From the Twitter Thread: Casey Hudson's Bioware Update, new post 5/10

Oh... got you. At first I thought you said it as "this was the general consensus", but it's more on the lines of "some people thought of ... "

No company is going to close the door on potential future revenue without knowing how much revenue is going to be left behind the door, let alone EA. There's no way EA said from the very start, no matter how well this game does, or how much money is out there to be made, we're not making any additional content. No way.

Actually...
Think about this: Base game is 60 bucks. Everything has to be covered, fuckton of hours of development, game engine, everything. Yet, then you have studios spilling 4 DLC with a price of 20 to 30 bucks each, the only thing they had to do was creating some new assets and do some more writing, everything else is already in, you're re-using one way or another a lot of stuff. So yeah, I think DLC in the bigger scheme actually makes you more money than the actual game, so long as it sells well that is.
Look at games like Battlefield, you wait a year and the base game is like 50% off, yet the DLC are still more expensive than the base game, that's just crazy. I believe in 3 and 4, the game was like 35 dollars, but the "premium" aka season pass still costed 60 after quite some time.
Same happens with some other companies, all the DLC together are still not enough content compared to the base game, but they cost way more. Or it is like a marketing trick, they leave you the base game cheap so you try it out and if you like it, then bang, the DLC are the heavy hitters.

I've got the impression companies indeed expect to make more sells through DLC, or to get most of the revenue that way. Obviously it doesn't apply to every single company or game, but still.

He doesn't pander in the same way that Flynn did. His sentences sometimes makes me afraid he's breaking PR that EA doesn't wanna see but he also kept some of it light.

What matters is that he emphasised himself as a person. Creators are egotistical, sometimes for the worse (ME3 ending) but also when they're passionate and I know Casey as someone who has his own visions and strong opinions on how stuff should be. I know he's GM now and not creative director or producer but even so, he has to direct the passion and culture at his studio, so he's an example of behavior. Perhaps this means he can un-pussyfoot the studio from all the pandering and constantly telling fans what they want. Flynn's statements always read like "The fans, fans, all the cons and cosplay, the fans, us at BioWare, we're humbled, the fans, etc. etc."

I don't have any hard facts but I'd speculate it around 10-15%.  If 4 million purchase that would put the numbers around 400-600K.  Let's split the difference and go with 500K.  At 20$ a pop that's 12 million.  The team allocated to making DLC's is typically small so figure 3-5 million to produce.  Not a huge profit but enough to justify it's production.  Assuming I'm anywhere near reality, I have to wonder just how far the playerbase dwindled in those first 3-4 months for them to warrant it not worth doing.

I thought those folks from Montreal was absorbed into another unit? Not that they was actually let go?..... ...I thought the initial reason for no DLC was simply because of Andromeda's less than stellar sales. From what i understand ME3 DLC are still seeing solid sales downloads even today.

As much as I hate downloads i finally downloaded "The Citadel" and "Leviathan" a couple of months ago...People hated ME3 for the endings, but eh the game still saw solid sales and folks overall liked the game regardless of the endings.....

My point is that, i don't think DLC happens unless the base game sells well.....

Not really, by standard dev cycle DLC development should have started before MEA's release, since writers, artists and some other folk finish their parts of main game earlier than programmers or testers, for example. Obviously it didn't happen.

I'll give Hudson credit for at least being somewhat honest. If his statement says one thing it's we know this wasn't our best effort and we promise to do better in the future and get back to the things that made you love our games in the past. So hopefully he means that and we'll see a better effort next time.

Nope. He never said no DLC was ever planned, only that it wouldn't happen. DLC-never-planned-thing was a denial-powered answer for that. Better to believe that than that Andromeda failed miserably and that is the reason no DLC was ever made. 

The whole DLC was never planned started when someone from Bioware or EA, I can't remember which said that they had always planned to expand on ME:A story through books and other mediums.  People took this as them saying that they only planned on expanding on it through those means.  As if DA and ME haven't always had their stories expanded on through books, comics, etc, and still received DLC.

But look at ME3, sold 6 million copies.  15% of that would be 900K people buying DLC, at $15 dollars per, that's 13.5 million if my math is correct, and they had four paid story DLCs.  That's 54 million dollars in gross sales.  Not even counting the gun packs and the other little stuff they sold as DLC.

The CEO of Ea said they expected between 6 - 10 million copies of Andromeda to sell.  Split the difference, and that's 8 million copies.  15% is 1.2 million people.  That's 18 million gross per DLC.  Say they expected the same level of interest as ME3, and they could release up to four.  That's 72 million dollars. 

There's no way EA said from start we're not going after this money, or couldn't find the bodies to go after this money. 

Disclaimer - I did all this math in my head so feel free to correct me.