So rather than getting people to buy more copies at a higher price, you get people to buy more copies at a lower price?  Great idea.

DL content doesn't matter, unless you're asking people to pay for that additional content.  Of course, most of the content usually added to special game versions isn't exactly worth paying much for...

Weren't the Substance and Subsistence re releases of MGS2 and 3 $30? I know the Subsistence was, but I'm not sure about Substance.

I guess you could wait if you were so inclined to.

Substance had some special features that meant... nothing. Subsistence was big because of Metal Gear Online and the third-person camera. There will be no huge features like that to add to MGS4. If a "special" edition of MGS4 is released at some point, it'll just be some extra crap that won't really matter that much.

We must have a very different idea of a few months.

Time between Sons of Liberty and Substance = 15.5 months
Time between Snake Eater and Subsistence = 16 months.

If you want to wait till October 2009 to play MGS4, go right ahead.

Does it really matter? It's MGS! It's so worth it.

 ++

If you really feel that you might get screwed just wait for a version that may or may not appear. I'll be picking up MGS4 day 1. I mean, I know what I'll be paying for, it's not like they are trying to use shady tactics by excluding some gameplay from the first release. MGS2: Substance was the exact same game as MGS2. It just had a couple extra side missions, and that stupid skate boarding thing. MGS3: Subsistence was the exact same game as MGS3, just with a new, improved camera. Of course, there were extras like extra cutscenes and such, but it's not like the original release advertised those extras and when you pop it in your PS2, it was like "sike, just kidding, you have to buy the special edition when it comes out later to get these features." You know exactly what you are getting when you buy the first edition.

 Ya know what screw the Metal Gear... and the blackjack... ah screw the whole thing.

 Well I don't think there will be a new version of Metal Gear 4 I think a lot of people forgot that you can DOWNLOAD these new features now so they'll probably release it as extra content later for probably 10 bucks or so would be my guessing.

BTW I finally bought MGSTS for the GC today, I never played a single Metal Gear Solid game only the Metal Gear game on the NES, its alright so far though I DONT like seeing snake without facial hair, everything else is fine, just right now I really suck at it, I'm not a huge fan of the whole covert ops genre like Splinter Cell, MGS hasn't changed this yet but this game has more promise to me then Splinter Cell, IE more fun to play.

 I think the point is that Metal Gear 4.5 would cost money to download. Say it's a $15 download, so you lower the cost of the game to $45 and charge the previous owners and new buyers $15 for the expansion. You've now made $60 of revenue from each new purchaser and $75 from every old purchaser that upgrades, and you don't have to worry about the older version of the game flooding the used game stores and cannibalizing sales of version 4.5.

 Doesn't sound like a bad model to me.

Except you keep assuming that the downloadable content is worth paying for.  Most extra game content is not worth paying for (how many times will I have repeat that in this thread before it sinks in I wonder).  For the sliver of DLC that would be worth buying, I'd be asking why it wasn't in the game to begin with.  Would it be signalling entrance into the gaming phase where developers purposefully put out an incomplete game or just leave out some things simply to charge people money for them later?

Edit:  Well, it seems EA is already doing it.  But then again, when isn't EA screwing over the consumer...