Spoiler folds for vertical brevity.... I got wordy. >_>
Except now DLC is pre-planned and dev'd and even ships on the disk. ...
Some of that is due to the nature of the production cycle.
Games, especially the AAA variety, are complex chunks of code that operate under very particular performance constraints (input acknowledgement and video output performance typically being the kings of that hill). In order to make sure the thing (reasonably) works when it ships, at some point you have to stop adding new things to primary parts of the game. Depending on the size of the game, that point may occur a year or more before the release date.
The best cautionary tale for this is the granddaddy of all vaporware, Duke Nukem Forever. (Yes, I know it got released... by another studio.) 3D Realms kept adding things and changing things for 15 painfully long years, and never got within sight of the finish line. Gearbox resuscitated the corpse, hosed it off, and pushed it out the door... and it was painfully obvious that is exactly what occurred.
Anybody mentioned App Store games yet? Those games don't always have DLC, but they do have microtransactions for gold/energy/gems/whatever.
I don't think anyone is excluding mobile/casual microtransactions from the ire on the topic, but I do think that very few of us here play those much, or at all.
A lot of mobile/casual titles simply don't have a lot of game-meat to them once you get past the interface and the graphics. With B12ers generally being dedicated gamers of some flavour, it doesn't take us long to figure out what's what on mobile/casual titles... this occurs before the inevitable slowdown those games engineer in to create mental friction, resulting in purchases to regain the "lost" progress-rate. While some of us will fiddle with absurd time-wasting things like Cookie Clicker or Sandcastle Builder, paying money for the privilege does not factor in at all.
The little I've played stuff like that was strictly for research, to help dissuade people I know from playing those
abominations. Tearing apart the game design with plain language is a lot easier if you've actually played a bit, and peered into the corners.
I no longer care or have any emotional investment in the 'Gaming Industry'. ... (other wise things)
I'm right there with ya.
It certainly helps that between solid free/open-source titles and reasonably priced indie titles, we don't have to put up with the bullshit that the AAA Games Industry tries to serve us.
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Speaking to the topic, whether DLC irritates me really depends on the details.
If it's AAA games paywalling something that came gratis with the box price in previous iterations, yeah, fuck those guys. I get it that making games can be expensive, but damn, that isn't the way to shore up your budget. The loss of trust from people that have already given you money is more damaging than simply losing a future sale; it's creating an enemy where none existed before, one that is often willing to quest to see you burn.
If it's buying advantages in multiplayer games, fuck the guys that make 'em, and the guys that buy 'em. Doesn't matter whether it's F2P, or in AAA games like Battlefield and CoD... I am not going to have fun getting steamrolled by Billy Billionbux Jr., who can afford to pad his performance stats with daddy's money.
In single player games, game altering elements can actually enhance the base game a lot. Crusader Kings 2 does this well; the parts are reasonably priced and not too numerous, all of it goes on deep discount fairly regularly, and the mini-expansion chunks are genuinely interesting changes. Other games do this poorly, like Sims 3 and its expansion-priced DLCs that don't actually give you all that much, and there's so many that you could buy a new computer for less than all the DLC would cost (off-sale; ~US$510 including the base game).
If it's purely cosmetic things, it depends on how it's pitched. In F2P territory, Path of Exile and League of Legends do well with only selling cosmetic things, and people love them for it. For those games, cosmetics are a way for the players to say "I'm helping keep the game going". It works well there because servers cost money to run, and those games don't exist without servers to run them.
Cosmetic things and minor side missions in AAA games... if it's cheap, I see it as _tolerable_. Maybe. They're keeping the artists busy and on the payroll instead of pink-slipping them, so yeah, the accountants want some justification for that. This type is usually the sort of stuff that gets made in the feature-frozen last leg of development, where they can add things, but not ADD THINGS.
Ultimately, I think the trend of Bad DLC is really just a symptom of larger economic problems within the AAA industry.
Common box pricing hasn't kept up with inflation (in some cases going down, not up), with many games becoming larger, more elaborate, and more expensive in serving an arms race of graphics/features that will see everyone out of business. I don't think anyone would be happy with a 25-30% price increase (or more), but that will be a strategy that at least has a chance to succeed over time... instead of major releases selling millions of units but
being considered failures because they didn't make enough money to balance the whole ledger, and the trend of game companies folding accelerates.
From that framing, the AAA DLC is a desperate play. It's something they can put out there to get extra bucks out of some people, and settle for basic box price from the rest. Once they think they've gotten all they can at launch prices, then the sales start, and the frugal people open their wallets... That can't last forever, especially if budgets keep going up. When you have to sell All The Things to All The People just to break even, there's a dreadful problem with your model.
Those economic trends were already visible in 2000 when a handful of developers wrote the
Scratchware Manifesto. (valid link in wiki page to read it) Those trends were getting worse in 2005 when Greg Costikyan revisited
(part 1) (part 2) the ideas put forth in the Manifesto. (he is the only developer that outed himself on contributing, afaik)
The good news? Your typical indie team these days looks a lot like what was laid down in the Scratchware Manifesto... ^_____^
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Topic: DLC Woes and Complaints/The Future of the Gaming Industry - Now only $0.99 (Read 7644 times)