In a move right out of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s playbook, Capcom has decided to ask Street Fighter fans for free labor. Why? To win a contest, of course!
Okay, that’s a bit disingenuous. Capcom is outsourcing labor to the fans in order to design new costumes for the game. Lucky fans will see the hours of hard work and creativity it takes to design a character rewarded not with money, like a real artist, but with that costume making its way into the game.
In other words, they get paid in exposure.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and Ian Walker puts it better than I ever could, but it’s worth restating that this is a deeply unethical practice. Designing a character is something that takes hours upon hours of work, and rewarding it with a spot in your AAA video game isn’t how you pay for labor. It’s also worth thinking about all the hard work that’ll be put into designs that don’t win - how will those artists be compensated? They won’t, and that’s wrong.
If you’re an artist, there are plenty of avenues available to you in order to make money. Far be it from a game journalist to tell you how to live your life, but your craft and your effort are worth more than being put in the Recycle Bin of Capcom’s hard drive.
Regardless, the contest will run until July 21.
