During an over-all interview covering next-gen consoles, Team Ninja head Yosuke Hayashi had a few dismissive words for the downloadable content already secure on physical discs.
He told Videogamer:
"We feel like this is a kind of sport, and you don't change the rules for sports. Everybody plays by the same rules. You don't have a 14-player soccer game versus an 11-player soccer game. That's just not fair. It's a similar thing to if certain people have all these characters and others don't. It makes it an unfair game, and we don't think that's the right way to go for fighting games. We have no plans to sell characters as downloadable content."
The anti-DLC stance can be directly traced back to Capcom, which had characters locked away on physical copies of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 but made them DLC regardless. Hayashi claims the promise of an ever-growing roster hampers the fighting style and balance of the game, as he explained the difficulty of making a 20-person roster and how to even hope to accomplish that under 50.
If you think balance isn't an issue, have you tried playing Street Fighter IV recently without encountering nothing but Shoto-clones? Or even the newly remastered Mortal Kombat that boasts a complete roster spanning the franchise. It's almost mind-numbing about the amount of choice we have. Give us DOA any day if Team Ninja promises to keep the focus on fighting than craming in past references to characters we'd barely remember anyway.