Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear (with Deluxe Edition) appeared.

The prices on the official site are $20 and $40 respectively, so that's quite a bit pricey. :/

$20 wouldn't be bad for a brand-new release, as long as it's a lengthy, meaty expansion. But another $20 on top of that just for the addition of the soundtrack does seem a bit unreasonable.

I'm actually feeling conflicted about this.

On the one hand, the expansion costs as much as the base game.
On the other hand, unlike the base game, it does have new content (or hopefully, it should).

How the heck does an expansion get released for one of the most prolific series of all time, to little fanfare? I thought the internet or at least this site would be going nuts for months on end in anticipation of this one.

Not that I'm intereted (blasphemy, I know!) but how haven't I heard of this one before now? Where was the hype?

I imagine they're just trying to hit that sweet spot of what people will pay -- if I were into these games, the 20 bucks for several hours (I assume) of new content would strike me as a decent price; whereas if they had tried to sell Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition at $50 or $60, I (the hypothetical fan of the original) would probably have been outraged, since it was mostly preexisting content, with some new stuff (and some fixes and UI changes) sprinkled in. I think BGEE's actual base release price was something like, what, $30? (Give or take about $5.)

And who knows? Maybe SoD will launch here with a slight discount (I personally doubt it, but it's possible).

According to the Wayback Machine, the game's launch price was also $20.
3 things:

1) Not all people liked the Enhanced Edition of the Baldur's Gate games or felt the need to buy them when they already had the originals. This is important because...
2) ...the expansion requires that you own the Enhanced Edition of the 1st Baldur's Gate.
3) It's not made by the original developers, so there is skepticism/doubt as to the whether Beamdog can deliver an expansion worthy of the originals.

Either that was the discounted release price (maybe just in their store, maybe everywhere), or they jacked up the base price for their subsequent Enhanced Editions -- I'm pretty sure BG2EE was $25 when it came here, and I'm positive IWDEE was $25 or $30 at launch (again, before any minor discount it might've had).

I certainly fell into this category - plus (though I'm sure they're ironed out now) I heard they were initially a bit buggy.

As far as the developer goes, I always figured "more of the same" would be plenty enough for a decent game in this case LOL. Write an interesting companion NPC or two, keep it bug free and craft a nice, tight but not terribly cliche story and you should be good to go!

Though... I suppose that's a lot easier said than done now that I type / think about it LOL.

What do you mean? All they need to do is please everyone who's played and enjoyed the previous games at any point for in the past twenty years, during which time they've become virtually deified. What's so hard about that? =D

Yeah, I could have sworn about the IWDEE base price at release being higher, but I guess I was just thinking of BG2EE. I guess too many people must've complained about the price of the latter, so they ended that little experiment and dropped the next one back down to $20. (Makes me curious about whether Night Dive will do something similar when they release the "updated" PC version of Turok 2, given how many people -- including me -- moaned about the price of the first one.)

I doubt it. One of the devs of the remastered version of Turok said that Night Dive might have put the price so high because the revenue would have to be split between 5 companies (of which at least 2 of them are the license-holders of the Turok property). Considering the cheaper price tags that Night Dive put on other games, I'm inclined to believe his words.

I also seem to remember reading somewhere that some elements of the new PC version of Turok were actually reverse-engineered from the N64 version, rather than this just being a tweaked version of the old PC port. I gather there was a lot of work involved that isn't readily apparent on-screen, so I'm less aghast at that price point now than I was when it first dropped. (I still wouldn't buy it, mind you, but the price has fairly little to do with that. ;) )