Mortal Kombat X came out a month or so ago and by most accounts, including mine, it's a top-notch game. It is also packed with content, with 24 characters (in the base game) a fun story mode, Lots of tower challenges, a krypt minigame, and heaps of fight modifiers for the very fun "test your luck" mode. Old-school gamers will remember the days when fighting games were sold with like 8-12 characters, no significant story or extra modes, clunkier gameplay and much worse graphics. War Gods was a full price product. Bio-F.R.E.A.K.S. was a full price product. Even MK2, which I loved at the time, had a roster half as big and no real extra modes. Jeff Gerstmann gave Tekken 3 a 9.9 out of 10 during the absolute height of the fighting game craze in the 90s for a package that's less compelling than MKXs. That shows in part how far gaming has come as a medium in 17 years, but also that base MKX is an excellent package comparable to the best the genre has to offer (provided you like the base fighting, which most people, including myself, do.)

Yet despite this excellence there's a haze of resentment around MKX, and it has to do not with any objective issue with the game itself, but rather with the business practices surrounding it.

MKX launched with Goro, a series favorite, withheld as a pre-order bonus, or a five dollar extra character. It launched with a "Kombat pass" that offered 4 extra characters, including Predator and Jason from horror movies, and some extra costumes for $30. It is also selling additional costumes outside the kombat pass and an unlock item for $20. The value proposition for this stuff sucks (though it's better than having to rebuy the game for 4 more characters like with Street Fighter II Championship Edition or Super Street Fighter II.)

None of this takes away from the fun of the base game. Neither Goro nor Jason (the two DLC characters released so far) is so overpowered as to make other characters not viable. The new costumes kind of suck for the most part. The unlocks can be achieved through the krypt minigame. In theory the availability of the DLC shouldn't matter. As for me I bought the $80 version of the game with the Kombat Pass so I get most of the stuff, including all the announced DLC characters, and frankly the $20 extra isn't that meaningful to me compared to having a really fun fighting game to play. If you look at inflation, $50 in 1994 is the equivalent of about $80 today, so arguably the game doesn't even cost more than fighting games did back then, even if you include (most of) the DLC.

So why are these practices still so uncomfortable? For me it's not about the money, it's about the way the stuff is implemented. In MK9 there was also a season pass and some other stuff but I never really thought about it because it was entirely external to the game. You could buy Kenshi and Freddie Krueger or you could not, up to you. MKX is not that way at all. Whenever you log in there are advertisements for DLC characters on the home screen. When a new character comes out they get a "tower" which lets you try them out, but also acts as another aggressive push for purchase. Meanwhile the krypt, while mildly entertaining, feels completely unbalanced and will require days of play to unlock everything.

All of this makes MKX feel like the videogame equivalent of a movie theater that forces you to sit through 15 minutes of annoying local ads before you even get to the previews. It's a restaurant where the waiter aggressively tries to upsell the specials even if you're not interested. It's annoying and it cheapens the experience. Games should be a place to escape the bad parts of the real world, and having a chintzy salesman pop into your game and try to sell you stuff all the time is a great way to break the illusion and escapism.

That, more than the cost, is what makes the stuff around MKX so objectionable. You want to raise the price of games, which hasn't budged in a decade, fine, I'm not opposed, these things are expensive to make. You want to mess up the main menu with the equivalent of a guy going "Hey! Buy Predator! He's available soon. Predator! don't you want to buy the Predator? You know who's awesome? Predator!" even if I already bought him? That's something I'm much less okay with.

Mortal Kombat X is an awesome hike through the weird beauty of Outworld with a sweaty guy in a seersucker suit following you and trying to sell you souvenirs even after you've already bought some.

Not cool, WB. Not cool.

"You want to raise the price of games, which hasn't budged in a decade, fine, I'm not opposed, these things are expensive to make."

See, therein lies the problem. Between mobile games, Steam sales, and free-to-play, the price of games has become devalued. Raising prices would have made sense 5 years ago, but the market now has changed so much. Especially for people buying games for their kids that have little awareness or history with the medium. "Why spend $60 when I have 20 free games on my phone?"

This new take on what games should cost is the reason all this microtransaction stuff is in there. People already buying big-budget games are still there, but it's tough to bring new people into the market. So DLC is their current solution.

@csl316: Revenue on big game experiences (console and PC) are still increasing, and the new consoles are selling better than the last generation. I don't think console gaming is as dead as you say. The real issue is that development costs are through the roof, and games need to sell millions of copies to break even, so even with a big installbase (the Xbox One and PS4 already have almost 30 million consoles out there combined, so cross-platform games have a lot of customers) it's hard to make a profit. I agree that DLC and such are taking the place of a rise in prices, but they are doing so not just in a way that makes games more expensive, but that also makes them worse. Some games cost more than $60 in the days of the SNES. I don't think it would be crazy to charge like $80 for the next Elder Scrolls. Better than having whoever the new Lydia is follow you around waving an advertisement for horse armor.

@bigsocrates: I'm not saying it's dead, I'm saying the console market isn't expanding quickly enough to cover the rising cost.

I don't think most reasonable people have any issue with DLC as long as it's good. Mortal Kombat has a lot of in-game purchases but, like you say, how many are actually necessary to enjoy the core game?

I take issue with things like season passes, which promise content to players but the publisher doesn't tell them what exactly their getting upfront. Backlash wouldn't be as bad for DLC if companies decided to show a little transparency about the kind of content they plan on releasing.