Capcom’s upcoming PS4 exclusive Deep Down will be a free to play game, and many have wondered what kind of content we can expect to have to pay for in order to provide the necessary funding to recoup the game’s development costs and keep the servers going.Today Producer Yoshinori Ono shed some light on that as part of an interview intended for investors published by Capcom itself.
One thing we’re doing is grappling with the challenges posed by next-gen hardware platforms. An example of this is the game “deep down”, which we are developing for the PlayStation®4. While it’s a home console game, the model is basically the same as that for online games.
When we develop an online game, we aim to create a game that allows people already playing it to continue enjoying it. At the same time, we try to avoid boosting the number of players just for the sake of getting new people to play. The game “deep down” is provided free of charge, but players are required to pay for additional items and other game content. To ensure people playing the game don’t lose interest, we will keep working to deliver stable long-term services.
Judging from Ono-san’s words, we can expect a business model very similar or identical to that of free to play MMORPGs, prompting us to pay for “additional items and other game content.” At the very least this means that we’re probably going to get further content pushed out down the line after the initial release, as this kind of business model requires constant support and content updates in order to work effectively
As an added bonus, Ono-san explained Capcom’s stance on DLC (for all games, not just for Deep Down):
We hope to provide a large variety of content at reasonable prices that is in line with what people like. The important is not viewing DLC as a form of added value, but as a system that we’re supposed to have.
He also mentioned that some DLC are developed before release, while others are created after, and detailed the reasons behind that:
There are some things we develop at the same time, and there’s other stuff we create after the release of the full title. The best thing to do is monitor trends in the days immediately following a game’s release, and then put out DLC which reflects these trends within a month. Problems occur when something we develop completely from scratch fails to match what people need. That’s the advantage of DLC. It gives us an opportunity to monitor trends before we make a decision.
