Interesting discussion on here, just wanted to add my 2 cents worth. So you know where I'm coming from, I am a fan of Shovel Knight (bought it around the time Plague of Shadows came out), and personally find it to be one of the top action/platform games I've ever played.
With regard to the cost, I think it's an interesting model that rewards those who supported the development of the project up front (before there even was a playable game) as well as those who discovered and supported it after the release (a similar comment was made earlier in the thread). Recent formats, unless I've lost touch, hammer new out of the gate customers for around $60 for the new release plus another $20 for season pass and another $5-$10 for stuff that was not included in season pass. A year or two later, persons can find this all for around $40 or less. So basically they overcharged the initial customers to make up for development costs instead of rewarding them for support (unique character skins for preorders do not count in my opinion as they do nothing to change the game and are nearly always available to everyone eventually anyway).
In the case of Shovel Knight, you had the complete game with challenge mode and a largely re-tooled module that uses the same areas but plays very differently along with the promise of new modules for $12-15. Less extensive add-on modules to games out there today usually go for $10-15 each just for the add-ons. The SK supporters were rewarded by receiving all add-ons at no extra cost (I'm not sure if they ever meant to extend that beyond their kickstarter backers or not) while the total cost will rise to $25, it's still a base game plus 3 full add-ons and challenge modes, gender swap, and whatever else there may be. Given that SK is not an old game, that's really not so bad, and had it come out at $50 and followed the usual cost reduction pattern, it would be around where it is now (plus the add-ons would likely have cost extra).
The price adjustment seems reasonable given the amount of material they've developed and those that refused to spend more than $5 were not likely to ever buy it anyway so they are not losing many sales, especially when people complain about a games on this site that have a base cost of $6 not being on sale (there is a difference between limiting a budget and being cheap). Would people honestly prefer SK at $5 and then another $5 each for every module (which gets to $25 anyway)? Everyone's free to have his/her own thoughts, but for what it's worth, those are mine.

By the way: A price decrease doesn't necessarily mean less money for the devs. If they halve the price and because of that sell four times as many games, they actually doubled their profit.

Devs and pubishers try to segregate the market. First they try to sell their products full price to the fans of certain genres and later at a lower price to people, that are not really into those kind of games, but still buy them, because they are cheap and there's a certain chance that those people will want play them at a certain point of time in future. Of course most of those people end up never playing the game at all, but since it was cheap, it doesn't matter. And the devs have sold additional games and therefore made more profit, because digital distributions hardly have any variable costs attached to them at all.

"But that’s not everything! Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove also features three additional campaigns that are games all unto themselves! Take control of Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight on adventures of their own! Together, they form a grand and sweeping saga!
With a fully cooperative campaign, a full-featured challenge mode, a 4 player battle mode, and body swap mode, you’ll be digging for a long time. With Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, you get it all. Uphold the virtues of Shovelry, earn relics and riches, and discover the true meaning of shovel justice!"

Wow, it's really jam packed with content now! :D

I think Steam has created a wave of "entitled" customers who even feel physical pain when seeing somethign not happening as they want.
Steam and their discounts it's dandy on itself but once mr. gaben ceases to exist or maybe the internet dies, then every1 will have to say goodbye to their collections since you are paying just for a rental service..
GOG in the other hand is giving us something we can keep, share and most time even comes with plenty of awesome extras.
Shovel Knight it's worth $75. I would gladly pay them that or more for creating this game.

As I've said before, people who haven't bought it yet at the already very reasonable price never were anyway. If $10US is too much for a good game then your value doesn't meet the value of the seller, and you weren't going to buy. Most of the people complaining here were never actually going to buy the game. I don't understand the hatred for good content for free (for existing owners), but that obviously took time and effort to create, and therefore has increased value.

I agree.
But, I think most of the people who didn't buy the game and complained, are people who just want to buy the game at a dirt cheap price, let it sit in their backlog and never play it. It's a great game that people should play and the developers should get paid for their work. It's generous enough that the existing owners get updated content for free.
To all those who waited too long to buy it: You snooze, you lose.

Part of it, but only part, was marketing did botch this. It's a price increase because of additional content. Additional content that's free for the then existing owners. If it was free content then the price wouldn't have gone up.

It is incredible that you cannot even imagine people valuing things differently than you do, and making purchases based on that different valuation.

I didn't say that. I said that people value it differently than the developer, who wasn't going to lower the price. If the price, which is not a prohibitive price point at $15US, is too much, then maybe there are other hobbies or games for people. I'm not at all insinuating that "It's the perfect price" and if I didn't already own the game, $25US may be too much for me. But at $10 (on sale) it was the perfect price for me, so I got it.

Others didn't feel that way and were set on a gaming culture that removes value from the games by bundling them or reducing the price to pennies, so they missed out. This dev has clearly stated that they would not do that, so $10 was the best it was going to get. Research is wonderful. I'm sorry that those people missed out, thinking that "Maybe $10 wasn't so bad" but to be angry that a game you were never going to pay the (then lower) asking price for went up in price is moot: you weren't going to buy it at that price anyway.

But maybe they were. You can't know. People have their reasons, all valid, for delaying purchases.

That's why I qualified it with "most." Most of the people complaining were waiting for a 50% or 75% off sale. Which according to the dev wasn't ever going to happen.

But fair enough, it's not worth arguing over at any rate. I'm happy, others are happy, and others still aren't. I'll enjoy my game (I've had since very shortly after release) and they'll find something else to enjoy or be miserable over. Or enjoy being miserable over. Life is good anyway. Tschüß.

I don't think anyone is mad. I think most of us are laughing about the "free" content.

:)

A slight correction, the model you're describing here is for AAA games. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making the argument that AAA games are better than smaller more indie ones. But I'm willing to bet the amount of dev spent on the type of game you're describing there is perhaps 5x to 10x what was spent developing this game. Again, I'm not saying anything about quality either way, you're just making an apples and oranges comparison.

But AAA games also sell way, way more. For the end user, this shouldn't matter: you're still getting the game you're buying and the fun you can find in it for the money you pay. There's no such thing as determining the fair price of a game vs. other games in the marketplace by their cost of production (rather, there is, but it's a commie concept; under capitalism, if you made a wildly successful game and reaped disproportionately yuge profits, congrats). The price is good if the fun per dollar ratio, for you personally, is good. Shovel Knight is intended to be a highly replayable "modern classic", and the market seems to agree -- therefore pricing it for that segment appears to maximize the profit. If impersonal-you aren't in this segment (e.g. one-time players, Steam card collectors), you might consider the price on the high side, and that's fine.