Bleszinski: On-Disk DLC an "Unfortunate Reality"

[MrHide-Patten]

People are willing to pay for it, so who's the real suckers. At the end of the day its still a Business, a business that still has to earn money and generally will look for ways to earn more. Every Business in the world does shady shit, so colour me unphased.

If you've got an issue with it respond with your power as a consumer and don't purchase it, or/and send the an email with lots of swearing in it.

 

[Simonoly]

I'm slightly confused about some of the information in this article. So apparently there's three or four months where the game is basically done and they work on dlc content. Hasn't the game been sent to Microsoft/Sony during this period for testing etc? Surely that means that all work on the vanilla product has finished? I was under the impression that when Microsoft or Sony give the game the okay it can no longer be modified. So how does the disc-locked dlc being developed during this period of testing appear on the disc? Surely they'd have to send it back to Microsoft/Sony because the content of the product had changed after initial testing.

The explanation given in this article seems only applicable to dlc distributed via digital download and not anything locked-away on disc. Although I suppose it is also applicable to dlc which is partially on-disc like the 'From Ashes' dlc in ME3. But still, either I've not had enough sleep or something doesn't add up here.

Basically the DLC is being developed alongside the main game but the developers know they can't finish it by the time the game has to go off to microsoft and sony so they just shove whatever is already done onto the disk and the put the rest up for download on release it keeps the download time down.

I can see how this process works for incomplete dlc like the 'From Ashes' dlc of Mass Effect 3. But things start to get a bit iffy when complete game content for dlc is locked away on disc. Street Fighter X Tekken comes to mind in particular. I'm not saying that any of this is particularly right or wrong, but it's starting to get a little uncomfortably murky.

 

[darksakul]

Since Cliff Bleszinski put his views the way he did, I agree with the developers and Day 1 DLC.
Game making like ant other production is a business not a hobby.

Side projects are not allowed unless there profit to be made. And most Day 1 DLC are not integral in the main story plot or game play.

Even online passes have there reasons, Ensure that people buy there product even if someone buys a used copy of the game, "Oh you want online multi-player, $10 please".

Some On Disk content has to be disabled on disk, maybe that one extra character still is buggy, whole stages that are cut out of the game and instead of deleting the stage it is fair easier to disable it. Programers will know what I mean it is called "Commenting out" sections of code.

Mainly its to do what Major corporations number 1 legal obligation is, pay their investors. Paying Investors means you have to make profit.

If I take a car for a test drive and decide to buy it right there, is the dealer going to charge me for the gas in my tank?!!
Well?

You technically you already pay extra for that. Take a look at the price of the car, then sales tax. This will include Tax and Title(tax on the car it self not the sale of), any last minute maintenance cost like installing extras. If you look real carefully I am sure there many car dealerships that charge you for that Tank of Gas, at premium rates. So many people fail to read all the fine print.

Before the time of digital distribution and Digital DLC there where the expansion packs, where you have to pay for the additional content later on. And it is not uncommon that some of that content is already locked up on the original disk.

Other businesses are doing similar practices that game publishers do with day 1 DLCs now for decades, the practice is actually centuries old.

Here is you "insert product here" oh the "insert accessory here" is sold separately.
This will include vacuum bags, USB cords, power adapters, memory cards, printer ink.
All items you think that should be included in the product.

 

[Darkness665]

Why did you even bother to write this? Do you get troll points for bits like this?

On disk DLC has been clearly explained with THREE MONTH verification cycles from MS and Sony. It was bad at MS back on Windows (and probably still is) but it is worse on the consoles. Putting the art resources on the disk means you don't have to download nor do you have to put it on the console local storage. A large number of consoles have limited memory and the owners run off the game disk not the hard drive. If you force the entire DLC to be downloaded now you two additional problems; first is MS charges money for the download (not sure about Sony), second MS charges $$$$ for each change to said download, third it means the DLC must fit in the download size restrictions by MS and Sony (which is higher then it used to be but is still a limitation).

