Can Smash DLC be done right? If so, how?

[MTZehvor]

spemanig said:

MTZehvor said:

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.

It clearly is, since Nintendo finds it profitable enough to sell roughly 50% of the overall content in mario kart 8 for roughly 1/6th the cost. If they can figure out how to budget that, I have little trouble beleiving that they can do something similar for Smash Bros. And balancing characters isn't an arguement. Both games are $60, yet Smash manages to have more characters, fully balanced, than MK8 has stages. Nintendo clearly feels that the total package found in Smash Bros is of equal value to the total package found in MK8. That means that, character for character, the characters in smash are worth less than the tracks in Mario Kart. It doesn't matter the work that goes into it and even if it did, we shouldn't underestimate the work that goes into creating them either. I could deal with paying $10 for that though, if they bundled both packs for $15.

I still stand by what I say. Two packs of 8 characters, 4 stages, and 8 alternat skins for $8-$10 each. Bundle them together with a bonus for $12-$15. If Mario Kart 8 can figure it out, so can Smash. It doesn't get an exemption because it's a "fighting game."

The problem is the majority of the production cost in Mario Kart games is dealing with the actual physics of the game, how collisions will work, how items will affect players, etc. Creating another track and simply implementing the same physics onto another track isn't that expensive, meaning MK8 DLC is nowhere near as expensive to make as Smash Bros.

Think of it like this: Imagine that there's two businesses in town, one that produces bread and one that makes handmade Octodad figures. The bread baking business has to spend $45 to buy an oven, but the actual cost of producing each loaf of bread with that oven is only $5. Meanwhile, the cost of producing each Octodad figure from scratch is $12 apiece.

Now let's imagine both businesses are looking to be bought for $60, the bread store coming with 3 loaves and the oven and the action figure store coming with 5 figures premade. If you looked at the bread you were getting compared to the action figures, you might assume that the bread is more expensive to produce, since you're getting less of it than you would be getting action figures. In reality, though, the inverse is true; the problem is that the bakery has a bigger start up cost, and if you wanted to produce another unit of each, the bread would cost far less than the figure.

That's an incredibly convoluted and sometimes unsatisfactory example to point out that comparing expenses across games, particularly ones in different genres, is simply unreasonable. The tracks aren't what take up the majority of the production value for Mario Kart, so producing extra tracks and selling them as DLC cheaply is by no means an unprofitable move. On the other hand, characters and stages are likely the majority of the production cost for Smash Bros, so producing extra of those is a much more risky venture.