I'm not sure why any of this is a hot take. I get the feeling that most of the people in this thread aren't even Tekken players, or fighting game players at all.
These games only work with continued funding. If that's not for you, then that's totally fine and understandable. But these games require labor, and labor requires payment. And the community is willing and eager to pay.
You wouldn't work for free would you? Why should anybody expect software developers to?
If they’d announced this before launch, it would’ve been the only thing anyone talked about.
Not really. It'd hardly have been mentioned, at all. MTX are a part of every major fighting game, so it's hardly a newsworthy tidbit. They're completely expected in this genre. Any major competitive game that gets developer support after release is going to be funded either by microtransactions or subscriptions. The people who actually play these games know this.
Doesn't it, though? This is what the players wanted, and the industry listened. They asked for support for the game after its release, and the industry said "Sure, but in exchange at least some of you should pay extra".
This isn't forced upon anybody. Just because Mazaratis exist doesn't mean that you have to buy one if you want a car. It only becomes a moral problem if somebody's choices are circumvented, but that's not really what's happening here.
Some people wouldn’t bother with a game at all if they knew there would be this.
Perhaps if this was unusual for the genre. But it's a AAA fighting game. Anybody who is familiar with the genre knows that MTX is normal and expected, because it's going to have several years of support from the developers. I'd have a hard time believing that any Tekken fan bought this on the premise of it remaining MTX-free.
I'm not seeing why that's a problem, if it's still just cosmetics.
Also, anybody who expected a AAA fighting game to not have cosmetic MTX in 2024 probably isn't that keen on the fighting game scene to begin with. That's just how the genre works these days; the players want continuous balance patches as new tech and exploits are discovered, and that comes at a cost. If you think $70 is enough for potentially years of continued support and updates, then you haven't been keeping up with the economy's effects on the gaming industry.