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Gaming

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round Tanks on Steam as Players Rage Over Recycled Game and Paywall DLC

Emily Chen 0 comments 9 min read
Dead or Alive 6 Last Round Tanks on Steam as Players Rage Over Recycled Game and Paywall DLC

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round crashed hard on Steam within days of launch, earning a crushing 23% positive rating and triggering a wave of "Mostly Negative" reviews that accuse Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja of passing off a stale re-release as a genuine upgrade.

The $40 re-release arrived on June 24 as a direct replacement for the original 2019 version, which Koei Tecmo delisted from the platform. The new edition bundles five previously released DLC characters and five costumes, while a free-to-play variant called Core Fighters limits players to four fighters and excludes story mode.

The problem starts with the sheer volume of missing content. Dead or Alive 6 has accumulated 440 DLC items over seven years. While most existing DLC transfers to Last Round, two King of Fighters crossover characters do not: Mai Shiranui and Kula Diamond, which now cost $11 each instead of the original $8. Players who owned them in the 2019 version must purchase them again.

"Good game but the negative review stays until the game comes with all the seven-year-old DLC from the previous edition of the game," one Steam reviewer wrote, capturing widespread frustration that Koei Tecmo's DLC licensing agreements, particularly with SNK Corporation over the crossover characters, have created a paywall even for returning players.

The licensing hurdle might be defensible if Last Round delivered tangible improvements. It does not. Players report that the main selling point, a promise that the game has been "improved and updated for current-gen hardware," amounts to little more than window dressing. The pause menu still displays a graphic for the 2015 Steam controller.

"It's the same exact game with the same bugs that were reported six years ago with a few changes," one reviewer complained. "So my review is the same but without the 5.5K hours of modding the game and no mouse navigation in the menus too. Also, mods are now broken."

The new photo mode, positioned as a marquee feature, fails to move the needle. No balance changes, no major visual overhaul, and no rollback netcode address long-standing community demands. One reviewer summed up the broader sentiment: "This feels like Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo just don't care about DoA anymore."

Steam reviews scorched the release as "shameful," "too expensive," and "an absolute joke." Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja have not publicly responded to the backlash. Their only official comment involved announcing the first post-launch DLC character, Minato, with pricing still unclear.

IGN's review awarded Last Round 6 out of 10, calling it "a great fighting game wrapped up in a very bad package" that "does little to justify why this re-release wasn't just another DLC pack." The original 2019 version scored 7.7.

Author Emily Chen: "Koei Tecmo just handed players a six-year-old game with licensing obstacles and called it next-gen. They're learning the hard way that a bigger price tag needs bigger changes to back it up."

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