The development costs of Bandai Namco Entertainment’s latest fighting game, Tekken 8, is 2 to 3 times higher than that of Tekken 7.
In response to a Twitter/X discussion regarding the inclusion of microtransactions in Tekken 8, producer Katsuhiro Harada stated that development costs are now 10 times higher than in the 90s, and more than double or nearly triple the cost of Tekken 7. According to him, even the Fight Lounge servers are costly to maintain. Entries prior to Tekken 6 didn’t have this many specifications and also didn’t feature an online mode. Plus, he said that earlier titles didn’t need to run in higher resolution with greater detail.
Harada mentioned that, today, fans want games to be supported for a long time. It costs money to continually update the game for that reason. However, he said that the aforementioned fans probably retain only the fond memories of earlier games, disregarding the changing times and increasing costs. Harada pointed out that the economic situation and everything around it is changing. He justified paid microtransactions in Tekken 8 by stating that if the development team simply does nothing, as one Twitter/X user had suggested, the game would simply get abandoned in a few months.
The Tekken series producer gave the example of Tekken 5, and mentioned that, at the time, games were being developed with the mindset of putting as much possible on the disc. He said that the development team didn’t have things planned out from the beginning, and instead developed games as they thought of things along the way. It was decided from the beginning that Starblade would be included as an extra, but the addition of the Devil Within mode and the Tekken 1, 2, and 3 arcade emulation modes happened spontaneously. Harada mentioned that the process of developing and porting went at a much faster pace back then, with much lower labor costs compared to nowadays. He added that development costs have now skyrocketed, and it takes a lot longer to make games.
Regarding future DLC for Tekken 8’s Story mode, Harada mentioned that, rather than adding an individual story mode for each character, the development team will add a combined story mode for each of the additional characters, including Eddy, sometime during summer. The DLC Story mode will show how the additional characters were involved in the game’s main story mode, “The Dark Awakens”. According to him, the main storyline can’t be broken up into smaller pieces for each character. Harada further revealed that the Story mode DLC will be offered for free in the form of story mode expansions that can be played without having to purchase DLC characters.
