Quote Originally Posted by edczxcvbnm View Post
Can't they just get it right the first time?
Sadly that's very hard to do. Until a competitive game of any kind is released to be played by tens of thousands of people or more, it's basically impossible to test every possible strategy for every possible matchup that may arise. So you can end up releasing a game with balance issues you never expected or intended which are only discovered by the multitude of dedicated fans out there. So then you have some choices. If what the community finds literally breaks the game you patch it. Period. Any company that doesn't do this is stupid and doesn't give a trout about their fans.

But what if the stuff alters the balance enough that the game isn't quite what you intended, but it isn't game breaking? Now you can still just patch in balance changes, and some games like Team Fortress 2, Starcraft 2 and others do this regularly. But the fan base for the game may like the way it plays as is. Some may not want to play a version of the game that is completely different from what they played before since they'll have to learn new characters and matchups, and basically start almost from scratch with a game they may have owned for a year. A newer, cheaper release gives those who would like an updated version what they want while not pissing off fans who don't want it. I'm not really opposed to releasing new variants as stand alone titles for that reason, so long as the changes are enough to warrant a new release. I haven't played the new versions of Street Fighter 4, but the various releases of Street Fighter 2 and other Capcom fighting games were often very different.