Dexter111 said:
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It's both "business" and there to make money, if you don't like the drug comparison then how about gold farming and child labor in 3rd world country, the resulting products are both optional also and bought/enjoyed by a lot of people... I'm not trying to compare the practices or the gravity but your and other peoples argument that if something is optional (and it makes a company money, because everyone knows they are and should be only about the money and nothing else it somehow makes it completely right and non-debatable). As I said... almost anything is "optional".
Yeah, the suggestion that a game can be somehow objectively determined to be "complete" nowadays is pretty much unsupportable, as are the the opinions that "as long as it's not on the disc, it's okay." Seriously, think that last one through - if that's a rule we're going by, what's to stop them from making the content on the same schedule, having it ready for release day, and just not putting it on the disc, choosing instead to pretend that it was something they made post-release and dropping it via a download a week or two down the line? I get the principle of what people who dislike the "unlock code" setup are opposed to, and I'm with them on it, but y'all need to understand that DLC being a big download doesn't prove **** about whether or not it could have been included in the standard release game. It's easier for them to distribute it via the disc and use an unlock code, yeah, but if you all make a point to only buy DLC that's a few hundred megabytes or more all it's going to do, really, is give them incentive to distribute it via download instead of on the disc and be less upfront about when that content was actually ready to go.
With that said, there are inherent differences between gold farmers and Portal 2's items. The biggest one, for our purposes, is that gold farmers do not provide "optional content." Gold (at least in the vast majority of cases) is necessary to progress in the game, and even if it's not strictly necessary, it still provides identifiable benefits in terms of player ability. At the same time, the act of gold selling disturbs in-game economies, upsetting the balance for all players, effectively penalizing those who do not buy gold. Cosmetic items, such as those for sale in Portal, do not affect gameplay at all. They do not unfairly advantage one player over another, nor does their presence impact the experience of those who do not have them. Given that the core gameplay and player-to-player balance of Portal 2 remain entirely unaltered by the DLC, and if anything the replay value for people who buy the things from the store has been decreased, it's clearly one of, if not the least intrusive form of DLC we've seen yet. Sure, games used to have extra, unlockable costumes in them, but seeing that go is a minor gripe at best, which is fine, because we need to meet somewhere in the middle.
Ultimately, developers are facing rising production costs and they have to find SOME way to make an extra buck or two from their customers. Since there is no definable point at which a game is "complete," it's on them to experiment with different definitions of "complete" and for us to respond with our wallets as to what definition we're willing to accept. We need to meet them somewhere in the middle, or they'll be left with just one way out: cutting costs, which they're not likely to succeed at. The problem there is that, since games already cost so damned much to make, it only takes a handful of losses to sink a studio. They'll go broke before they figure out how to make games cheaper. But I'm getting side-tracked. The point is that there is nothing wrong with letting companies give us games with various levels of content, so long as we talk with our money and tell them at what point it's no longer acceptable. If we're unwilling to do that, then the problem is with us and our willingness to just buy whatever they put out, not with them. But on the flip side, if we just never buy any game because it has DLC and we're afraid that they didn't give us the "complete" game by the definition of the pre-DLC era, then we'll quickly find that they can no longer afford to make games of the quality they do now, and may even kill a few companies in the process.
Sure, as a consumer I want everything I can conceivably get from Valve for the same amount of money. What we need to open our minds to, though, is that the amount of content we once got in a game is no longer something we can conceivably get. Not when costs have risen as much as they have. This is the bad sort of entitlement, the sort that wants to cede no ground and still take more in return. We shouldn't just cave to the companies, of course, and buy whatever they put out - but neither can we continue to expect them to make games with production values that cost exponentially more to achieve than they used to and comparable levels of content without also expecting a commensurate increase in price. And sure, the average game price has increased by ten dollars in recent years, but we need to accept that this may not have been enough (indeed, it wasn't).
The real dilemma is in trying to understand what the least costly middle ground will be that still allows them to do what we want them to do. Given that we don't really know their costs (and they have little incentive to tell us), this is a real problem. But this is exactly why we should applaud Valve for doing this. By taking a step towards making the game more profitable that has such a minimal impact on the average player's experience, they're extending a pretty big ****ing olive branch to the consumers. They're starting their "what level of content will consumers accept?" experiment from the opposite end of the spectrum from pretty much everyone else. While Bioware, etc... seem to be starting from the "most obtrusive and game-altering" end of the spectrum with the intent of working their way backward (assuming, of course, they get told by consumers that this level is unacceptable), Valve is treating us with a bit more respect and starting with the least obtrusive method, instead. Pretty much the only thing they could do to be nicer would be to have a "donations" button where you could volunteer to give them money for nothing in return. Of course, this does mean that, if we accept this, they may go a bit further next time, but if we don't accept it for fear of that, we need to understand that as a result they may just have to stop investing so much money into development. It's a risk either way, and it's up to us to decide which way we want to go. But honestly, given that DLC isn't going to just disappear, I'd lean more towards rewarding the companies that implement it the best, rather than punishing them just as much as, or worse than those who implement it the worst.
