T w e n t y S i d e d
Back in my day the whole game shipped on the disc or cart and it worked!
I remember the first “DLC” I ever cared about. Halo 2’s expansion maps. I spent entire nights playing Halo 2 with my friend, his brother, and occasionally a third person. That’s right. I had 2 and sometimes 3 friends. One of us went to the local used games store and picked up the add-on installation disc and installed them. It was a novel concept for us: adding new things to a game that had already come out.
That was far from the first expansion content I had ever played. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Sonic & Knuckles… there were plenty of times in the past I was given reason to revisit games. But this time felt different. There was no new story content or mechanics. There was just more maps. That “lack” of content came with a lower price tag and a physical disc that you could share across consoles, so it felt like you got more than enough for your dollar.
The next generation really opened up the market for DLC. Maps, missions, characters, costumes, even armor for your horse! Memes aside I think simple cosmetics are a great example of where that kind of bonus content can go. As long as it was developed after the game itself was, I don’t mind throwing game developers a few dollars here and there to unlock some skins and outfits. I say all this even with the knowledge that when I was a kid there were plenty of codes and otherwise unlocked outfits, filters, and modes. Maps are fine too. I’m a sucker for exploring something I already liked in a new context.
If I spend $60 or $70 on a game, though, I want the whole story to be on that disc or in that download. I don’t mind extra side adventures or questlines that push the story forward, but if the game gets a sequel I don’t think it’s fair to expect me to go back and buy the DLC from the previous game to have any idea what’s going on. I just finished Alan Wake II and the whole premise of the game relies on you playing both the Alan Wake DLC and a DLC mission from Control. Alan Wake is an excellent game but I REALLY didn’t care for the later released stuff. And I thought Control was great but I’m willing to bet there’s a huge amount of people that didn’t even know the games share the same universe. It feels like I’ve been given homework in order to try to experience a product and I’m not a fan. Thankfully, though, the days of cutting chunks of the games out to sell later as DLC has mostly gone away. The industry has seems to have come to understand what they can and cannot get away with.
As for DLC characters, that has REALLY changed. I remember a time where I refused to buy Capcom games because of the on-disc DLC debacle on Street Fighter vs Tekken. Now most multiplayer games get new characters further down the line, so you can see a proper allocation of time and attention. It felt like the post-release market for characters went from a gross way to sell portions of that game that were already there to a great way to support the platform you’ve built. Many games even give you a way to unlock those characters for free just via regular play or grinding. I have the full roster of Rainbow Six Siege operators and I never paid a cent for them. I paid for cosmetics, but all gameplay related content is available with the game purchase.
My favorite part of the post-release video game landscape is how devs of some games patch in new content for free. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, and Terraria all have content coming out many years after their release and it’s all free. With lots of indie games in particular it’s an almost expected feature nowadays. We really went from being asked to pay for the reattachment of a not-so-carefully amputated segment of a story of game, to a line of breadcrumbs from one game to the release of the next for no extra cost.
Honestly until I got all this out on the page, here, I didn’t know how positive I’ve grown to feel about the proliferation of downloadable content. I don’t often go back to games to play more story or missions anymore. I kind have the same feeling that most people get when they hear about a new sequel to an old classic. That page has turned. There are plenty of exceptions. The Witcher III, the Souls games, and Resident Evil 8 are the most recent that jump to mind. But for the most part I just want to have an encapsulated full experience and move on to the next one.
Discussing releasing a broken game only to try to fix it later with patches… I have thoughts and few of them are positive.
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Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
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The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
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His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
I generally have positive thoughts on DLC, but that may be at least in part because I don’t tend to play a lot of story-based games where it doesn’t make as much sense as in the more mechanics-focused games I to tend to play. I’ve put collectively thousands of hours into various Paradox games, RimWorld, etc., all games with open-ended campaigns or runs where new DLC is an inviting excuse to start another run with more new content. I think I have more DLC items in my Steam library than games, because I’m really picky about what I play and it’s always a risk whenever buying a new game that I’m not actually going to end up spending much time in it, whereas DLC for a game I already know I like is a pretty solid proposition.
There’s a weird sort of culture around gaming, where if you have, say, $200 to spend on games, if you buy 10 $20 games, half of which you end up playing for a few hours and never touching again and maybe one or two of which you really get some enjoyment out of, this is treated as somehow better than buying a $40 dollar game and $160 dollars of DLC for it over multiple years while getting hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of it. Like, there’s this sort of weird taboo that you’re allowed to spend $X on a “single game” (a game + DLC for this discussion), and no more. This is bonkers to me, because in other hobbies people have no problem paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single piece of equipment. Yet if we choose, of our own free will, having weighed the pros and cons, to spend more than ~$80-$100 on a single game that we really enjoy, clearly there’s something wrong with us and we’re falling for the developer’s money-grubbing tricks.
Not that there’s anything bad with $20 (or less) games that are complete in and of themselves! (Or are able to add free content after release due to their success, though that’s only sustainable up to a point.) I’ve certainly bought, played, and enjoyed quite a few such games. But I think if we ever want gaming to be accepted as a grown-up hobby, then we need to accept that there are going to be games asking grown-up prices. There is always the option not to buy them if you don’t want to (there are myriads of other cheaper games out there to get instead), but I see a lot of discourse arguing that such options should not even exist, and I think that’s wrong.
It’s definitely a fine line to walk when it comes to calling a practice in an artform like video games. There’s no real industry standards for DLC because there’s so many different forms of it. So then it really comes down to a case by case basis.
