spemanig said:
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To a certain extent, yes. If you're going to refuse to buy something unless it's priced so far in your favor that it would be almost impossible for the developer to make any profit, then again, you're going to have trouble actually finding anything that meets your criteria.
First off, let's put this into perspective. Your post below states that you would not spend more than $8 on any DLC that didn't contain at least 8 characters, 4 stages, and 8 alt costumes. Extrapolating this to full game numbers, you would not spend $60 on a Smash Bros game unless it contained a whopping 60 characters, 30 stages, and 60 alt costumes. I'm willing to leave the alt costumes issue to the side, as there's plenty of additional in game content to make up for that (single player, some additional songs, etc.). Unless some huge announcements get made really quickly, I can't say I'm liking your chances of buying this game.
For argument's sake, let's say the current game ends up with 50 characters and 30 non-reused stages. Probably a huge overestimate, but whatever, we'll roll with it. Let's also assume that equal development time goes into stage creation and character creation (probably a horribly inaccurate guess, but again, for the sake of argument I'll go with it). That means you're paying, if you buy the game new, 58 cents or so for each character, and $1 for each stage (30 x 1 = $30, .58 x 50 = roughly $30). So buying a full game, you're paying a little over half a dollar for a character and a full dollar for a stage. (this is throwing out stuff such as music and alt costumes, but since those are factored into your push later on I think I'm safe in doing so)
Your scenario, if I'm reading this correctly, means that you would refuse to buy anything less than 8 characters and 4 stages for $8. Doing the math, if we use 58 cents per character, and 1 dollar per stage, you're refusing to buy anything less than nearly $10 in content, by game standards, for $8.
Now, granted, I don't know how much it costs to produce a stage versus how much it costs Nintendo to produce a character, so this calculation may be off. BUT with that said I do know that DLC suffers from one major area that full releases don't: scope. Nintendo can afford to sell a full roster like what exists in Smash at a lower cost than with something like DLC, because more people will buy the full game as opposed to DLC (as is the case with any title). Nintendo can afford to have a lower margin of profit per unit because they're selling much more than a DLC will. A DLC can't hope to sell anywhere near as well as a full Smash game, so it has to have a higher marginal profit for it to be a wise business move for Nintendo.
All of this to say that the absolute most you will pay for a Smash DLC is simply unprofitable for Nintendo. Granted that my calculation is probably nowhere near exact, but throwing in issues of scale there's no way that Nintendo could make a profit off this. Your expectations are beyond what a business can reasonably do.
