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Capcom Rethinking Its Unpopular On-Disc DLC Practices

Street Fighter X TekkenCapcom has not been a popular publisher lately.  Among other reasons, part of the community's dissatisfaction stems from the company's habit of fencing significant chunks of a game's content off as paid downloadable content, yet including that content on the game disc itself.  While Capcom has explained its reasons for locking content behind on-disc paywalls and has stubbornly stuck to its guns on the issue, new information suggests that management is rethinking the unpopular practice.  Here's the word straight from Capcom's Senior Vice Presdient, Christian Svensson:

We've been getting several questions, here and elsewhere about the future of on-disc DLC.  We would like to assure you that we have been listening to your comments and as such have begun the process of re-evaluating how such additional game content is delivered in the future. As this process has only just commenced in the past month or so, there will be some titles, where development began some time ago and that are scheduled for release in the coming months, for which we are unable to make changes to the way some of their post release content is delivered.

I'm glad to see that Capcom is actually listening to community feedback.  I don't necessarily mean the kind of feedback that is expressed via e-mail, Twitter, and message forums, of course.  I'm talking about monetary feedback: the recent Street Fighter X Tekken apparently didn't hit sales projections, and of course that game seems to be the worst offender in the world of paid on-disc DLC.  Capcom needs to rethink how it supports its products and should go back to providing whole experiences at launch.  Let the DLC compliment the product, not complete it.  Customers are tired of being burned by this sort of thing and I doubt that Capcom will see a turnaround until they stop cutting out 40% or so of the total experience to sell later for an additional charge.

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