Capcom is releasing a new Street Fighter game and that’s just great isn’t it? No. It isn’t. In 2010 it is absolutely not cool in any small way for Capcom to be treating us like it’s last generation and we live in a world where we have no broadband, consoles can barely go online, hard disk storage isn’t common and paying over 50% of full price for an update that doesn’t even add 50% more content is acceptable.

What the…?

There’s 10 New Characters (of which only 2 are actually ‘new’) as well as a new costume set for each character, extra play stages to accompany the characters and a few new game modes thrown in. Oh did I forget the extra Ultra Combos? Sorry but that just doesn’t sell it for me. Maybe that’s why it slipped my mind.

Super Street Fighter IV is NOT a new game and should NOT be sold as such. This is the equivalent to Rockstar Games releasing The Lost and the Damned and making you buy it again, along with GTAIV for 60% of the price of a new game. Wow bargain you might say if you didn’t originally buy GTAIV but what about those who did? The only people who profit from a model like this are the Developer/Publisher and those who didn’t buy the original game. So what does that say to those who were supported the game from the beginning? Thanks for the support and the money but hey do you mind just bending over there for a minute?

Call me bitter but seriously no one should be taking this practice in the current state of gaming. Sure this is a bit different to the episodic content in GTA4 because it couldn’t be stand-alone but to make me BUY THE GAME AGAIN when it could have been DLC is inexcusable. We know that T Hawk and Dee Jay were completed by release of SFIV and we know that 6 of the others only had to be recreated in 3D, so for two completely new characters, some extra game modes and new combos I’m just not seeing the value here. We aren’t playing games in an arcade here. We are buying the product for our home so why should we suffer this out dated ‘update’ model.

The bottom line is that this game should have been DLC and it’s insulting that it isn’t. To not take advantage of a viable new model that is on its way to being well established seems greedy and irresponsible from a big player like Capcom who you would expect to be a leader in new distribution methods. I guess it comes down to the fact that it’s easy to exploit the hard-core fan base that Street Fighter holds but really how long can it hold up when companies pull sh*t like this. There’s a whole upcoming generation of gamers out there where loyalty and nostalgia is not a factor and if this kind of greed and laziness continues it’s only going to hurt the industry and most importantly the gamers.