You are never going to convince the haters and the anti-fan-boiz. Ever! So just do a bit with a couple of developers about the past and current release and DLC release mechanism and quit the freaking trolling!

 

[Darkness665]

Twenty years ago I bought a new car and the tank was half full. I wasn't charged for it. Today with gas at $4+ a gallon I would be surprised if I wasn't. Games used to cost a couple of million to make. Now they cost tens of millions. Yes, they are going to charge for it.

 

[darksakul]

Why did you even bother to write this? Do you get troll points for bits like this?

On disk DLC has been clearly explained with THREE MONTH verification cycles from MS and Sony. It was bad at MS back on Windows (and probably still is) but it is worse on the consoles. Putting the art resources on the disk means you don't have to download nor do you have to put it on the console local storage. A large number of consoles have limited memory and the owners run off the game disk not the hard drive. If you force the entire DLC to be downloaded now you two additional problems; first is MS charges money for the download (not sure about Sony), second MS charges $$$$ for each change to said download, third it means the DLC must fit in the download size restrictions by MS and Sony (which is higher then it used to be but is still a limitation).

You are never going to convince the haters and the anti-fan-boiz. Ever! So just do a bit with a couple of developers about the past and current release and DLC release mechanism and quit the freaking trolling!

It also means that the game studio, Sony and Microsoft does not have as much storage used on servers to hold the information necessary for DLCs. Huge downloads do not just waste the local console's resources it also waste the resources on the distributor. That $10 for the 142 KB of code to unlock on disk DLC will got to $35 if you have to download the whole DLC.

When you increase the cost on the supplier, the customers is going to feel it when they get there bill. This is a vital part of how businesses work.

 

[Simonoly]

I'm slightly confused about some of the information in this article. So apparently there's three or four months where the game is basically done and they work on dlc content. Hasn't the game been sent to Microsoft/Sony during this period for testing etc? Surely that means that all work on the vanilla product has finished? I was under the impression that when Microsoft or Sony give the game the okay it can no longer be modified. So how does the disc-locked dlc being developed during this period of testing appear on the disc? Surely they'd have to send it back to Microsoft/Sony because the content of the product had changed after initial testing.

The explanation given in this article seems only applicable to dlc distributed via digital download and not anything locked-away on disc. Although I suppose it is also applicable to dlc which is partially on-disc like the 'From Ashes' dlc in ME3. But still, either I've not had enough sleep or something doesn't add up here.

No, you're absolutely right. You "hit the nail on the head" so-to-speak.

What really gets me about all of this? The people who come in to these discussions defending this bullshit. Siding with the douche-bags at companies like EPIC, Bioware, EA, and others. It's especially cute when they condescendingly try to defend their stance by pulling out that little "game development cycle" chart. (coincidentally, as most people seem to forget, a chart that was released by EA/Bioware to cover their own asses when gamers discovered the on-disc Day 1 DLC in Mass Effect 3. Or did we all forget that?)

Still, you're right. For any content that's printed on-disc it has to go through testing by both the developer and the owners of the platform. (i.e. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc) If they started work on DLC after the vanilla product was finished and sent for testing, then they wouldn't be able to print it on disc unless it too was finished and sent in for testing.

Ergo, this whole bullshit story of "Well we had a little spare time before release so we whipped up this little extra bit of stuff for people and put it on the disc; though you have to pay extra for it because it's not part of the vanilla game." is exactly that; bullshit. And anyone who actually believes what these developers and publishers are saying, and anyone who actively tries defending it, is a gullible fool.

The problem I have is buying a disk and then being told that my money only counts for a certain amount of whats actually on it. It just feels completely ridiculous to me.

Also this.

Oh good. I'm glad I'm not the only one that saw the massive gaping error in Bleszinski's statement.

