Upcoming fighter Tekken Tag Tournament 2 will not feature paid-for DLC locked onto the retail disc, Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada confirmed at Namco Bandai's Global Gamers Day event in Las Vegas.

When asked about the recent controversy surrounding Capcom's decision to include an eye-watering amount of DLC on Street Fighter x Tekken's disc - unlockeable for a fee - Harada re-iterated his long-held commitment to providing all content up-front in order to preserve the chess-like nature of the character combat interaction, and the purity of the competitive fighting scene.

"Tekken's never really done that before and charged for it, however we did have an [unlock] system in Tekken one to five," he explained to Eurogamer in an interview.

"The character locks were like that - we never took money for it but the concept itself was there. I think really the players' opinions and the heated discussion is whether you charge for it or not."

While stressing that he could only speculate on the reasons for Capcom's DLC strategy, Harada felt that much of the reasoning for including the content on the disc may have concerned the demands of online gaming, and the need to transfer data promptly between those who own the DLC, and those who don't.

While no paid-for character content will be locked out for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, those who pre-order will enjoy early access to certain characters, but only for a limited period of time before the content is made available - for free - to all players.

While not ruling out the potential for paid DLC in the future, such purchases would be limited to cosmetic fan-service requests, rather than unique characters or balance-breaking combat sets.

"There are some strange people on Twitter asking for really peculiar items like bikini swimsuits - and obviously we didn't have that in our original development plan! So if we were going to do that, we'd have to create that without the [original] budget, and we'd have to charge a little bit for those items," Harada said.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is scheduled for release in September this year.