Street Fighter 4 DLC Priced. Commence The Bending Over.

Today scans from Famitsu confirmed some details of the previously announced downloadable content for Street Fighter 4. Capcom has made a pretty big deal about making sure that all the players are on a level field, and that no one will have access to any kind of paid for characters. I really admire Capcom for going that route and not taking advantage of players ala Scamco Bandai, but that decision just makes the news of these downloadable costumes is even more disappointing. It’s worth mentioning that the pricing has only been confirmed for Japan but there’s no reason to think that the prices will change. Here is the release schedule of the costumes from 1up:

- February 12: Zangief, E. Honda, Rufus, Abel, El Fuerte
- February 19: Chun Li, C. Viper, Sakura, Rose, Cammy
- February 26: Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Gouken, Dan
- March 5: Vega, Sagat, Balrog, Bison, Seth
- March 12: Guile, Blanka, Dhalsim, Gen, Fei Long
- April 30: All-in-one Pack (1000 MS Points, 1200 yen)

Each pack will cost 320 MS points, but if you can stand to wait then you can get an uber deal of only 1000 MS points! That’s a savings of 600 points! So for just over 12 dollars you can have new skins for your characters. This is ridiculous.

Remember the good old days when you could unlock costumes for your characters by completing certain challenges within the game? Good times. Not any more though, money talks and common sense walks. I realize that costumes aren’t a necessity and the old argument of “if you don’t want to pay for it then don’t buy it, no one is forcing you” has already been leveraged against me. What bothers me is that Capcom has been doing so well with the release of Street Fighter 4. There’s a great collector’s edition coming out, the Fightsticks look spectacular, everything was falling into place nicely until this. Some of the costumes that you can actually make out in the scans do look pretty cool. Apparently Sakura beat up Ryu and took all of his clothes’¦except for his pants, Fei Long loves his Bruce Lee esque speedo, and Cammy is looking more like her Alpha 2 self, but I’m already paying 80 dollars for the collector’s edition, and 150 dollars for the Tournament Edition fightstick. Why do you need more of my money for some costumes? For a company that’s been doing a great job of taking fans into consideration for this release, this just reeks of greed.

In the arcade, alternate costumes were unlocked using a battlepoints system. Why couldn’t something similar be used here? With the new training modes added to the home console version, new costumes for the characters could be a great reward for a player who’s spent hours honing his skill with a specific character. There are a million different ways that this could be done better and could serve as a reward for players willing to put the time in, but I suppose there’s no money in that. While this of course can’t be confirmed yet, I fully expect these costumes to already be on the disk. Hey, at least it wont take up much room on your hard drive right?…right?…