By Mark Ramos | Observer Contributor
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When you purchase a product you would expect that product to be a completed one right? So why is it that, that level of expectation applies to every product on the market except for video games? From releasing unfinished games to locking content behind pay walls, the gaming industry has turned its back on those who made it the biggest entertainment medium in the world.
Street Fighter V is the most recent culprit of the beloved industries new business model of undercooked, microwave gaming. Its longtime publisher Capcom promised consumers the next level of fighting games, but delivered and substandard game due minimal content and dysfunctional online connectivity.
When you compare the content of SFV to essentially any other fighting game on the market it feels like you payed a $60 full retail price for a game that has about $20 worth of content. If you where to look at a game like Mortal Kombat X with its robust roster (over 20 characters), multiple games modes including a massive narrative of a story mode, multi-tiered combat ladders and a classic arcade mode just to name a few, you’re left feeling like you got ripped off.
Capcom’s response to the overwhelmingly negative reaction lack of content was basically a halfhearted apology, a promise of free DLC that is be rolled out over the next 6 months, and there lies the heart of the problem: Downloadable Content. What was once used to extend a well-supported games lifespan is now the gold standard excuse to sell you an unfinished product and then charge you more money to play content you may already have.
Let’s start with selling you an unfinished game. It has become all too common for game developers to push out games to the retailers that aren’t quit finished or are even buggy. Developers get away with this by using what is called a day one patch. A day one patch is downloaded automatically when you first start a game up. Even a great game like the aforementioned Mortal Kombat X is guilty of this. MKX had a massive 1.8GB patch on its launch day to fix bugs, online stability and balancing issues.
This brings me to the most egregious issue: Pay walls. Pay walls are used to make you pay more money to access parts of the game. No company has been caught more red handed then SFV’s developer Capcom.
In 20012 with the release of the highly anticipated Street Fighter X Tekken, it was revealed that the 12 DLC characters, that would cost $20 to unlock, were already on the game disk in their entirety. The only thing keeping you the consumer from using them was a single line of coding that allowed access to them.
This is the modern business model. Game devolvement is no longer about creating an enjoyable and groundbreaking product that fans will love. It’s all about making a good enough product that can chopped up and sold as micro transactions in as many pieces as possible.
You used to be able to buy a games season pass and get all its DLC for$20. Now the average season pass cost $30-$50 and some games like Batman: Arkham Knight will cost you almost $200.00 to play all its content. With these practices and gaming’s easy accessibility it’s no wonder the gaming industry is a 91.5-billion-dollar industry.
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