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Are Game Consoles Ruining DLC?
A round-table discussion at Gametopius looks into the state of downloadable content for games as it has evolved over the past several years, going from an occasional, welcome supplement to being a common marketing strategy for most of the industry, frequently causing irritation over pricing and availability.
"All of the map packs so far released for the Call of Duty games have been $10 each to download on consoles through closed networks, while PC gamers could download those same packs for free off of FileShack or somewhere else. Valve's own Team Fortress 2 has received a significant amount of DLC that's been completely free on the PC. Xbox owners of the same game, however, have only received perhaps half of that content, and they have had to pay for it in $5 packs. Why is this? The idea of this kind of content delivery was scarcely heard of on consoles, so console gamers see no reason not to pay for it. But on the PC, these amounts of content are usually just considered parts of patches. Furthermore, why pay for a few extra maps and costumes when modders are making and offering new ones for free all the time?"
DLC is supposed to give to console gamers what we the PC gamers have. Stuff made by entusiast to enhance already good games with more maps, game modes, textures, models, etc..
Since that stuff can't be freely installed in a console, because a console is locked down hardware, to give that cool stuff companies make that stuff thenselves and need to sell it.
DLC is the DRM version of Modding.
-Woof woof woof!
PC gamers purchased that PC. Often at thousands of dollars -- mine's just over $7K including the 30" LCD. When I purchase a game, I purchase the game.
Consoles don't cost thousands of dollars. Most consoles cost $300ish. The idea of the console industry is to lose money on the consoles and make it up on the games. So the game publishers pay the console makers. No one pays the PC makers except the person buynig the PC.
Lately, DLC has been an excellent way to make the games cheaper, because there is further revenue to be had on the DLC later on.
Remember, someone has to pay for that $1000 console. Congrats on paying the first $300 yourself. The next $700 used to come as $20 from the $60 games. Now it comes as $15 from the $40 games, and $5 from the DLC. Big surprise.
Stop wanting things for free. If consumers would look at things from the other side, things could be very different. Instead of wanting things cheaper, why don't you try to fund your favourite company, by paying larger prices, so that they have the money to build better things, and can then charge less for better. You don't want the same for less money, you want better for the same money.
But hey, most of my friends spend $20 per month on satelite radio. Because "it's a fine deal, for loads of content, blah blah blah". They forget that if they add up all of their entertainment dollars -- radio, television, internet, movies, restaurants, games, sports, et cetera -- there isn't enough time in the month to get the full value of all the money spent. It's not that satelite radio isn't worth $20/month. It's that television plus radio isn't worth $100/month.
But consumers are too busy budgetting dollars to know how to budget value. I find it interesting.
DLC is ruining sales of games on consoles, at least as far as I can see.
On the PS2, it was pretty simple: The game was $40-50 new, or you could wait a year or so and buy it for $20 as a Greatest Hits release. Either way, you got the same game. Buying new, you'd pay $50 up front, play the game, sell it for $15-20, overall cost $35. Buying Greatest Hits, you'd buy for $20, sell for $10-15, overall cost $5-10. With buying the game at release costing you maybe $20 more overall, it often made sense to buy games on release day.
On the PS3, the game is released new for $60. A couple of DLC packs are released for $10 each. Then after a year or two, the entire game plus the DLC packs is released as a Game Of The Year Edition for $30. So if you buy new, you pay $60 + $20, but by the time you sell the game second hand it's worth $20 at best because of the GOTY edition at $30, so your overall cost is $60. Buy later, and you get the entire game plus add-ons for $30, resell for $20, overall cost $10. So now suddenly it costs $50 more to buy on release day than to buy and play later.
So basically, there's now a major financial incentive to wait for the Game Of The Year edition which has the DLC bundled in. For instance, I was considering buying Red Faction. However, I just saw on the PSN store that the first DLC has been released for $10. So now, I'd much rather wait and buy the whole thing in a year or two for $30.
