LOL the expansion costs $40? That is absurd. The greed. I do not care about the trash MK11 story, so that leaves 3 stages, 3 characters, 3 skins, at least 1 stage fatal, and friednships. Not paying $40 for that. The base game costs $60, and that comes with many times what you get for $40.
Whether you appreciate the story or not doesn't change the fact that it's in there as part of the package, and constitutes a huge part of the effort they put into the production. Just because it's not worth it to you personally doesn't mean the value's not there. If I ordered a five course steak dinner and don't care about the steak because it's not a dry aged Wagyu and I won't settle for less, that doesn't mean they should give me the steak for free and only charge for the rest.
For a case like yours, I hope they have an option in the store where you can buy individual characters and skip on the story expansion. At standard pricing for individual characters, you'll only pay $12 for Fujin and Sheeva, or $18 if you also want Robocop, and you'll still get everything else that they're handing out FOR FREE TO EVERYONE. Yeah, the Friendships and stages, and Stage Fatalities are free, you bunch of goobers. They could very, very easily have nickel-and-dimed you for those if they wanted.
DLC prices are never going to scale with the original product, because of the simple fact that the DLC sales are never going to compare to the original game's sales. The same amount of work goes into creating the content, but with a fraction of the number of people paying for it, so there is a higher cost to make it worth the effort. You can argue that DLC should not exist and games should be complete on launch... but you can also argue that DLC extends the active lifetime of the game in ways no other model can. So if there's going to be any DLC at all (which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself) then it's going to be "overpriced."
If you break down the cost of this pack, you're pretty much paying $15 for characters/skins (at Kombat Pack pricing) and $25 for a cinematic expansion that will probably increase the story length by 25-40% depending on how many chapters there are. Which doesn't sound entirely unreasonable if you actually enjoy the content -- and if you don't, then why are you bothering. Once you consider how much of the expansion content is free to all, plus how much more content in gear, skins, and Brutalities have also been released for free over the past year, plus periodic updates and events, funding tournaments... then having them charge $40 to those who are willing and able to pay for extras starts to sound a little less malevolently greedy. Yeah, they're still making shitloads of money. But it's not even in the same galaxy as your average mobile game model in terms of predatory pricing.
The analogy I keep going back to regarding game pricing is this: How many hours of extra entertainment are you going to get out of this pack? If you only spend 8 hours playing the story and using the new characters, then you're getting the same value as 4 movie tickets. (Never mind the difference between passive and interactive entertainment.) If you bought the Kombat Pack at full price already and balk at the idea of paying $140 for a full game, then I ask whether you've gotten at least 28 hours of entertainment out of it. Personally, I don't have a problem there. A handful of afternoon sessions with friends has already paid for that.
Here's where I do have a problem: The full collection only costs $60, which makes it much, much harder for a consumer to justify the price of the expansion alone. It's not so much that the math doesn't check out; the optics are just very, very bad.
How does the math check out? Well, the base game is currently selling for $20 on Amazon and Gamestop, or a third the original price. The Kombat Pack should then scale down to about $15, or maybe $20 considering the content is still fresher than the base game. So the full bundle could be expected to cost $75-80 rather than $60. Why such a steep discount? Well, it's to get players who weren't interested in the game at launch to get on board, obviously. If they didn't want MK11 for $60 before, why would they want it for $80 now? You gotta sweeten the deal.
Does it look like a huge middle finger to the fans who supported the game from the start, who are expected to pay $140 for a game now selling for less than half? Sure the fuck it does! But keep in mind, buying the base game new at launch cost $60 and now costs a third the price. If you'd bought everything at launch it would have been $140, and a third that price would be around $47. Add a little bump because the Aftermath content is brand new, and a $60 figure seems about right. That's the discounted price you pay if you have the patience to wait for the game to get cheaper before you engage, or you weren't interested enough until now. It's the standard price dip, really. Those of us who bought the game at launch, bought the Kombat Pack, and are now buying the expansion have essentially purchased a $140 game in installments, versus those of us who waited until now to buy anything and now get a cheaper price. It makes perfect sense, but seeing the prices side by side confuses the issue and makes it look like a ripoff.
It's not a very good rollout in terms of clear communication of what you're getting for your money. I'm sure a fair number of people would not have bought MK11 if they knew it was "secretly" going to be a $140 game all together, which from the producers' perspective is a good reason to sell this behemoth in more manageable pieces -- though the lack of transparency from the outset is, fair to say, offputting from a consumer perspective. The frustration is very understandable. But the problems have much more to do with the communication strategy than the actual value, as I demonstrated above. It all makes a lot more sense than it looks on the surface. You just have to cool down your reflexive rage for long enough to work out the logic.
