John Funk said:
That said, I don't have a personal problem with any of it. Stuff gets cut from games all the time, and developers ought to be paid for their work. It's the height of arrogance to suggest otherwise.
Whether or not content that is cut from a game becomes DLC or not doesn't have anything to do with people getting paid. If someone's paid to model a hat and it's later cut from the game. He's still paid for it.
Now if someone takes those cast offs, and tries to market them as DLC, and people are dumb enough to buy them then that's another matter.
The P2 situation as I understand it, is that they're basically selling in-game achievements for the most part because a lot of this stuff was available in released game. Now wasn't there some hullabaloo a while ago because some hacker or some exploiter got a bunch of free achievements they shouldn't have, and those were later taken away because people value that sort of thing? Like the XBL gamer score, or general achievements.
And if you're selling stuff to give gamers an in-game advantage, isn't that what you were arguing about in your article? Are cosmetic advantages okay to sell off while gameplay advantages are not? That depends on the gamer I suspect, I mean people play a dozen games in a sitting, they win some and they lose some but what doesn't change is how they present themselves in that gaming environment. It's purely a matter of perspective.
Point is, if some gamers have to work their butts off to get an in-game item, and other gamers can just buy it off the store, then whether that item is beneficial gameplay-wise or not is irrelevant, at the end it's still giving someone an advantage by them paying for it. Because the individual gamer is going to value different things.
