The weirdness of DLC pricing

Game pricing in general is an irrational system that makes sense. Games almost all launch at $60, whether they're huge exciting titles like Skyrim, or unpolished messes nobody wants to play like Rogue Warrior (Released by the same publisher!) They then fall to whatever price the market will bear at varying speeds depending on their popularity. Thus a year after release you can expect a game like Modern Warfare 3, extremely popular and full of value for those who enjoy it, to be close to the $60 market, while the least popular titles can be had for half price in a month or two. By pricing games this way publishers get to at least claim they believe every release is AAA quality, while capturing maximum value from those who might be excited about a title (Especially a game that's great but unpopular, like Rayman: Origins) and letting games settle to the value the market sets for them.

A tiered pricing system might make more sense, especially since the majority of games have frontloaded sales patterns that mean that often gamers who might buy a game at $30 have lost interest by the time the game hits that level a couple months down the line. But there are other considerations, like store margins, marketing budgets, expectations (any game released as a 'budget' title would instantly be seen as inferior given the current scheme) and the like. Publishers have experimented with cheaper games that are far from shovelware and it doesn't seem like the experiments have paid off.

All that being said, the price scheme for DLC seems underdeveloped to me. Downloadable games actually do have the tiered pricing that retail games should, with top titles like Resident Evil 4 HD going for $20, while smaller games or bigger risks are sold for $10. There is some variation in DLC too, especially with the new season pass concept, but the majority still seems to come out for $10, and stay there, regardless of popularity or interest. This is especially odd considering that DLC is almost always overpriced in the first place. Mortal Kombat cost $60 when it came out and featured, I believe, 28 characters, which means that each character was a little more than $2 if the whole value was the characters. In addition to that you got the engine, all the backgrounds, a robust story mode, the challenge towers, etc... The MK season pass costs $15 and features 4 characters, making it $3.75 per character with none of the other stuff. You can buy the characters separately for $5 each.

Today Bestbuy sell the main game for $40, bringing the price per character in the main game below $1.50. The DLC hasn't budged and to my knowledge hasn't even gone on sale. The same is true for most games. The game drops over time and the DLC remains expensive. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed can be had for $20, but the two mission pack DLCs (with much less content than the main game) are $20 on their own. Add the character packs and you're up to $30. 1.5 times the cost of the core game for not nearly as much content. There was a Sith edition that bundled all this together, but it's out of print, and while Game of the Year or special editions are ways in which DLC sees discounts through bundling, not all games get those. Enslaved has been as low as $10 on Amazon. Pigsy's Perfect 10? Hasn't budged from its $10 cost.

Why do publishers do this? Do they think that DLC buyers aren't sensitive to cost? Do they expect the core game to capture people so much that they will pay the higher prices indefinitely? Do they just not care?

A lot of gamers complain about the rip off of DLC, and those complaints are legitimate (insofar as DLC is overpriced. Whether it's ever justified to really complain about the cost of entertainment is another issue. This is not the gas company gouging you for heat.) But beyond that I just don't understand how the market works. DLC has become a major part of the game market, with almost every major, and many not so major, titles featuring additional content for sale. Yet it doesn't act like the rest of the game market. Is that because buyers act differently in the DLC market, with less price sensitivity, or is it because there's no used game market driving prices down here (If that's the case then how come downloadable games seem to go on sale much more reliably than DLC does?) or are executives just pushing it out the door and forgetting about it because DLC sales are frontloaded too and changing the price to capture an extra few hundred downloads isn't worth the time and attention it would take? The last makes the most sense to me but I have no evidence to back it up. Besides the fact that the prices are so sticky.