I love a video game crossover as much as the next person, and fighting games are a perfect platform for absurd matchups. Unfortunately, at $15 each, the price of new Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello costumes in Street Fighter 6 is giving a lot of players sticker shock.
Announced during last weekend’s EVO 2023 fighting game tournament, the TMNT-themed cosmetics, which apply to the player’s custom avatar, are perfectly timed to cash in on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem movie hype. Or at least try to. The four turtle skins arrived in the game’s Battle Hub on August 8 costing 750 Fighter Coins apiece. That’s a big jump over the 50 coins needed to unlock each of the main cast’s alternate costumes.
Fighter Coins are Street Fighter 6‘s premium currency you acquire with real-world money, but you can only buy it in certain increments. For example, to get 750 coins you’d need to pay $12 for 610 coins and then $5 for an additional 250 coins. That would leave you with enough to buy the Leonardo costume and have 110 fighter coins left over. However, if you buy 2750 coins for $50, and another 250 coins for $5, you’ll have the exact amount you need to buy all four costumes with none of the non-refundable tokens left over.
There’s nothing exactly new about any of this for those who have been dealing with live-service microtransaction economies at any point over the past five years, but it still sucks. Even more so because it’s the god damn Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Each character is effectively just a color swap for the bandana and belt. “It’s whale bait,” wrote one commenter on a Street Fighter 6 subreddit debate about the subject.
The high price tags are unfortunately on par with those for new skins in games like Fortnite and Overwatch 2, though both of those games are free-to-play. And they are still cheaper than a single set of the freshest horse armor in Diablo IV. If you love the Turtles and plan to play Street Fighter 6 for hundreds of hours in the years to come, you’ll still get your money’s worth, in a way. Of course, you could also buy a whole other fighting game with that $60, or a dozen classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games with cash left over for a pepperoni pizza.
Cowabunga, dude? Not at those prices.