| MTZehvor said: 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. |
I can see that. However, as a consumer, all that matters to me is what I get for my money. The experience you get from 16 extra tracks largely dwarfs the experience you get from 16 extra characters. In Mario Kart, the tracks are the meat of the experience and you're likely to play one every track multiple times. In Smash, the characters are the meat of the experience, but you're likely to stick with only a small handful of charaters. Many of them you'll never play more than one or twice. The characters are less valuable. 16 characters more is a big deal because you may find one or two more characters to play as, and it adds to the diversity of players you'll face while playing, but it isn't something where each character gets a ton of milage the way MK tracks do. (no pun intended)
A bigger roster just means that my potencial handful is bigger, and my friends' handfuls are bigger, and the communities handfuls are bigger, adding to the diversity. But when you're talking about additional content, that handful plus additional diversity is only worth so much. I think it's worth $12-$15 for 16 characters.
