Thread: Some facts about DLC

1. DLC is a good way of making money.

Yet making money should not be the top priority of all publishers and studios. Making money is a goal of any corporation obviously, but if a game publisher does not have the gamers interests in mind first they have their priorities screwed up. Game publishers should be working for the gamers, not using them. Their primary job is to provide quality entertainment while making money doing it. When their primary goal becomes making money while providing quality entertainment as a secondary or even unnecessary goal, the quality of their products and services goes down the drain which is exactly what has been happening lately with EA and Activision.

2. DLC can either add content to a game or remove it.

Back in the day you would buy the original game and receive 100% of it for your money. Then you could buy the expansion pack(s) and they would add more content resulting in 150% of a game.

Today you often buy a game and receive 80% of it. You have to buy the rest of it in the form of DLC for extra money. It is a clever way for publishers to raise the price of games without gamers really noticing since 15 bucks doesn’t seem like much to spend when all of your friends are telling you to buy a map pack and the money is converted into “Microsoft points”. The system is geared around people making seemingly empty transactions that involve real money.

3. DLC can be good or bad, but is never necessary.

Many people like to be publisher apologists by claiming that companies like Microsoft or Activision actually require the extra money generated from DLC to sustain themselves.

I think it’s safe to say that when you are the publisher of the CoD series and can generate 775 million dollars in one week, you are not in a position to be scraping for every last penny. Making a game does not cost 775 million dollars.

Looking at a more realistic example though, Tripwire has released several DLC skin packs for Killing Floor over the past few years to supplement the games revenue. The packs are only a couple dollars a piece and do not change the gameplay at all besides aesthetically and Tripwire has a strict policy to never withhold maps or weapons to use as DLC content. This is the best implementation of DLC I’ve seen so far. Fans of Killing Floor actually do buy the packs and help out Tripwire in the process. I even bought some packs for myself and some friends just as an excuse to give my money to Tripwire because I’m a fan of their games and want to see them make more.

However, even as a supplementary source of revenue DLC like this is still never necessary. If a game does not sell well it spells bad news for the studio and no amount of DLC sales will somehow prevent this unfortunate outcome. DLC is either added to games for greedy purposes or as a helping hand. If game studios could get by without any DLC back in the 90s then they can get by perfectly fine in a market that is substantially larger as well today.

Imagine a scenario in which Facebook makes you pay micro-payments to access certain parts of their site that used to be free. Wouldn’t people be pissed off by that? Of course they would.

How is it then that gamers do not get pissed off at the same thing happening to them? Why is there so much tolerance and acceptance for something that is mostly just a scam?

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A lot of DLC is just a waste of money. I hate when I buy DLC just to have something the developers spent 2 minutes on just to make more money.