For instance, I own all the Payday 2 DLC. I bought every single one without question because you could play every mission in the game without buying DLC if you play with someone who has it. I liked that a lot. It felt like we were able to experience all the game has to offer if we want to give them money or not.
I wouldn’t ever give EA any of my money for their “DLC” because they crap out the same game with a different label every year. I, unfortunately, really enjoy the Madden and UFC games so I pick them up when they plummet in price after the release of the next game. I’m not paying a penny for the “premium” content because it has no real value and the company is run by crooks.
Interesting take in that DLC (and other bonus content like “deluxe edition” tat) is how publishers have been sneaking the prices past the “mental cap on the AAA price tag”. It’s why EA gave away the base game of Sims 4 for free, if you wanted ot get all the DLC that is about 1000$ when on sale, and no I have not accidentally added a 0 to that. Stellaris I’m not sure about because they’re doing weird stuff with bundling and pricing the DLCs. On the other hand for a lot of people this is THE game they play, this is the thing they put hundreds or thousands of hours into and I have spent many, maaaany times that on my library as a whole.
I mean, obviously at the end of the day it is an individual’s decision how to spend their money but I think part of the problem (aside from people making other people’s business their own) is that video games as a medium have a somewhat short history during which the production and distribution models went through many drastic changes affecting the prices. The move from floppies to CDs to DVDs to digital. The graphics from sprites to FMV to photorealistic or stylised but very high quality. The sounds from nothing or beeps to professional voiceacting and sound effects. The “indie revolution”. AAA especially would love nothing more than to keep expanding the budgets, wihch does not necessarily translate into quality, and raising prices and are mostly held back by the need to balance the pricing for mass audience and “mental barriers” of established pricetags. Then on the other end are people who latch onto things like the “price to playtime ratio” or argue along the lines of “for the price of this game you could get X number of Y”.
It’s a mess is what I’m saying.
My personal problem with both DLC and the post 1.0 content updates is that I don’t replay games all that often so I want the game to be “complete” when I do play it. This means that I often end up postponing playing or even getting the game until I feel everything came out. Currently, for example, I am holding back on Rogue Trader for that exact reason even though I liked previous Owlcat games and by all accounts I’d enjoy this one as well. To be fair this is somewhat alleviated by my massive backlog so it’s not like I’m short on things to play in the meantime.
On the other hand I am aware that it is simply not viable, especially for independent developers, to deliver many games in the form they finally get to and only the initial sales allow them to keep working on the project polishing it and adding to it.
That’s really what my issue is. I don’t hate the prospect of more game to play, especially when I enjoyed the base game, but it feels like I’ve already moved on. And my backlog isn’t getting any smaller.
I’m kind of the opposite. If I buy an older game in a bundle with all of its DLC I get a bit overwhelmed. Should I play just the base content first to get a feel for the mechanics, look up what the best add ons are, or go for it with everything? This paralysis means that in Civ IV for example I’ve played a little bit of the base game and barely touched the DLCs
Gosh, that sort of thing actually affected my Hollow Knight run-through, where I knew there were various free addons to the game, and so I assumed that all of the dream-nail stuff wasn’t part of the main game, including the Radiance. I still did it (mostly), but there was a difference in perception where I thought I was just doing extra content, not the actual main game critical path. In fact I even assumed
the Abyss, the Hive, the White Palace, were all DLC.For me I want to be doing “the genuine thing”. It’s why hearing about magic being OP in Dark Souls sort of messed up my perceptions too, suddenly I was not engaging with the challenge in the right way. Not because I fear the judgement of others, but because it awoke my mind to different self-imposed challenges that I started thinking I ought to do to fully beat the available challenge of the game. DLCs, updates to change balancing, and most difficulty options, mess with my perceptions around these things, or rather make me think about it when all I’d like to do is be immersed in the game. The original Thief games handled difficulty options in the best way that I’ve seen. Crysis was good too (ish). Thematic difficulty, rather than mechanical. In Thief e.g. you’re not allowed to just kill people, on the highest difficulty, and must steal a minimum amount of the loot. Crysis maximum difficulty had the enemies speaking in their language instead of English.
I like No Man’s Sky as an example of both lots of free “DLC” (more like just updates for the game itself…might not quite be the same thing as just new missions or characters) and an example of a game that didn’t live up to its advertising when it first came out.
As for cost, I kind of lump all games etc. in with movies. I used to pay $10 to see a 2 hour (ish) movie in the theatre, so $5/hour seems like a good deal to me. That means if I buy a $70 game and it takes me over 14 hours to ‘finish’ it, I am fine with that. I’ve had cheap games that I spent hundreds of hours on and I’ve had expensive games that just barely made the $5/hour mark and I’d rather have the first.
Usually I like the end of a game to be quite conclusive, especially story-wise. So adding DLC usually gives me a sort of FOMO where I don’t really want there to exist a bolt-on section. Or I’d rather come to the game once everything is out. But that might be moreso with story-heavy games. I certainly don’t mind there being an expansion to Empire at War (Forces of Corruption), adding a new campaign with a different faction, but I wouldn’t want an expansion to KotOR. The ending of PoP 2008 is amazing, but open. So there then being DLC, only accessible on the PS3 (I played on PC!) which provided an epilogue was a real kick in the teeth, inaccessible to me, and I was unsure if it should exist, but also wanted to see what happened, have some alternative closure to the story.
That is one reasons I don’t care about Dragon Age: Veilguard. For that to make sence you have to play Inquisition with all its DLCs again. And I don’t want to wander those giant empty maps again.
I am reminded of the Mass Effect 2 problem, where we spend the entire game on a sidequest and have story progression awkwardly nailed on the end for an extra fee.