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Dragon Age: Origins To Get Paid DLC Expansion — On Launch Day
BioWare's upcoming RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, is set to launch on November 3rd. Today they announced details about some of the downloadable content they have planned for the game. In fact, it's scheduled to become available on the same day the game launches, at a cost of $7. (The PS3 version will be slightly delayed). "Called the Warden's Keep, the DLC will add a dungeon-based quest to the game along with six new abilities, a variety of items, and a base where players can trade with merchants. It will feature a supernatural storyline set in an ancient — and possibly haunted — fortress once used as a redoubt by the Grey Wardens, the ancient order at the center of Origins' main storyline." There will be two additional bits of DLC that are available for free to people who have purchased the game new. One "adds a stone golem character to the player's party from the beginning of the game, unlocking numerous story options," and the other increases a character's defense against some attacks in-game.
Dear Gamers you are officially like teenagers, because you use silly words that are uncomputable by normal adults.
Whats up with the acronyms that no outsider can possibly understand ?
~epSos.de
Why does everyone assume that this content was "ripped out". I am not denying that this is a possibility, but it is not the only way this scenario works.
Having worked on large engineering projects I know that almost everything comes down to the bottom dollar and to time.
"We could have done more with X but we didn't have the time / resources / money / manpower."
Games do cost a lot to make, no matter what you think. Does this mean they are all good? No. But there are still some great games being made by dedicated teams.
Unfortunately, at the end of the day a lot of the "Great" studios don't get bought out because they are making money hands over fist for their product. They get bought out because the dedicated game makers (while making a great product) don't always have the biggest profit margins. This will inevitably make them insoluble as a company.
It all comes down to a certain ratio. The game market has already set the games price at 59 dollars. At the end of the day, a publisher is probably trying to get 20 bucks off the top.
Lets say your blockbuster game sells 1,000,000 copies. Great! You made 20,000,000 dollars! Thats a lot of money! But you have a staff of around 6000 people (as of about 2006 I think) and we'll assume they are all underpaid slobs at 20,000 a year. So they are going to set you back about 120,000,000. That leaves you with -100,000,000 dollars.
Okay, so you only need to sell 5,000,000 more copies to pay your staff! Oh wait, you have to pay for research into the market for the games themselves. You need to pay for advertising. We'll assume that distribution is already taken out of the equation, as well as the actual manufacture of the games, the overhead in organizing all of this, the costs of upkeeping the buildings, buying new computers, legal fees for patents, security, secure storage for sensitive documents, scouting out talent, etc.
The point it, they don't get to magically make a great game, take as long as they want and then just assume that people will pay lots of money for it
You have to be very careful, judge the market, and based on your best research you have to decide how much money you want to make based on how many you think you can sell. A single games won't carry a company the size of EA, so they portion out some of their staff and some of their project money based on how much they think a particular game will make in the end.
This means the team making the game has only so much money and so much time. (Unless you are blizzard and you just live off your WoW money and take 8 years between games...)
In the end, every game is too big. I've never heard of a game (by a major publisher) that came out exactly as planned. They always have the choice to shitcan anything which is overbudget, or charge a premium for it.
Using DLC they still can get some "impulse buyers" or casual people who don't really care if they don't see every quest in the game. At the same time, they can actually afford to make the game they want to make (at least assuming that the DLC actually sells, if it doesn't they just lost money)
The other option is charging the premium up front, but I can already hear the complaints at a 95 dollar game. "They already made the game, it's not like it cost them any more". But in reality, the good, long, involved games DO cost more. You either get a more expensive good game, or a cheaper worse game.
DLC simply allows the consumer to choose which one they want. If you love games like Dragon Age, then the extra money should be worth it to you. If you are mildly interested, but don't really care, then the standard price is still okay, and you don't have to spend an extra $20 for a dungeon you don't give a shit about anyway.
Nobody.
Valve and Blizzard are both eaten by the greed monster.
There are officially no respectable PC developers left.