• 3Nov 11

  The DLC Situation

  Majority of games today will have DLC component(s) attached to them, purchasable DLCs that is. Although DLC can provide gamers with additional content, feature, customization and prolong the game lifecycle, it is highly questionable whether in practice the developers are actually adding anything to a finished game, instead of dividing a finished game into sections to maximize income.

  I'm not against DLCs, it's actually nothing new, except a long time ago we knew them as expansion packs (however expansion packs seem to be more expansive than DLCs). If a developer felt like adding new stuff to their masterpiece, then by all means do it, and sell it to us. On the other hand, I'm a little concerned that without a regulation or at least an accepted business practice for DLC, it will eventually get out of hand.

  As the consumer, how do we, the gamer, know that the game we just purchased is a complete game? How will we know for sure that the game we bought is not actually 75% of the completed game, with the 25% set aside to be sold as DLCs?

  I started getting concerned about the above questions when I started seeing games with DLC achievements already listed in the game even from release day. It raises the question whether the DLC was an afterthought or pre-planned.

  The next concern is the portion of the DLC, if DLC trend continue as it is now, sooner or later we will probably experience that games become shorter and shorter on initial release, with more and more DLCs to add to the experience.

  That is also something we are familiar with, except prior to the DLC trend, we know them as free demo, and we have to pay for the full game version.

  The timing of DLC release is another issue that raises a red flag for me. For example, the recently released NBA2K12.

  The game is full of glitches (makes me wonder how the game got such a great review, but that's a topic for another blog), yet not long after the release 2K made announcement of a DLC for NBA2K12.

  For me the announcement evidently shows that selling DLC is a higher priority than fixing the game, as a faithful NBA2K player I was very disappointed. Had 2K announce the DLC after all the major issues in the game are tackled, then I would have welcomed the DLC better.

  I believe that if things continue as they are now, it's only a matter of time before we see games with 3 DLCs on release week. Unfortunately I also believe that we as the consumer can't really do much to prevent the above scenario from happening, because some of us will still buy those DLCs on day one.

  What if we buy a book, 15 chapter book, yet when we read the book chapter 13 was a single blank page with "Chapter 13" on top, the book simply jumped from chapter 12 to 14. Then we found out that chapter 13 will be sold separately at a modest price in the coming week.

  Are we in a different scenario from the above? No, not really, to me that chapter 13 page is the same with the DLC achievement listed in the initial game. It's there taunting me, that I've bought an incomplete game and I can never fully complete the game (in this case, getting a 100% achievement), unless I pay more.

  Game publishers can try milk us as much as they want, but at least try to be subtle with it. A Happy cow is a productive cow!

  • Posted Nov 3, 2011 10:57 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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