Ultimately, I think the game companies are shooting themselves in the feet by penalizing early purchasers to this extent. I wonder if this might be why PS3 and Xbox 360 game sales have been down.
And if we're talking Valve, the way they've treated Xbox 360 owners is nothing compared to how they've fucked PS3 owners. There's no DLC for TF2 on the PS3 at all; we haven't even seen any of the fixes for the initial maps, which means that games tend to be ruined by glitchers. (Yeah, I know the "It's up to EA" excuse, but it's Valve's decision to let EA decide release policy, so ultimately they're still responsible.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What is so hard about WASD? My boys have been able to seriously kick my ass in FPS since they were 11. And before any nanny lovers have a fit, I actually taught my boys the difference between reality and fantasy. I showed them how to edit DOOM wads (remember those?) and how by using scripting you could change behavior, using an editor to write their names on the bad guys, etc. So by the time they were playing they could explain quite well exactly what was being drawn on screen and how it works. Of course when the oldest 'curses" the game it is very funny, because you here "Who wrote the levels for this thing? You can see seams everywhere! And this AI is worse than DOOM Hey you dummy DUCK ALREADY!"
It is DLC that will always keep me a PC gamer. It is pretty obvious by now that the console manufacturers are using DLC as yet another revenue stream, screwing their console buyers yet again, while we PC gamers get tons of stuff for free, year after year. Look at how many games have had their life extended thanks to DLC. I'll give some examples of my favorite games: Freelancer-I have tons of fully packed solar systems, new campaigns, ships, etc, and all for free thanks to DLC from modders. Look up "the nameless mod" for Deus Ex which was just released, that game is what...1998? And even the lame budget games can get new life. I am downloading the "Black Ops" pack for Delta Force Xtreme now. It was a budget title and just okay, but the modders have put out some excellent mod packs that make up for a lot of the game's shortcomings, all for $0.00. All it takes is a little time and 480Mb of bandwidth and I have dozens of new weapons, new campaigns, all for free. can't beat that for a title I picked up for $15 in a bargain bin!
In the end it just comes down to greed, pure and simple. And at least with PC games if the developers act like asses the community can just work around them. With consoles acting as gatekeepers they can screw their customers all they want, which I predict they will. I'm betting that more and more games will be released which are only "half games" because they have gutted it so they can sell the other half to use as DLC. And with all this crazy talk about how much "cheaper" consoles is, when I paid less than $600 for a monster dual core with 8Gb of RAM and a 1Gb 4650 GPU, it is just nuts. Hell my oldest is playing L4D on my 3.6GHz P4 hand me down. With a 7600GT I picked up years back for $100 L4D is smooth as butter. So for me and my money the PC is just a better deal, and DLC just makes it more so.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Back my dad, we used to call DLC "modding" a game, and it was free, and there were large vibrant modding communities for all games that had explicit or implicit modability. The Team Fortress guys started as a bunch of guys sitting around in Australia hacking on the mod source code for Quake 1 (before even Quakeworld).
But for TF2, they've published no mod tools except map editors, and have instead been releasing their own, official, mods for it, such as alternative weapons for each class. And charging for it on the Xbox. It's a shame, really, that they've gone so far from their roots.
I'd love to bring CustomTF into the 21st Century, but (as far as I know) there's no way to easily mod the TF2 sourcebase. So everyone loses... even Valve, I guess, since modding greatly extends the life of a game. Quakeworld is still played even today because of the mods for it.
"FPS games on a console are a big bag of fail IMO. Only people who defend them in my experience are ones who haven't spent years using the superior mouse/keyboard combination."
Played FPSs on PC for many years but I'll defend them on console because it's a quick and easy way to get 4-8 people playing a FPS in a room as a social activity. No lugging around PCs, making sure everyone has the right version, stuffing around with networks, etc. Bring along a projector to add to a TV, a second Xbox and controllers, couple of copies of the game and away you go.
Aiming might not be as accurate, but everyone in the game is in that same boat.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'