It was the whole game when you bought it, and then they added more. The reason they can continue to refine a fighting game after launch these days is that they sell stuff after launch. In the online era, you can’t really get away with releasing Street Fighter Alpha 1, 2, and 3 three years in a row, because the people who bought it the first time aren’t around to play with the people who bought Alpha 3, for example. I think there’s a happy medium to strike here, but literally no one has done it before or since Ultra Street Fighter IV.

That’s not financially feasible in fighting games. Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, for example, currently has 32 characters even though it launched with 15 and that’s thanks to DLC selling well.

The current version of the game as we know it took nearly 10 years to develop. If you’re asking a mid-range developer to put 10 years of development into a self-published fighting game without seeing a single cent, you’re obviously disconnected from the market’s economics and are OK with the game potentially never seeing the light of day because it’s “not complete”

What does the “whole game” even mean in fighting games? It sounds like you’re applying non-fighting games standards to fighting games while ignoring any and all nuances related to the genre, which’s uninformed at best.

There’s “protect the consumer” and there’s “nuke the genre”—you’re calling for the second here.

I’d rather people get paid when they work hard to add stuff to a video game.