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Hiku said:

That is a lot of money for content that is primarily unknown to the consumer at the time of purchase.
Most of the costs seem to be attributed to costumes though, so it feels like an easy skip. But they must be making good money on costumes, so there will probably be plenty of people who pay for this, sadly.

Cerebralbore101 said: 
I hate this trend in fighting games. MK 11 has 18 confirmed characters for the main game plus 6 more for the season pass. So they've basically locked a quarter of the game behind DLC, when these 6 characters could have come out with the base game. It's nothing but content carving. 

If they want me to buy their game on release they need to make sure it is complete on release. If games in other genres did this then 10 hours of content out of a 40 hour game would be locked to a "season pass". 

I don't mind expansions, that's fine. But if your "extra content" is ready to be released six months after launch or earlier, then that reeks of content carving.

Though while it's fully understandable why situations like that are suspicious, there are situations where it is not financially or physically viable for that content to be produced many months after release.
The reason for that is because even when it comes to internal development teams, and especially when talent is contracted from the outside, they can't always just sit around on the same project for months/years after the game has been finished. They have other projects they're supposed to move on to, leaving the remaining team that can stay for an extended time as a skeleton crew of its former self.

The saying 'time is money' is applicable here.
Publishers can invest the DLC budget during the initial game development period, to get that same work done during that time period, while they still have access to all the key designers and artists, etc.

That's just poor management though. If somebody is working on a AAA game they shouldn't be a short term contracted employee to begin with. People that went to school for 4 years for game development shouldn't be hired out on a 6 month to yearly contract. They've worked way too hard to have to worry about their next job every six months to a year.