I find this whole on-disc dlc situation so difficult to judge at times. What with the dlc market being so huge these days, I can totally see why material allocated to dlc is developed alongside the vanilla game. But the problem is, as a customer, it's so difficult to objectively say at which point a piece of dlc is an addition to the product we have bought and not simply something detached from the main game and repackaged as 'additional'. How can we say that something should have been included in the main game when we know so little about how the game was individually constructed? And that game development cycle chart that keep cropping up everywhere is purely representative of the general time frames of game development and becomes very unhelpful when we consider many games on a case by case basis. It puts some things into perspective but that graph raises just as many questions as it tries to answer.

Maybe games developers need to start being more transparent and communicative of their development aims and stop issuing weak statements like Bleszinski's.

 

[Bostur]

I think part of the outrage with the DLCs is the way it is presented to makes us focus on what is missing.

We get an almost full glass, but our attention is being diverted towards the tiny part of the glass with nothing in it. All we notice is that the glass is half empty.

I'm baffled as to why marketing would want the product to look bad in this way, but I suppose if they believe everyone is doing it the same way, they may think we will get used to it.

Well, the prevailing thought these days seems to be "When in doubt, always assume someone's trying to screw you."

Probably because consumers have a lot of experience getting screwed.

 

[orangeapples]

I think the major bulk of the team should be working on a whole new game. You shouldn't be having a full development team working on after fact DLC. Once the game has gone out for approval or whatever, the team should have another project planned to work on. So if there is a development team of say 40 people, and they finish a game. 30 of these people should move on to another game project while 10 stay and work on DLC. Then once they are finished with the DLC they can think of they can go back and join the rest of the team working on the new game, or have people rotate between DLC and new game. To say this team has nothing to do means you are not planning effectively.

 

[MPerce]

Can we just go full digital now and get this mess over with?

I get where the devs are coming from here. Statistically, DLC sells less the longer you wait after the original game's release, so it makes sense to get some DLC out there as soon as possible. And if the DLC was made during the three month down time, it makes sense to charge extra for it, even if its included on the disc. Extra money's being spent on their part, too.

It's the mistrust this situation breeds between consumer and publisher. An asshole publisher can easily lock up parts of the game meant for the original release just to nickel and dime the customer. This will piss your customer off, resulting in loss of future sales. Everyone loses.

So it all comes down to the publisher keeping the customer happy. If you can do that, he will happily pay an extra 10 bucks for more gameplay. Right now the only major company doing decently in that regard is Valve, and they have an angry mob of Half Life fans at their door. Not a good sign.

 

[Daniel Sugrue]

I have no problem paying for incomplete on disc dlc, because your paying for the content developed after the game was released, this would be like for ashes, which while it did have on disc content, a significant download was required.

On the other hand, content that is completely on the disc and only requires a 18kb unlock file, paying on top of the purchase price (which for new games here in NZ can be $100 - $120) is complete and total bs and shouldve been available from day 1 as part of the original purchase price.

 

[Archemetis]

It's all a matter of circumstance.

From this gears example, it sounds like the on-disc content is purely cosmetic, and affects the game in no significant way, not a big deal, multiplayer maps, likely included for collector's edition, you might want something like that on disc at day one so that the paying costumers can access that content as quickly as possible, this is purely a way of trimming down download times.

For mass effect 3's from the ashes dlc, the stuff that was data mined from the discs was placeholder data for the character that wasn't just added on as a little bit extra in his own mission or thrown in at the end, he was woven seemlessly into the narrative, that takes a lot more work then basic dlc does to implement.

What i'm getting at here is there had to be files in place with the shipped game to make sure that on day one, that dlc wouldn't just take as little time as possible to download, but that it would actually work as intended.

I don't begrudge Bioware for the decision either, the money was well spent and if having those files on disc is what needs to be done to ensure that kind of quality, well, I'm fine with it.

 

[Frostbyte666]

Consider this:

What if the developers have all the assets, textures and code for a particular level but when they actually try to run the level they find it is broken. Either unbalanced or technically unstable full of bugs and game crashes... it. is. not. ready. It needs another 3 months work.

Now the extra work has nothing to do with creating the textures, the body of the Data, that is done. The extra work is in testing both for balance and stability. The extra work is only a few megabytes, basically a patch.

