making monetization systems additional to those of the simple purchase price of a product practically essential. base game, such as microtransactions, DLC and so on. A speech that clearly states that this applies to a large part of the industry and not just for Tekken 8.
“Now, so many people want the game to be supported for a long time. That's why it costs money to continuously update the game. But probably (the author of the post) only has fond memories of the old games he experienced as a kid and doesn't pay attention to the changing times and increasing costs. The economic situation and everything else is changing. If we simply don't do anything as he suggests, the game will stop working in a few months. I think that's what he wants. So it is useless to talk to him about these realities. He wants us to stop economic activity and stop updating and supporting the game.
Console gamers are not increasing, in fact they are decreasing
Harada's post did not go unnoticed by Thomas Puha, director of communications at Remedy, the studio behind Alan Wake 2 and Control, who added that, not only potential gamers on consoles are not increasingbut which in some ways have decreased and at the same time are more selective and pretentious.
“Pearls of wisdom. The audience for the consoles we sell to hasn't grown 10x, it's somehow smaller and more selective than ever. Creating a competitive game for what audiences expect (especially graphics and longevity) and bringing it to market… is difficult to make the economics work to say the least.”