I'm betting the disappointing amount of CAS items is due to budget. We don't know how many people they have working on these Creation Sets, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a tiny amount of staff. Considering the low budget of the main game, there's no way they allocated a lot for DLC. Maybe season pass 2 will have more content than season pass 1 now as Namco sees SC6 as one of their main successes from their last fiscal year.
At the pace the DLC (the characters in addition to the CaS) are being released, and considering what we know about the production of the core game, I'd say that a tiny amount of staff is virtually certain. However, I'm not sure that's the most sensible way to evaluate the "fairness" of the deal that the CaS packs (or DLC generally) represent; we're buying from Namco as the publisher, not Project Soul, the internal development team. If those teams are undermanned, that's Namco's own choice and it doesn't really effect that
analysis of what we get for our consumer dollar (though it can, of course, effect the cost-benefit
value of the content that they ultimately put on the market).
All of that said, am I the only one here who feels like what we get actually represents pretty incredible value when compared against the competitors? So not all of the items are to everyone's taste or have featured in previous games. For the same amount of money that, in this season pass, buys you four new characters, dozens of music tracks, and 120 dynamic objects that have to be carefully developed for a feature-rich character editor that no other fighter even attempts to offer you, you would get maybe a dozen static, uninspired, non-personalizable outfits that each could only be used on one character in DoA. I mean...that's a pretty drastic difference in value, and it's comparable to the kinds of skins you are offered as DLC for similar prices in just about every other fighter. On top of that, Namco have been dropping free content with every other update in recent months--they aren't huge drops, but there too, I can't think of any other publisher of fighters that gives you anything for free right now, post release.
In any event, lay people who have never worked with modellers are definitely, definitely under-appreciating the amount of work involved here in their assumptions. Even with Namco's library of assets, development tools and skilled labour pool, this stuff takes time. I suspect that Namco's profit margins on this DLC are actually pretty thin at the prices they are selling it at (and certainly narrower than what their nearest genre competitors are making on their DLC). And their staff could definitely be used elsewhere on more lucrative IPs (Project Soul is an ad-hoc development team that is constituted for new entries of Soul Calibur games with staff that must eventually be re-absorbed into other higher profile teams, not a permanent studio). I think the only reason they are pursuing this is because it synergizes sales with the base product and they expect they can move enough units of both that it makes sense under a variable sales model.
Anyway, I just feel if what we are getting here is seen as not decent value, we're all getting pretty damn spoiled. Development costs have skyrocketed and it's not just the demands of more technically complex games and concordantly larger teams that have gone up--think about the increase in basic wage rates, company overhead, and licensing costs over the same thirty years that the cost of a new game has remained static. If $30 for what we got in this season pass seems bad, some people are in for a super rude awakening regarding what is coming down the pike as the industry standard. But as with most products, most people today just don't recognize the basic real costs of the stuff they buy, or appreciate the basic reality of inflation. Honestly, this is as good as its gonna get. Good lord, how did I end up the one defending this, my fourth most favourite Soulcalibur game against people who mostly say that it is one of their favourites? This is so weird.
