Starting next Monday on May 16th, Japanese gamers (or those with a Japanese PSN account), will be able to enjoy a free-to-play rendition of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 on the PS4.
According to Siliconera, Koei Tecmo will offer gamers the opportunity to play Kasumi across all of the different mini-games made available in the game. The Owner Mode, and Gravure Mode will be available, but the casino and the other characters will require actual real life payments to access. If you’re outside of Japan trying to purchase DLC will likely be a real hassle.
You can only buy the DLC and other in-game outfits after purchasing the characters, otherwise the outfits for specific characters will be locked.
Within the free-to-play version of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, it will also possible to purchase the casino completely separate as its own DLC for the PS4 and PS Vita.
If you decide to only unlock some of the content in the free-to-play version and then purchase the full version of the game, saved data and progress that was made in the free version will carry over.
I know the media has been playing up the narrative that Dead or Alive Xtreme games don’t sell well and that’s why Koei Tecmo didn’t want to bring it to America, but the reality is that according to Koei Tecmo’s latest financials, Gematsu is reporting that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 has sold 190,000 copies between Japan and Asia. Of course we can’t know for sure what the breakdown is between both regions, but a sizable portion of that is obviously attributed to the imports from places like Play-Asia, who reported that they had record breaking sales thanks to imports of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3.
For a lowly advertised niche game, those are impressive numbers. Of course, we know for sure exactly why Koei Tecmo didn’t want to bring the game to the West, despite sizable import figures, and they rolled out that information back before in November, where a community manager on the Facebook page for Koei Tecmo stated…
“We do not bring DOAX3 to the west and won’t have any plan change in the future. Thank you for asking.”
“Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision. Thank you.”
Koei Tecmo brushed up a more PR friendly version by saying the same thing but removed the allusion to third-wave feminists.
Later on it was revealed by Idea Factory International that they don’t bring some games to the West for the same reason, wanting to avoid censorship and attacks from the Social Justice Warrior-driven media. Shuhei Yoshida, the president of worldwide studios at Sony, also acknowledged the same thing in a Japanese interview shortly after the Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 fiasco went viral.
At the end of the day, a lot of Japanese developer simply do not want to deal with raging America, third-wave feminists and the cronyistic media outlets that employ smear tactics to uphold that ideology.
Even still, gamers came out in droves to support Koei Tecmo by paying top dollar to import Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 for the PS Vita and PS4.
