BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle DLC Pricing For The United States, Comments From The Producer

Arc System Works announced the DLC pricing for Japan earlier and they followed up with information on pricing for the United States. Producer Toshimichi Mori also shared some comments about the game’s DLC.

The base game itself will go for $49.99, but similar to Japan there will be a Digital Deluxe Edition featuring all the Cross Tag Character Packs for $69.99.

As for the Cross Tag Character Pack pricing, they’ll go for $4.99 and will contain 3 characters each. There will be a total of 6 in total, with the first pack available for free, only for the first two weeks after its release.

Speaking to Destructoid, producer Toshimichi Mori said in response to being told that Arc System Works’ message was faulty out of the gate:

“I’m in total agreement. We’ve been making efforts to make the price accessible for everyone, but we should have communicated it a lot more clearly though so we didn’t have that misunderstanding. Our first mistake was announcing [fighter] Blake as DLC before saying he was free.What should have happened is that we should have said Blake is coming as a DLC for free. But because of so many events late last year and early this year, we wanted to announce things little by little. Unfortunately the first announcement was muddled. We said Blake was DLC but we should have announced it all at once. That caused confusion and Arc is very sorry for that.”

Mori also shared his opinion on the current state of DLC and how necessary it is for fighting games:

“For me, DLC can present a bit of a surprise for gamers. It also helps games to survive in the long term. But at the same time not everyone is going to agree or understand what the developer thinks. From the development side it’s hard to convince everyone, but if we listen to everyone we’ll go bankrupt. So what we can do is try to design DLC in a way where more people are understanding about it, which is basically all that we can do. I do agree with some people that DLC should be in the game to begin with, but thinking about the business side that isn’t always the case. As creators it’s always fun to continue developing for a certain title, but without the gamer’s support it’s hard. For more people to understand what DLC stands for, we can make efforts to clarify in the future how it fits into the game as a whole. Hopefully we’ll create a broader perspective.”

Lastly, Mori was asked how the development of BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle is going for the Switch, considering it’s one of the first times the developers worked on it:

“We are having some trouble, but mostly because it’s a new console. But we planned to release on the Switch in the beginning, so there was always R&D taking place. One of the key concepts for Cross Tag Battle was to play a fighter using a gamepad. The Switch allows that but in order to provide the full experience we had to make sure it would run well. I’ve been playing the game on Switch at my office and it’s running smoothly and really fun to play on the Switch. For future games it is a possibility for us.”

BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle releases for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam in Japan and Asia on May 31, 2018. You can check out its latest trailer revealing the three new DLC characters Platinum the Trinity, Kanji Tatsumi, and Orie in our previous report.