| kitler53 said: Top: how are you to know Y<X? if DLC as a concept didn't exist how are you to know that these characters would have ever been developed instead of being deemed not needed and not budgeted for? how can you be so sure that the budget didn't only allowed for Y but because of the extra income that DLC provided X could be justified?? Bottom: I work in software (not games) and i can assure you that even small changes like that can be costly. any code change, no matter how small, is required to go through a QA cycle before being released. where i work i'd estimate each QA cycle to be ~$15-$25k. (4 man team x 1 week).
...i couldn't care less about capcom in specific. i care more about software development and ip. i care that standard business practises (like co-currant product development) are deemed acceptable in every industry but mine. i care that people are under some dilusion that avocaodos cost money to create but software magically creates itself without any time/money investment by a team of developers and therefore consumers of the god-given-right to that product free of charge. |
Top: Are you saying that the game was designed for the immediately-available characters, and then they added the extras on top separately? That's the only way that I would accept your argument, because my point is that the extra characters were almost certainly developed alongside the base ones, and the game balanced including those characters immediately. They will not have spent time checking to make sure that the game is still balanced with only the base characters.
Bottom: The cost to the developer is irrelevant to the perceived value to the consumer. Good business involves increasing the perceived value, and then setting a price to suit that perceived value. Bad business is increasing price purely because you spent more money on the product and want to increase your profit margins. The latter is what Capcom have done.
Other: A bit of ad hominem sneaking in, there. I never said that software is cheap to make. I said that increasing the price of a product in a "hidden" way rather than increasing the perceived value is bad business, and upsets customers. There are two ways to increase revenue for the game - they can increase the price of the game (even if it's a "hidden" cost, in the form of on-disc DLC), or they can make a product that will sell to more people.
You say that you're annoyed about how consumers expect something of people in your industry that they don't expect of other industries. The thing is, bad businesses complain about the consumers' expectations and try to hide things from them, good businesses either meet consumers' expectations or find a way to change those expectations (which is NOT a matter of PR - I'm talking about changing the market itself, not swaying consumer sentiment using arguments).
It's business, and if you want to be in business, you need to learn these sorts of things. Many studios have died because they refused to pay attention to the business side, focusing everything on the creative side.
