Yeah, it’s more a thing with the other companies and their games. His point still stands though, not just for fighting games and their characters. Games now often come with barebones / stripped progression and the stuff is then sold as overpriced DLC that immediately unlocks the content instead.
I think you’ll have a hard case to make to argue that Street Fighter 6 is a barebones package compared with what you got on the SNES or PS1, or even the PS3 or PS4, for that matter. There’s definitely overpriced DLC for SF6, but thankfully it’s been relegated to the Battle Hub mode that I couldn’t give less of a shit about, where people spend $15-$60 for TMNT costumes for their custom characters.
the Alpha/Zero and EX series did that (Alpha 3 on PSX made you work a little bit to unlock the PSX exclusive characters/forms), then there was also CvS and some of the Marvel games, but that was mixed in with a point and shop system I think.
Alpha games had characters unlockable from the select screen with codes, usually intentionally unbalanced ones. I guess I wasn’t thinking of CVS or Marvel in that bucket as well, and EX was from a different developer. The real model for unlocking new characters in the old Street Fighter games was to put out a new edition of it, like Hyper Fighting or Super Turbo, that came with balance and mechanics changes, which meant you had to buy the entire game over again instead of just the characters.
Street fighter 4 did this very explicity.
I’m not discounting that the whole DLC characters thing has been around since 2 though and has gotten worse.
I remember 5 launched with a barebones roster where a lot of core characters were missing (basically the first edition of 3 all over again).
When you make sweeping system mechanics changes though, you’re not going to have every character. I think Capcom now knows, between 3 and 5, which characters must be in a Street Fighter game, but selling additional characters later is how they can pay developers to hone in on the best version of the game they were trying to make.