– Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai
The Super Smash Bros. series has embraced premium DLC — but it was a tough decision for its creator, Masahiro Sakurai, as he reveals in his latest column in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, as translated by Smash fan-site Source Gaming.
Acknowledging that, as a player, Sakurai “would be livid” if a game was “split up and sold in pieces,” he then asks: “Why, then, do you think so many titles provide premium DLC on or shortly following a game’s release?” His answer: “It’s because that’s the easiest way to make money.”
In his column, he assures the reader that the announced DLC characters for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS weren’t an attempt to do this but instead are “authentic, developed only after we finished working on the main game.”
His words stand in contrast to the microtransaction-led DLC plan for the premium-priced Mortal Kombat X, which Gamasutra examined this week.
“When you pay a price like that up front, the feeling that you are being nickel-and-dimed for even more rubs a lot of people the wrong way,” fighting game dev Seth Killian told Gamasutra. Seems like the Smash creator agrees.