LogFAQs > #979881097

LinkDaLunatic posted...

how do we also justify the costs of these characters? if the base game has 30 characters, and the game is $70, that's $2.3 per character... but the base game of course includes tons of other things, they had to create the engine, there's voice work for the story mode, tons of new music, etc. so realistically the characters probably aren't even half the cost of the game but let's say half to be generous, now we're looking at $1.16 per character

but when they are released as DLC it is of course a minimum of $5, sometimes more, sometimes there's no way to access them without buying a $30 season pass which includes only three characters at nearly half the cost of the fucking game

listen, i know this post is making wild assumptions and there's a lot to take into consideration but just hear me out, when you zoom the scope out a bit it's not hard to see how people are feeling cheated

To be fair, more effort goes into characters created after initial release than the originals, since you now have to rebalance everything. You have to balance the new character vs. the original 30, which is extra effort, and then you need to apply balances to other characters that already exist, to both make sure they're balanced vs. the new character, and also in reaction to the way the balance has shifted among the existing characters that already exist. And these balance patches are actually provided for free, it's only the character itself that costs money.

For example, the latest trailer for Mortal Kombat 1 is for Ermac. In that trailer, it showed Ermac fighting Reptile. Reptile used both a variation of an existing move that doesn't currently exist, as well as an entirely new move that doesn't currently exist. They put effort into trying to balance/improve Reptile, since he's, currently, an underused character. That balancing comes in the patch, everybody gets that for free, regardless. Ermac costs money, yes, but... If you don't want Ermac? You DO get other work they did, for absolutely free. They do that because they figure the money they make from Ermac will balance out the free work atleast somewhat, and they want to support the game, either way.

EDIT: The scummy part of MK1, for example, isn't the DLC... It's the "battle pass/season"-esque stuff, which... You'd see more of, in games, if DLC wasn't a thing. We don't want every fighting game to turn into Games as a Service-esque Brawlhalla, for example.