"without seeing a decrease in their profits" that right there is the key term. It's not about making money, or even large amounts of money, but as much money as possible. Your dealing with an industry that has grown into a multi-billion dollar powerhouse despite the prescence of used games, game sharing, and piracy, none of which are good, but they haven't prevented the industry from operating at a profit. The games industry has as a whole not been losing money or operating in the red, even if like any area of business specific game companies have gone out of business.
The thing with these arguements is that your listening to people who are sitting on obscene piles of money basically telling you "I should have even MORE money, irregardless of how it might affect you".
The reason why the industry likes DLC is obvious, we didn't need an article to tell us that. That isn't the issue here, the issue is whether it's right, and fair to the consumers themselves.
Really the concern over used games, game sharing, etc... is largely because a bunch of fat cats have convinced themselves that they could be even fatter if they could cut into that. In the process missing the point that thise re-use is EXACTLY how high prices they are chaging are justified. Someone buying a game knows he is going to get $60 worth out of it, especially if he shares it with friends and family, this is to say nothing of people (especially kids) who both chip in for a game, knowing that they will both get to play it. Then the used game market, and potentially getting some of that money back towards other games figures into it as well.
I might be more sympathetic if the gaming industry was say lowering it's prices, but it's not, it's asking for a lot of money, and always threatening to raise that price.
To be blunt, lower prices would impact a lot of these problems. If it becomes more practical for people to buy games new, they are going to do it rather than wait to borrow them, and of course lower prices means less trade in value, and of course there is less desire to trade in games for a cash return when they aren't so expensive.
Of course the reason why you never see the gaming industry talk about lowering their prices and going for an increased sales volume that way is that it's not about the principle things, it's about adding more dough to their already obscene piles of cash. All these complaints ARE a cash grab. If they were to say halve the price of games, and sold twice as many, they would wind up right where they are now, as opposed to gaining anything.
Another point to consider is that the guys who make games are in no way impacted by this arguement to begin with. This is all about the fat cat publishers. In a general sense the way games are made is that a publisher either lends money to a developer to create a game, OR comissions them to create a game for them. Irregardless of how it goes down the development cost of a game pays the people making the game, the cost of computers and office space is minumal in scale of these budgets, the rest goes to human resources.
People act like developers are victims, but they aren't by the time a game hits the market they have generally gotten paid. If a game fails it just impacts people hiring them again, or being able to borrow more money. By the same token, unless the developer borrowed the money as a loan in hopes of making enough money to pay off the loan and profit (after paying thmselves through the development process) the developer never sees any profits off of the actual sales of the game.
If anything it can be argued that developers are part of this problem, as gamers we want to love the guys who make our games, and believe they are regular game-loving schlubs like us, who live hand to mouth to produce these wonderful things. Some will even tell you that. In reality these guys might like games and enjoy their work, but they also expect to be paid very, very well for their work. In general when you hear about the increasing cost to produce these graphics and stuff, the bottom line is that the people making them are demanding more money. If the guy doing the graphics made $100k last year, but demands $250k this year to design graphics, that gets added to the bill/loan request going to the publisher, which means that the games are becoming more expensive to produce. In reality it's greed more than the advancement of technology, we just rarely hear about it in those terms but merely "the cost to produce graphics has more than doubled over the last year..." or whatever.
I've read quite a bit about the relationship between developers and publishers over the year, magazines like Game Informer alone have covered aspects of it in the past, as have a lot of sources. This is just the basics, and really as often as not it's not the employees but the heads of development teams. The guys in charge of these studios like to pay themselves very well, the massive increase in a dev cost might be from like Peter Molyneux wanting to buy his own island and have a castle shaped like his head built on it... and maybe hire John Cleease as his personal Butler for real. All jokes aside, the point is that the the division of resources here is not nessicarly fair or based on who is developing what, part of it is the development honchos becoming as greedy as the publishers.
The bottom line here is that this whole situation is stupid. The game industry needs to chill out, and be content with making reasonable profits, while advancing games, as opposed to trying to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible. I as a consumer am getting tired of being gouged by people who already have more money than they could ever possibly spend without engaging in astronomical stupidity. As a gamer I buy a TON of new games each year (it might shock some people) but yet every time I login, I have the industry making me jump through more and more hoops, and filling sites like the escapist with constant bellyaching about how much richer they deserve to be.
Really, as much as gaming keeps me going at this time in my life, I'd be willing to give it all up to see another industry crash take these guys down. I would love to see Bobby "I have a private jet and personal stewardess yet won't pay promised bonuses" Kotick wind up on skid row after having Activision closed down and his assets seized to pay debts.
