You have to understand, the costs of game production for major titles have multiplied many times over in the two and half decades that Soulcalibur (for example) has been around, while simultaneously, the price the publisher can ask for the core game has remained static. And the volume of sales for games in the fighting genre has not kept pace to compensate for those impossible profit margins (in fact, the genre has been in decline for many years now, as a market share matter when compared against other genres). That leaves the developers and publishers with two realistic options: start turning out increasingly smaller games with stingier content, or find a way to price and produce that content in a fashion where they can still turn a modest profit.
Season passes not only allow the company to do this and stay in the market producing games with modern levels of production value and of similar size (or even larger) than past titles, they also allow said companies to get their profit from the core game which can then be re-invested back into a chain of DLC releases--a chain that can be sustained or tapered off as both demand for the product and the company's other obligations (production and fiscal) allow. It's a great system that serves both the consumer and producer and its the only way we can continue to get games like Soulcalibur without their rosters and other content shrinking to a fraction of what they once were because of the economic reality of modern game development.
And the developers/publishers have been trying to get us here for about a decade, but most gamers/consumers of games (the majority of whom don't know much about how the products they enjoy are produced) only perceive that they are getting "less" and arrive at the ill-informed opinion that this is merely because companies are getting greedier and greedier. Which as axioms go, this is sometimes reliable, but the truth is that most games companies that have stayed in the fighting genre do so /despite/ diminishing returns--either because it is a part of what they are known for (or all they are known for) or because it is a part of their company culture. But you can't get blood from a stone, and most companies and most franchises (not all, but most) cannot afford to keep delivering major titles without beginning to serialize at least some of the content that ultimately gets added tot he game.
Our choice as consumers is to either embrace this trend and pay a little more over a longer period, or just not get that content that we would have gotten in the season pass. One of the great things about DLC, is that it allows the company to offer both options to the consumer: those who can't see their way past paying more than the pricepoint for the core game can get that, and those who want a more robust roster and experience can pay a little extra for that. Personally, given the epic amount play I get out of a Soulcalibur game, I find the $90 I have spent on SCVI to be a pretty damn amazing cost-value exchange. For the longest time, most consumers in this industry were so pissy about these new sales models that they were shooting all of us collectively in our own foot, forcing incomplete games to be produced (hello, SCV), because very few gamers were willing to do the multiple season pass thing.
Now to be fair, part of this is because there were some truly bullshit practices being embraced by companies about ten or twelve years back when DLC was first becoming a thing: some companies got greedy and were engaging in some truly exploitative practices with the way games were packaged and consumed. So to some degree, this Frankenstein's Monster that is the modern, highly entitled gamer-consumer base is a problem the industry created for itself. The consumer now has their guard up and since we are talking about gamers, we are talking about a group of quasi-tech-saavy people who now know how to throw their weight around online when they don't like something.
But not at all companies are cut from the same cloth when it comes to BS practices, and many of the worst practices are now poison pills for companies (though that won't stop certain companies from pushing the envelope--we all know who these guys are, I think: rhymes with D.A., Clactinision..). So speaking of equilibrium, now is the time for reasonable producers and reasonable consumers to get on the same page--which is thankfully slowly happening--note that multiple season passes started becoming ubiquitous just a few years ago. Anyway, again, for my money, the deal that Namco is offering us for SCVI--that is, the price we pay for the core game plus the season passes, seems to me to be more than reasonable. And I guaruntee you, they are not making off like bandits: they probably have a similar or smaller profit-per unit figure to what they have always had. Amongst producers of fighters, I think only Capcom is likely making money hand over fist right now: they get to ask for that same industry standard price for Street Fighter products, but they also sell at much higher volume. They've really landed in a charmed position.
