Well, if I'm perfectly honest, that's exactly the kind of irrational "we'll cut off our noses to spite our faces, because the way the product is sold is not what we are familiar with" thinking that the FGC consumer base is finally getting over now (and needs to get over, if the franchise is going to survive and thrive in the modern industry). But we might be talking past eachother a bit here, so let me clarify what I mean about the constraints developers have to work within today:
Those games that you got off the shelf when you were a kid were produced for a small fraction of what it takes to develop, market, publish, and deliver to marketplace a similar-positioned product today. The earliest fighters literally cost hundreds of times less to produce and bring to market than their contemporary counterparts. At the same time, the fighting game genre has crashed in terms of it's market share of the overall gaming industry, and certain franchises (Soulcalibur most assuredly included) have shrunk considerably in terms of how much market share they have of even that narrowing slice. But here's the critical part: during all of those long --decades-- of increasing production costs, the price of a game (unlike virtually every other consumer product in existence) has remained virtually frozen for most games at about $60/£50. When you combine all of these factors, the math is incredibly unkind to companies who still want to produce quality products in this sphere.
So clearly something has to give, and there's only so many options on how to do this, and none of the alternatives are remotely as consumer friendly, non experience-breaking, or more reasonable than the season pass/post-release support model. Let's consider the options:
- You could increase the cost for the base product or create several different tiers of base product. This is only really viable for triple-A games in hot franchises, and probably will never be particularly realistic in a genre where publishers are struggling to maintain enough consumers at the base pricepoint. In fact, most fighters have to leap to slashing their prices and boosting their sales through discount events just months after release these days.
- The could create a pay-to-win model; clearly a terrible idea for pretty much any game, but particularly heads-up competetive experiences, and a death-knell for any fighter.
- You could create a grindfest experience linked to microtransactions a la Diablo Immortal, but I'm sure I don't have to explain why that is a terrible, terrible idea.
- You could create a subscription-based, games-as-a-service product. But not only would this end up being drastically more expensive than a couple of season passes, for a fraction of the benefit, it would also be pretty certain to kill any fighter before it even had a chance to gain any popularity.
- You could do a freemium model (as with the most recent entries of Dead or Alive), where everyone gets the core experience for free, but with limited content in terms of characters and bells and whistles, with additional content costing a premium. This is the least onerous of the alternatives to a continuing support model, but notably it really amounts to the same thing: it's just a little more a la cart, allowing the consumer a cheaper entry point (maybe even completely free if they can live with the limited content), but will typically cost them significantly more (than a similar core game and all its season passes), if they want all the content under this model.
- You could just produce a product that is a fraction as large as what people have traditionally come to expect from a full price game and nevertheless try to sell it at full price. But you will be savaged by reviews and word of mouth, and probably will not make your money back.
That's pretty much all the options (alternative to a continuing support model), and all of them either A) are infeasible in terms of turning a profit/sustaining games in the genre; B) are deeply exploitative and bilk us out of much more of our money; C) break the game, making it much less like those complete, reasonable, balanced, and fun products of yesteryear; or D) are some combination of those types of downside. And then you have to factor in that a game like Soulcalibur, owned by company like Namco, doesn't just have to turn some sort of profit: it actually has to turn enough of a profit to be an attractive option when compared against all the other IP that they own and might want to push as a product.
So realistically, season passes are what we've got if we want the genre to both survive and not become a cesspool of absolutely shitty, broken, money-sucking experiences. But luckily I don't think we even need to look at the season pass as indicating that the core product is "incomplete" as you suggest. That's a kind of non-sequitor that people have been using for years: but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, there's potential for unscrupulous companies to try to exploit such a model to increasingly give you less for your buck. But there's nothing about the model that makes that an automatic result. That's what I meant when I said this is the best option but that the consumer base/fanbase has to keep the company honest by open pushback and withholding transactions if they begin to feel that the value per dollar is dropping below a reasonable level. But if you are getting a core game that has 20-30 characters, twelve stages, full online features (with decent netcode, matchmaking, and server maintenance), a beginning creation suite, a handful of single player modes, and a decent level of polish and balance, I would say you are getting a "complete" product and have nothing to complain about, even if you buy a fully priced copy/license at launch. And notably, everyone who bought SCVI got all of that and more, and most of them paid less than full price.
At that point, if a company wants to offer season passes to increase the content offerings and create a more robust experience than they were able to deliver with a reasonably priced core product, increasing the depth of the experience and making them a marginally better return and increasing the likelihood of a faster turn-around on the next entry in the franchise, that is to my mind a pretty clear win-win (especially considering the much more money-grubbing/experience-ruining alternatives) and refusing to accept this new/works-best-for-everyone option (just because it doesn't come packaged as a product that looks like the ones we grew up with), is incredibly self-defeating and unreasonable.
Don't get me wrong, I totally understand why DLC puts people on guard: in the late 2000's/early 2010's, it felt like almost every company pushing into DLC territory was competing to find the quickest and most offensive way to separate you from your money. As a consumer culture, we got burnt and saw how unscrupulous the biggest companies could be--and the trust has just never been fully restored, particularly as we watch major publishers continue to push boundaries and manipulate consumers to give them less product and inferior experiences for more money.
But crucially, it doesn't have to be that way, and some companies are dealing squarely with the fans of their products to deliver fair exchanges under the new models. In my opinion, though SCVI was far from my favorite Soulcalibur experience, and I do have concerns about where they put their emphasis in terms of the content, I don't think the season passes were an unreasonable money grab: I definitely got my money's worth from both the core game and the season passes, even buying multiple copies on multiple platforms. That, at the end of the day, has to be how we measure whether a product is complete: no other option makes sense or is sustainable in today's industry.
