When you buy a car and opt to get the basic, no-frills stereo, the really rad sound system isn’t also included somewhere in the vehicle, just waiting for you to plunk down some money to activate it. If that were the case, the car-maker has to know that buyers are going to be tempted to figure out how to turn that better system on without forking over the cash.

Such is the current situation with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Street Fighter X Tekken, which was shipped with not only a mouthful of a title, but also, lurking locked somewhere on the disc, $20 worth of “downloadable” content to which the buyer has no access.

Not only do the makers of the game drop this tempting morsel in front of gamers, they also say that buyers won’t even be allowed to unlock the content — which again, is already in their hands, just waiting to be played — until after the release of the PlayStation Vita version… in the fall.

So you can’t be surprised that some clever types have figured out how to unlock the content already, for free, and months ahead of time.

“I was pretty disappointed by that,” the game’s producer tells GameSpot.com. “I was really surprised at how skillful the hackers were, basically. But I was really kind of disappointed that it created this kind of environment where a bunch of players were playing the characters but a bunch were unable to play with them.”

We’re certainly not saying that what the hackers did was a good thing. But if game companies want to continue nickel-and-diming the gaming community by charging an extra 40% above the retail price for content that isn’t worth the price or the wait, they have to expect that at least a few people will be savvy and angry enough to figure out how to unlock it.

Street Fighter X Tekken dev ‘disappointed’ in DLC being hacked[GameSpot.com]

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