I'm pretty sure they said that they literally had no more room on the disc for the other maps and they'd have to go 2 disc if they did, then they would have had to increase the cost. I would have been OK with that, but they had to make a choice. $60 for a remake would have been unjustifiable for many people. I feel they made the right choice. If you paid damn attention you'd have all the maps. Its not really 343's fault I don't think. Though I do also understand the other side of it.
I don't think ODST was 60$ because it was two discs. There's also the fact that they spent all this time hyping up the Halo 1 pistol gametype for marketing purposes and then
didn't include it on the disc for space reasons. When you've run out of space on a DVD for a 102KB
gametype, mayhaps it's the time to change the SKU to a two-disc release.
In the end, Microsoft chose to favor saving 2$ from printing a single disc instead of favoring the Reach playerbase.
As Halo has gone on, the DLC releases have gotten more and more pro-shareholder and less and less pro-userbase. Halo 2 was the best for the playerbase, free maps after a while and a reinstallable disc. Mythic was a pretty ideal compromise, with all the maps on a single disc. And you could use Mythic to cheaply set up a LAN with all DLC, and the disc allowed Core users to finally enjoy the entire Halo 3 map selection. But people on the vanilla disc did eventually at least get permanently discounted maps (Legendary costs as much as an RB song).
With Reach, we've gotten DLC releases that are still the same price a year later, a title update that not only split the online userbase but split LAN, and you're either going to be lanning with the disc maps or just the Anniversary maps, unless you've got enough money to rig up all your LAN 360s with storage devices and DLC purchases. Like I said before, Halo Wars' DLC support was VERY.. I'm looking for the word.. corporate. It's DLC is still both 10$ two years later.
Now that MS will have complete control over 4, I see nothing to indicate to the contrary that Halo 4's post-launch support will favor keeping the community intact over making the shareholders 5 more bucks. Even the TU does this, with a DLC gated gametype and more bandwidth usage for ATLAS to help sell Windows Phone 7 phones.
Blah.
