It’s rare that a season pass for a game costs more than the game itself. Dead or Alive 6 owners can now drop nearly a hundred bucks on two new characters and 62 costumes. Considering downloadable content costs for the previous game, that could be a bargain.
Prices for the season pass bundle, now available alongside the game on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, weren’t revealed until yesterday. The high price was not unexpected, however.
Tecmo Koei released vast amounts of cosmetic DLC for Dead or Alive 5: Last Round: hundreds of costumes totaling hundreds of dollars. So the Dead or Alive 6 developers rolling out this $135 deal — and specifies that there will be more — isn’t a huge surprise.
What does $135 get a player? In addition to the new characters, the 62 costumes include NiCO’s “Technomancer Gear,” seen above, and Nyotengu’s wrestling getup.
Here’s everything that comes in the pricey bundle:
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Happy Wedding Costumes Vol.1
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Happy Wedding Costumes Vol. 2
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Costume Pack Vol.1
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Costume Pack Vol. 2
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Additional Character Mai Shiranui
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Mai Shiranui Debut Costumes
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Additional New Character
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Additional New Character Debut Costumes
Plus there’s the peace of mind from knowing that you’re completely covered for Dead or Alive 6 DLC for three months.
Note:
– Downloadable content not included in the list above may be released during the same period, but it will not be covered by this Season Pass 1.
Almost completely covered.
Comments
22 responses to “The First Dead Or Alive 6 Season Pass Costs $135”
My first thought it “wow that is criminal”. But then I remember that people buying $135 worth of DLC is the reason why games aren’t $135 in the first place.
As if they wouldn’t charge $135 for games if they thought they could get away with it
Honestly they should do. Games have been RRP ~$100NZD since I was a kid. They should be $160NZD+ by now. No wonder we have shit like this.
They were over $100 for a game back in the 1980’s, they should be near $300 by now if it was purely about inflation. But even here they are dropping rather than rising. Most new releases are $60 to $80 these days, sometimes less.
But the industry is so different to then that you just cant compare. The first and most obvious is the sheer size of the market today. You’ve gone from 50k sales being big to 1 million being just OK. You have so many more countries open to you, so instantly have a billion potential customers.
Second is the cost cutting with using other peoples engines to get most of the hard stuff done. Its why you see games on Unity, Unreal, Frostbite, Cry Engine, etc etc. Massive saving in cost if you dont have to make that engine first.
Third is distribution. Moving stuff around has improved dramatically since the 80’s, and whether its a physical product or digital you’ve never had it easier. Steam has done so much for keeping prices low just by being a central and convenient platform. There will be other things as well keeping prices down, but those 3 are biggies.
End result, we see games actually dropping in price while they are costing more and more to make. Enjoy it while you can because eventually it has to plateau and you’ll see the base cost start to go back up again.
All very good points.
Economies of scale certainly is a driving factor. Physical distribution actually hasn’t really moved that much cost-wise especially out to AU/NZ, though scale helps there. The cost to develop a game is still going up significantly year over year – middleware usage is just a mitigating factor that helps slow the growth. It’s true that maximum units sold is also tracking upward, but the rate of growth of the market is slower than the rate of growth of development costs and has been for a long time. Plus there’s the fact that the market is not infinite. There’s a finite number of people to sell games to and they have a finite budget. One game doing very well eats a bigger slice of the pie, but that means everyone else gets a smaller slice. Unfortunately I don’t think EA, Actiblizzion etc understand this though.
The biggest difference actually compared to the 80s is actually simple manufacturing costs. It costs a few cents to press a Bluray, and not a lot more to produce a flash cartridge. Back in the 80s and 90s, the games were expensive because all those cartridges had a ton of circuitry in them. A lot had custom chips that were unique to a handful or even a single game. The cost to manufacture cartridges could run into tens of dollars. The manufacturing costs were much higher so the risk was higher and the cost had to also be higher. The move to optical media drove the cost per game down massively and resulted in the standardization of game pricing around that $50 USD ($60 USD for PS2 generation onward).
DLC and Season Passes are basically the only way that AAA games are able to pay for themselves. The $60 US price point has gotten set in stone and they had to recoup their costs elsewhere. The downside to this is it’s also really risky – if they rely on DLC sales to make up the difference, then a game selling lower than expected for the base game affects the DLC sales too, which is why you see asshole companies like Actiblizzion laying off staff after recording bumper revenue.
The problem is the AAA industry is so damn greedy that even if they put the price point up to $80 USD or something, they would still put season passes and shitty DLC everywhere because why make adequate money when you could make even more money?
As I said, you cant really compare eras. I wasnt thinking of cartridge based gaming btw, I was predominantly a disc gamer with the C64 the only exception. Even there I had a disc drive for those majestic 5 1/4″ discs.
Did have an N64, but was gifted about 50 cartridges (which my sisters stupidly threw out…) so never really had to invest in them. Oh, had a DS, but their cost wouldn’t have been massive.
But for consoles, yeah, that too is something that’s no longer a cost. Not so sure the manufacturing costs have dropped all THAT much though. Yes, a cartridge will be more expensive to make, but licensing was never as big an issue in the 80’s compared to today, which is on a per copy sold basis whether its digital or physical.
