when you look at series like Tekken or Dead or Alive, which have hundreds of dollars' worth of DLC content for each title.
I can't speak about Tekken since I haven't played a game in that series since Tag Tournament 2, but Dead or Alive 5 is the only game in the DOA series that we can accurately judge their microtransaction practices on so far—6 is too new, I don't think 4 or before had any, and Dimensions was sort of hampered in its ability to have DLC by being a launch 3DS title (it only had a few free costumes as DLC).
As for DOA5... as much as I hate the way Tecmo handled that game, microtransactions being unfair wasn't really one of its issues. Assuming we're talking about Last Round, there were only two paid DLC characters, both of which were priced relatively normally by current industry standards. Granted, there were more in previous versions, but they all came with the last version, and I'll get into the whole version crap in a bit. As for cosmetic DLC, it's hard to hate them for it despite how absurdly much of it there was, since even in the original base version of DOA5, there were about as many unique costumes as there had been in DOA2 Ultimate, which previously had the highest variety of costumes in the series; and Last Round had way more than that included in your initial purchase.
That said, the game was absolutely handled atrociously for consumers. There were three different versions, and while you could pay a lower fee to get the Last Round content in Ultimate, I don't think there was any such option to upgrade the original to Ultimate, and certainly not to Last Round, meaning early adopters got screwed. Despite a public interview with the head of Team Ninja stating they would never charge for DLC characters, Tecmo went right ahead and released several paid DLC characters, and even continued introducing new ones after what was supposed to be the final version of the game. And then the cosmetic DLC, while generally inoffensive despite the sheer volume, was clearly preying on the weak-willed. I will say that at least it wasn't gated behind in-game currency that you had to purchase with real money, as that's a slightly subtler and therefore more predatory practice, though then again games that feature that sort of system often have systems in place to get that currency without actually paying yourself.
So while for the most part, I'd rate the microtransactions for DOA5 as being relatively unimportant to accessing the full range of gameplay and unnecessary to a satisfying level of cosmetic variety, the way the game was handled was far from consumer friendly, and actually managed to turn me off fakeying DOA6 despite having done so with DOAD and DOA5.
ing impact on anything.
