TK421 said:
The reason most people complain is that DLC is largely bullshit.
DLC, like
everything else about video games, is widely reviewed with a veritable avalanche of information being available in the time immediately surrounding it's release. It is
trivial to determine if DLC is worth buying or not. I find it utterly impossible to side with someone who shouts vitriol about something when they have sufficient information to quickly determine if it's suitable for their tastes or not.
TK421 said:
About 10-15 years ago, you could also get extra content for games after they came out. This extra content had two names: Mods or Patches.
The mod scene is as prevalent now as it has ever been with some games producing
thousands of user mods. Hell, even games that don't officially support them still often see some mods made. Patches, meanwhile, are
incredibly common - overwhelmingly more so now than in the early days of the internet.
TK421 said:
A lot of times, a developer would fix bugs in a game, and then add in some extra content with the release of the patch.
Sure, this happened from time to time. Of course, it wasn't frequent and the content that was added required a far lower investment on the part of the developer. In the Quake 1 era, for example, a single person could produce a polished multiplayer map in the space of a few days. In the modern era, producing a single map can take an entire team several
weeks to accomplish. You still see this play out in a different way: maps now cost several dollars each in a game like Call of Duty. Meanwhile, the game Team Fortress, only shipped with a handful of maps - players simply made new ones and distributed them widely.
What you have to keep in mind here is that there is a
hugely significant difference between what the developer offers you directly and what they give indirectly. Your only source for maps for Call of Duty is Activision; there are neither tools nor a means of distribution available to the player base. By contrast, Duke Nukem 3D
shipped with sufficient tools that you could produce a total conversion simply by using the tools available on your DOS computer in 1996. 3D Realms didn't directly give us the Platoon mod - three modders did that.
TK421 said:
That is why people are mad. There were expansion packs that cost, but they were usually almost a whole game's worth of content for $10-20, whereas now, $10 grants you the ability to play one measly character class, maybe.
You can largely blame the skyrocketing costs of development for this trend. In the ancient days of quake, producing a new character model was easy considering you only hand a handful of polygons to work with. Producing a skin was easy because you only had a scant few pixels to work with. Producing a map was easy because you could only use a few hundred brushes (the name quake used to refer to world geometry) to build it and you didn't have a lot of space to work with. What one person could do in a day can require a team more than a week to achieve with a modern game.
This is why, for example, the mod scene for games of all sorts has evolved over time. Total Conversions were incredibly common for Doom or Duke Nukem or Quake because a handful of people could do something
enormous and professional looking without spending years on the task. By contrast, mods today tend to be small in comparison - a few new weapons or armor pieces or a set of changes to game logic or tweaks to a map. The ever increasingly complexity of games comes at the price of simply taking more time to achieve a tangible result.
This isn't to say that I'm always on board with such things. League of Legends pricing model is simply gross to me - asking 30 bucks for a
skin is outrageous. But, then, that's just my own personal value judgement - Riot seems to be doing fine regardless.