DOA5 costumes and DLC are shown as "unavailable" for the PS4, what to do?

Solution 1:

Enable DLC for PS4

Here is what you need to do when you encounter these:

• Find the corresponding PS3 version of the item in the store and buy it. Yes, indeed. Even if you don't have the PS3 version of the game or you don't even own a PS3.

• Return to the PS4 version of the item, it is now available as a free download. Install it and probably restart the game.

  

  ^{The center image shows that unavailable PS4 DLC becomes available after buying the PS3 version.}

Old DLC and next-gen transfer

That's right, you were mistaken if you thought that previous DOA5 DLC will be free or discounted in DOA5LR and switching console makers probably easy or cheap. They said that you will be able to "transfer" DLC to the manufacturers next generation console and they obviously chose the most complex, difficult and irritating path if you come from another console. With Last Round you get the standard characters, the story mode, the 3 DLC characters (Marie Rose, Phase 4, Nyotengu), the 2 new Last Round characters (Honoka and Raidou), but you don't get any other DLC. There seems to be a bundle as expensive as the season pass with a lot of DLC from previous iterations and this doesn't seem to be a mistake or confusion with content specific to the free to play version of the game (core fighters).

Caveats and other known issues

• New DLC was only available with some significant delay on PSN-EU in the past while there was no unplanned delay or special necessary maintenance on Xbox.
• DLC management overall is handled very inconsistent and messy.
  • You need to download all costume catalogs. (That's acceptable.)
  • Whenever new costumes are released there is a new costume catalog. (Still okay.)
  • Naming schemes and numbering have not been very inconsistent in the past. Some catalogs have been missing or required a special search in the store from the dashboard or the web, not through the DOA section of the store in the game. Another example for bad content management is the Marie Rose Overall costume, where you need to drop Marie from your query to find it through the web interface.
• Content transfer seems to only work from old to new generation consoles (at least on Xbox), so buy content on the old console if you still use it and want to be sure.
• There is no DLC transfer interoperability between Microsoft and Sony, but that was actually announced and somewhat expected.

I would have preferred if this had been communicated more clearer or their European support actually giving any(!) reply at all. They could have handled this similar to the bugs on the Xbox side during the launch (which was quite okay).