Also stick with distribution costs dropping since then as well. There were far fewer flights in and out of Asia back then, and shipping was expensive. These days theres hundreds a day into just about every major airport, meaning space isn’t at a premium. Its far cheaper to ship something today compared to the 1980’s.
Fair points though, the hardware costs were comparably higher for a lot of the market. Thank god that’s stopped, I hated the drawer of widgets.
No arguments, that’s why I said it will plateau. And it probably already has, DLC, MTX, season passes etc have all blurred what the real market base is compared to the old days of buy and forget.
On the one hand, yup, they’ll nickel and dime as much as they can out of you, but on the other hand, so what? The pricing is now at a point where you as the consumer can choose how much to invest in a game, and with the sheer variety out there theres always something to move to.
I think its dirty to pay full price then have to buy a season pass as well, just to get basics out of a game, but as that ratio of cost to growth increases to get wider, they have to get their investment back somehow. As much as I dislike them I think season passes are a better option that $200 for a game…
They have to make a profit, or they go out of business. Then we have nothing.
Overall though, if you look at just the last decade, and not the last ~40 years, then everything you say is 100% spot on. So even in that shorter timeframe we’ve seen massive market changes as costs have gone up while the market base really hasn’t. At the same time, digital distribution has taken off though, which makes it easier to distribute things like DLC and updates.
Just more stuff making it harder to compare eras, even one as recent as 10 years. Digital distribution, far better internet (whether we think so or not, it is much better), and simple access to information all streamline a lot of the costs.
Better people than me have written books on this. Its an interesting discussion when you break it all down. For us, all we want is a fair product for a fair price. And I think we’re (mostly) getting it. DLC and season passes suck IMO but they’re a far better option than a bigger upfront cost.
Having said that, if prices had slowly gone up rather than down, I think we’d have gotten so used to it that we wouldn’t have noticed. Today, I don’t think we could.
They basically do already though when you consider that the bulk of the stuff that ends up in season passes most of the time is stuff that would have been in the game back in the day.
This kinda DLC is what puts me off of current gen fighters. It takes away some of the fun and replaces it with monetisation. You’ll see other people with these costumes and be like “Oh that’s cool, how do I unlock that? Oh that’s right, with REAL WORLD MONEY!”.
I just wanna unlock stuff with skill and so forth, but now that goes unrewarded (I could get a Trophy, but those don’t tickle my fancy).
I’ll have to get this because Mai Shiranui is in it (see username).
If DoA5 is anything to go by, you’re better off not installing the packs that make the costumes visible and simply buying the ones you like. A lot of them were hot trash and actually made the game even more embarrassing to be seen playing in polite company. Definitely not worth buying the season pass here.
This would be less galling if the in-game costume unlocking system wasn’t so completely awful to begin with.
Good to see koei/tecmo behaving like assholes again. The last dead or alive game turned me right off because of the business model they chose.
This isn’t any better
Again with overpriced games for dress-ups. This kind of DLC is currently causing me not to buy games at all. Didn’t matter if its just dress ups or actually content, it’s all over priced these days (including the actual game, no physical version)
That’s utterly insane. EA and Ubisoft must be sitting there going “Well, at least we aren’t the WORST out there now…”
Ubi, maybe. I expect EA are in puzzled silence. “… Which of our studios is least fitting to make a shop window disguised as a fighting game? Popcap? Great, have them do it!”
“Sir… quick, we can make a COD fighting game! Lootbox clothing! QUICK!”
Well, someone DID make Tetris BR work…
My wife and I were going to buy this on day 1. we may affectionately refer to it as Boob or Alive, but it’s a damn solid combat system. I’ve owned 3 iterations of it and she has owned every one since 2.
But nope. Not now. Locking off multiple characters behind pre-order/special edition/season pass purchases, multiple season passes, multiple insanely priced season passes, that weird marketing shit they pulled on the EVO stream few weeks back…
The whole thing is just full of bullshit. Which really fucking sucks. This looks like easily the best DOA to date.
They’re actually locking the new characters behind the season pass? That seems insane if true.
I was really excited for DoA6 with what they originally were pitching – less overtly sexualized costumes and so on – but its increasingly looking like this is just them re-releasing DoA5 so they can sell all this stuff again.
From memory you get Nyotengu and Nico for preordering. Season pass 1 has Mai and another TBA character.
The fact that you get one of the best characters and the new antagonist locked behind preorder, then the $120 season pass to get a series staple and another character they haven’t even bothered to plan does not bode well. Also, season pass 1. One of several. At the very least there’s a second pass that will have two more characters.
They’re using the fact that people have mains as a ransom for their hundred dollar wedding dress packs and I’m just fucking not cool with any of it.
Well if it’s anything like DoA5, the season pass just lets you buy *all that stuff* at a discount. You’ll still be able to buy the new characters separately unless Tecmo have gone utterly batshit insane.
Fair enough. But I feel like paying full price for a game and then getting series veterans as DLC is taking the piss.