Same thing [rapid price drops] seems to be happening with Capcom fighters.
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was still $40 or more new at most retailers and on most Web sites up until the release of
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 nine months later, and it took a long time to get that low in the first place. And it doesn't matter that it's only $20 new now, because UMvC3 renders it worthless. Meanwhile, UMvC3 is still $40 new (original MSRP) almost five months after release, and unless Capcom does another disc release, it'll most likely stay at that price. I don't see price drops on
Street Fighter x Tekken coming too quickly either.
Most of the fans who are complaining about SFxT's locked content are complaining that it's locked on-disc, yes, which means they'd still buy into this crap and spend the price of the game again on DLC some months later if it was actually necessary to download it. CoconutMikeNIke is spot on here, except that the real thing making people's argument lose validity is the fact that they're
still buying into it (and still showing interest SFxT in the first place), not them saying it does or doesn't matter based on the type of content.
He's a bit wrong as far as the idea of selling playable characters being bad, though. Consider
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, where the last of three DLC characters came out quite some time after the game's initial release, and was a 700MB download that also updated the game to have the balance changes of
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II, the then-newly-released arcade version that had introduced this new character. The alternative to releasing that eight-dollar character (yes, they also charge a lot more for single characters than Capcom, mainly because, again, people pay for it) would have been releasing a new disc version of the game with
one new character, which is what they ended up doing with
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, except that that game also included all the DLC characters ($24 worth of content right there if you hadn't bought them previously, which was a big draw for me), had massive balance changes, and added a lot of other new stuff, including single-player content worth playing thanks to Arc System Works developing competent AI and putting it in a mode
capable of wrecking tournament players. (Don't click that video if you've got any sort of bandwidth limit, because it's an hour and forty-five minutes long and it'll devour your connection whole. Most of it is people being destroyed on the first stage anyway.)
As far as Pac-Man and Mega Man being in, I wouldn't have a problem if this were designed as
Namco x Capcom in fighting game form. But it's not. The game is specifically marketed as being a crossover involving two specific franchises, and
neither one contains Mega Man or Pac-Man. Having those characters in isn't "thinking outside the box"; it's stupid blatant fanservice, and it doesn't have any place in something Capcom wants people to take seriously, as a competitive game or otherwise. This is the same reason Cole and Sony's Japanese cat mascots have absolutely no business being in (though, funnily enough, all five of the characters in question are almost certainly going to be auto-banned from competitive play due to being platform-exclusive, so Sony's marketing attempt isn't going to work).