Yes, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition will have downloadable content. Capcom aren’t saying what kind just yet, but they’re hoping that DLC updates will help offset the cost of selling the game at a relatively cheaper price ($15), despite the numerous additions and tweaks to the game.
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition is the highest-budgeted downloadable game that Capcom USA have produced to date. Unfortunately, it’s also relatively unpopular; or to put it another way, Capcom don’t expect it to be as popular as Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix or Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
That’s where DLC comes in. Capcom’s Christian Svensson shed some light on the situation, over at their community site in a Q&A:
Q: Sven how in the hell can you offer this game for $15 going by the amount of time/money put into it? What kinda numbers are you planning to get for sales on this?
It’s a risk we felt was worth taking.
To be fair, we have good history with SSF2T HDR and MvC3 [Ed. note: he meant 2] on the platforms in question (both of which are among the most successful titles on PSN/XBLA). So historically that has given us some confidence that we can reach an audience, though we do know SF3 is less popular than SF2 or MvC2, so we do have to be careful.
I know some of you have noticed we have a DLC menu item in the game. While we’re selling it for $15 to hopefully attract a reasonably decent audience given the value it represents. We are hoping the DLC downstream will raise the ARPU (average revenue per user) on the title beyond that of what we’ve seen on other titles.
I think it’s fair to say that there are few better values for $15 for games, but we are also hoping that people get engaged enough to get a little more content. Could we have put everything together and sold it for $30? Yeah… but by putting together a compelling base package and selling the other stuff a la carte, we’ve given folks a lower barrier to entry and lets them decide what additional pieces they find of value.
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition doesn’t have a release date locked down yet. We’ll keep you updated as Capcom let out more info on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network release.
