DOA 6 was released in late February on PC and Consoles, with STEAM users getting a 10% discount on the game's initial purchase price. However, scrolling down the STEAM store page for the fighting game revealed the inevitable season pass. Problem is, this game's season pass is $93.99; more than double —or even triple— the asking price of every other fighting game that has ever existed.
Season Pass?
Season passes are a way for fighting game players to pay for a lot of future content preemptively, such as new characters and stages yet to be released, or even developed yet. These season passes are popular among the wide range of gamer because of the deep discounts they often represent. The average season pass is a fraction of the often outrageous prices triple-A game publishers charge for downloadable extra content, and season passes are considered the lesser of the two evils.
However, DOA's season 1 pass is almost double the MSRP of the actual game, leading gamers at large to wonder what the point of the season pass even is, if it's going to be that damn expensive.
For comparison sake, let's measure the DOA 6 season pass to the full price of Tekken 7 season passes for a moment. Tekken charged $35 at launch for season 1, which is only a little over half the $60 launch price of the actual game. You got three DLC characters, including characters from both Final Fantasy and a boss character from SNK's Fatal Fury franchise, a new mode, and new stages. By the time season 2 came along, we had added 4 more characters and stages, for the same price as season 1, and it included season 1 content. With DOA on the other hand, you have no idea what you're getting, besides the Mai Shiranui DLC the game is already bundled with, leaving many of us to wonder if the almost $100 season pass could ever possibility be worth the money.
Gamers are not happy
The gaming community at large has not been taking this well at all. One Reddit user DataBreaks even makes direct comparisons to Koei-Tecmo's previous title, DOA 5.
To those of us who remember the disastrous launch of DOA5, this is major Deja Vu. They basically just went through all the same mistakes from the previous title, again.
- pushing too hard that you want people to take your game seriously in interviews instead of appealing to your core audience
- hastily dumping all the stuff you took out (to be 'taken seriously') back into the game right before launch because of low preorder count due to pissing off your core audience who actually buy your games
- devs getting annoyed that people will only talk about the tits when that's the first thing he kept talking about when the game was revealed
- ludicrously expensive season pass content which will never end and also never get any cheaper
To which Reddit user TheWorldIsFullofWar replied:
They didn't even dump everything back in. There are costumes no one wants in the main game that existed purely for marketing and costumes that were in the original DoA5 release are pushed to the Season Pass. They fucked this game so hard.He's not wrong here. Games like Forza 7 have seen a similar controversy play out in the previous year, as core content that came with the initial $60 game was made into paid extras in the sequel. Content, such as characters, and even entire modes in the case of Forza 7 were locked behind rigid paywalls, or lootboxes.
Doomed to repeat history
DOA 5 -the previous game- was even worse. Considering the game was free-to-play at launch, Koei-Tecmo decided that downloadable content was the hill it wanted to die on, with more than $1289.79 in downloadable extras, spanning hundreds of individual DLC items in STEAM, and Xbox Live. To make matters worse, the prices of said content haven't dropped in the five years the game has existed, even now, where DOA 6 has made the nearly $1300 worth of content obsolete.This controversy comes on the heels of backlash by consumers toward game publishers over lootboxes and season passes. Gamers, who are already expected to pay an already steep $60 are regularly pressured into buying a combination of lackluster DLC for outrageous prices, several season passes, and pressured into spending up to $200 on ultimate editions to comprise the complete content of a game.
These shady pricing practices are most commonly associated with companies like Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard, but gamers tend to berate -or even boycott- games that adopt this practice regardless of who published it. In the case of EA's BattleFront 2, pay-to-win lootbox mechanics in the game have resulted in everything from effectively organized boycotts, to lawmakers taking action against the practice.
Playerbase is practically dead already.
DOA 5: Last Round's playerbase on STEAM peaked in April of 2015 at 2,735 concurrent players. Now, this nearly $1289.79 game sports -at most- around 150 players in any 24-hour period. that's under 6% of its peak, or a 94% player drop-off. If Koei-Tecmo is already making similar mistakes with DOA 6, it isn't hard to imagine it ending up with similar results, scraping the bottom of the multiplayer barrel.Despite a devoted core fanbase, and people who only want the fanservice, and Given the massive dropoff in popularity of this franchise as the result of a lackluster DOA 5 launch, DOA 6 could not have picked a worse time to start screwing its player base around. gamers have had to stew in two full years of vitriolic backlash toward what we now know as the "games as a service" culture, and given that this game's number of recurring players could give Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite a run for its money in a race to the bottom, Koei-Tecmo is in no position to be demanding the highest price for a season pass in recorded history.
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