Microsoft’s pockets are deeper than Sony’s when it comes to online play, which is why Super Street Fighter IV is less of a sartorial extravaganza on the PS3.
Capcom has explained why PS3 pugilists are sometimes unable to see their opponent’s snazzy new DLC threads in Super Street Fighter IV, and it turns out that the answer isn’t technical in nature, but is instead to do with who’s footing the bill.
Writing on the Capcom forums, community manager Seth Killian said that the platform holders imposed “significant” charges for distributing the data for content like costumes to people who hadn’t bought them. On the Xbox 360, Microsoft had paid these fees itself, so every could see the new costumes whether they’d bought them or not. Sony, on the other, left the costs in Capcom’s hands. Killian said that it wasn’t quite as simple as “Microsoft paid, Sony didn’t,” because timing and location played their parts as well, but that at the most basic level it came down to cost.
Unsurprisingly, Killian doesn’t say how much money Capcom was looking at having to pay, but implied that it would have made it difficult for Capcom to make any money from the DLC. Capcom elected not to pay, and so only those who had bought the costumes could see them, and everyone else had to make do with the costumes that were already on the disc.
Of course it really isn’t as simple as Microsoft being more generous than Sony, because Microsoft charges for Xbox Live, whereas PSN is free. It’s a lot easier to spend money on Super Street Fighter IV players when you know that every single one of them has ponied up some cash in order to play online.
Source: via Eurogamer
