In the wake of fighting games like Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 and Mortal Kombat 1 getting an intense amount of backlash for their in game stores one would think that any future fighting game release would steer very clear of such an incendiary feature. However, it seems that Bandai Namco has different plans with their flagship fighting game Tekken 8, as announced for their latest patch, it looks like there actually will be an in-game store added to Tekken 8, much to the outcry of the playerbase.
Alongside the first DLC character for Tekken 8, Eddy, Tekken 8 will undergo a large patch. This patch will include some options such as being able to change the title screen character from Kazuya to Eddy, but the feature everyone is talking about is the inclusion of an in-game store. As Michael Murray, designer for Tekken 8, stated during the livestream, the in-game Tekken store will feature many nostalgia costumes for the Tekken cast. These nostalgia costumes will be sold at around 400 Tekken coins ($3.99) the in-game currency. These costumes will also be cycled in and out every so often, similar to how Mortal Kombat 1’s store functions.
Now, this monetization is a lot less predatory than Mortal Kombat 1’s or Street Fighter 6’s, but many players are worried that this is the first step down a dark road for Tekken 8’s future features. Especially considering that Bandai Namco are going out of their way to take down YouTube and Twitter videos of modded old outfits for Tekken 8, which is scarily similar to Capcom’s near draconian rule towards mods, though unlike Street Fighter 6, many are assuming this is because Bandai Namco doesn’t want players to get modded skins for “free” and would rather they pay for it.
There’s even a theory going around Reddit that Bandai Namco intentionally left the store out of the initial release for fear that reviewers and early impressions would be tainted by it, though that may just be the usual Reddit fearmongering.
In any case, whether or not this store is good or bad is up in the air, but what isn’t up in the air is the community’s response to it, and the crackdown on PC mods are not a good sign of things to come regardless.