See that "patch" IS NOT on the disc (or the initial download). This couple megabytes file may be small, but is may have taken more work to develop than all the creation of th

See, games are coded increasingly on the lowest level, BYTE BY BYTE! Think about that with a 2 megabyte patch, that is TWO MILLION BYTES! Two million variables you have to code, test and balance for. That 1.5 meg download is valuable beyond what its size would suggest.

A simple unlock code would not be 2 million bytes long, it wouldn't even be 1 kilobyte.

As to digital download only I think it should definitely be an option and it benefits everyone who matters to this industry.

Digital download cuts out the middle-man, it is more direct capitalism, directly connecting the creators of wealth (game makers, who turn worthless computer bytes into great games) to those who pay and actually use the wealth. Middle men in retail do nothing but hike the price and disrupt the market with exploitative used market.

You fret if something happens to your hard-drive, what if something happens to your Xbox 360 disc? There is NO BACK UP! Nothing, once it is scratched or cracked there is NO RECOVERY! No re-download. And you can back up your digital-downloads to - you guessed it - back them up to now cheap RW-DVDs. Once you have bought a game on Steam, it is almost impossible to lose it.

Digital distribution is FAR cheaper in sales. I have never found as good deal on Steam, and on digital-only eco-systems like iOS has such low pricing and so often free. By god, the collections especially. And on PC digital only Free-to-play. I don't know ANYWHERE in retail that free-to-start has worked. Even demo disc you have to pay for buying a magazine that it comes with.

Jeez did I hit a nerve or something? Fine I'll give you that the 1.45 meg may be extremely important to play a level and it may be unplayable because the publisher didn't give the developer enough time but then with that argument it is a patch to make it playable NOT dlc.

Also wow so your happy having digital and just burn a disc, good for you. However I like collections and to have a proper collection I want the ORIGINAL disc for 1 thing it is a lot more valuable in the fact I can sell it if I so choose. Also with consoles if I have the original disc I don't need to worry about the hard drive failing and losing paid for games. I lose my saves etc etc, but I don't really feel that is a big deal to me. Hell I've had my ps3 hard drive die, know what I did? Replaced it with another 1 and all was sorted out with no problems, instantly back to playing instead of having to wait a couple of days just to finish redownloading all my games again.

Finally yes digital distribution is cheaper in SALES. But if the game you want is not in a sale your looking at the same price (if its a new title) as if I go to the shop and buy it, hell instead of buying new games on steam I buy the physical official disc from amazon, know why? IT'S CHEAPER.

 

[Danzavare]

"If we can get to fully downloadable games, then you can just buy a $30 horror game and just have it, and that stuff will thankfully go away," he continued.

Wouldn't that also be true if the DLC were free? If so, the problem (if you see it as one) could be solved now.

(bold added by me)

 

[getoffmycloud]

I'm slightly confused about some of the information in this article. So apparently there's three or four months where the game is basically done and they work on dlc content. Hasn't the game been sent to Microsoft/Sony during this period for testing etc? Surely that means that all work on the vanilla product has finished? I was under the impression that when Microsoft or Sony give the game the okay it can no longer be modified. So how does the disc-locked dlc being developed during this period of testing appear on the disc? Surely they'd have to send it back to Microsoft/Sony because the content of the product had changed after initial testing.

The explanation given in this article seems only applicable to dlc distributed via digital download and not anything locked-away on disc. Although I suppose it is also applicable to dlc which is partially on-disc like the 'From Ashes' dlc in ME3. But still, either I've not had enough sleep or something doesn't add up here.

Basically the DLC is being developed alongside the main game but the developers know they can't finish it by the time the game has to go off to microsoft and sony so they just shove whatever is already done onto the disk and the put the rest up for download on release it keeps the download time down.

