No character DLC for Tekken, says Katsuhiro Harada

See these guys? All free.

In a recent interview with Edge, Tekken’s Series Producer Katsuhiro Harada has essentially promised gamers that they will never have to pay for playable Tekken characters, at least as long as he’s in charge. “I see the characters and their move sets as chess pieces,” Harada said. “They are essential items necessary in the game and we would never sell any of those individually.”

Despite what you might think, Harada isn’t criticizing Capcom’s questionable practice of putting some Street Fighter X Tekken characters on the disc. “I expect the reason they did that was, if one player bought a character that another player didn’t have, they would not be able to play against each other online. Each player needs to have the character data on their disc – if one doesn’t, they would need to download it before each match – and as that includes the character model, the data would be large, increasing the download time.” I’ve heard this kind of argument before, and it illustrates that the industry can’t really come to a consensus on this. Some people are fine with on-disc so they don’t have to download a huge update after purchasing some DLC, whereas some people want everything on the disc to be unlocked from day one and just don’t care about huge downloads.

Anyway, Tekken characters won’t be DLC anytime soon. Make of that what you will.