Yeah I think if it is finished on the disc and you charge for it that is just bullshit. I would love to see somebody give people access to unfinished on disc DLC to stop them complaining to I think it would be pretty funny

I can see how this process works for incomplete dlc like the 'From Ashes' dlc of Mass Effect 3. But things start to get a bit iffy when complete game content for dlc is locked away on disc. Street Fighter X Tekken comes to mind in particular. I'm not saying that any of this is particularly right or wrong, but it's starting to get a little uncomfortably murky.

 

[loa]

Pardon me, why can't the on-disk DLC be, you know, free?
"It was developed during a time in which the game is basically done and team would have had nothing to do" is not an argument for it to be with costs.
In fact there is absolutely no excuse for it to cost money, especially given the outrageous pricing games have nowadays.

 

[Treblaine]

Jeez did I hit a nerve or something? Fine I'll give you that the 1.45 meg may be extremely important to play a level and it may be unplayable because the publisher didn't give the developer enough time but then with that argument it is a patch to make it playable NOT dlc.

Also wow so your happy having digital and just burn a disc, good for you. However I like collections and to have a proper collection I want the ORIGINAL disc for 1 thing it is a lot more valuable in the fact I can sell it if I so choose. Also with consoles if I have the original disc I don't need to worry about the hard drive failing and losing paid for games. I lose my saves etc etc, but I don't really feel that is a big deal to me. Hell I've had my ps3 hard drive die, know what I did? Replaced it with another 1 and all was sorted out with no problems, instantly back to playing instead of having to wait a couple of days just to finish redownloading all my games again.

Finally yes digital distribution is cheaper in SALES. But if the game you want is not in a sale your looking at the same price (if its a new title) as if I go to the shop and buy it, hell instead of buying new games on steam I buy the physical official disc from amazon, know why? IT'S CHEAPER.

Hit a nerve? What makes you think that? I'm not angry at all. I'm using caps only for emphasis as I have explained this complex concept before and many people have not understood or taken in the key points.

Like for example you missed my point on Optical-Disc storage vs HDD storage. If your HDD dies, you can re-download or use a back-up or use a friend's install to back up from. You CANNOT lose your game. But optical discs are too easy to destroy, such as if the console is moved while the disc is spinning and of course they have no backup, once they are gone the only replacement is to go out and buy another physical copy. There may be a delay with replacing games lost in dead HDD, but the delay with a dead Optical Disc is perpetual.

I understand you have some emotional attachment to the physicality of a game disc, but I think that will pass just like we let go of Cartridge-games to spite how applicable they were.

I'm using patch in the broadest sense. A patch to make minor improvements or fix a problem that slipped them by is obviously unreasonable to charge for, especially if they only noticed this post-shipping and only started to look for it after release. A general patch for stability is to hold up their end of the deal to have a balanced and stable game, but extra levels is beyond the deal of what you paid for.

But a patch to completely construct and assemble a game level is CONTENT, it is downloadable CONTENT! It has come from effort of very skilled individuals with significant value. It is NOT just an unlock code for everything that is already on the disc. If they had never released that DLC/patch then no amount of hacking could unlock that content, they would be forced to actually design the levels themselves.

Don't miss the other benefit of digital-downloads: a higher proportion of whatever you pay goes to the people who actually make the game. The Reason amazon sells a few % lower is the buy the game in bulk at lower price.

On digital downloads the split in money is 70-30. The people who made the game take 70% of the selling price, the networks takes 30%. With retail it is the other way around, the people who actually made the game get only about 30% of the price you pay, while all the retail, wholesale and middle men take 70%.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

I find it rather funny.

So while they are waiting that the game is shipped, they make a DLC that magically appears on the already burned game disc?

Sorry to say this, but that excuse holds no water in the case of the on disc DLC. It is valid excuse for first day DLC's and everyone with a brain will agree with that. But now with the on disc. Ya know, ON THE FUCKING DISC!

If it's on the disc, that means it had to be finished before the burning process, therefore, it's before all the time you say you would be wasting doing nothing. I'm not sure, but shouldn't it also be done before shipping to M$, Sony and Nintendo because they need to approve? Whether or not that's the case, the first point still stands. It must be finished before the burning process.