Nicolaus99 said:
I'll admit I'm less concerned about Steam as a DRM platform though GOG, CD Projekt and Minecraft have definitively proven that it is not necessary. Steam has only ever locked me out of my own library once; once too many but it was a temporary fluke rather than s.o.p.
Again, you're mistaking "possible" with "financially prudent." Steam is a store, and unless they plan on shipping SRR to brick and mortar stores (which is way more expensive), they're going to need to put it somewhere else other than their own site to reach more potential customers.
Will stand my ground against DLC. When did this even become a business practice? Ah, the moment it became technologically possible to gouge us with it. What did you pay for Dragon Age 2? Add $37 of DLC. Mass Effect 3? Add $50. The Sims 3? Add a mind boggling $410. Fable 3 will charge you $1... to dye your clothes black. That's just, wow. Truly. A pallet swap. And oh, Capcom, where to begin.
Back when I started playing games, we called them expansion packs, and they were much more expensive at $40 a piece minimum (well, except for the Sims, although you could argue that they've been getting cheaper with the new a la carte style so you're not buying massive packs that you only used about 10% of).
But now the meat of it, Cost to Value ratio. When they are "done" with DLC for a title, the total typically comes to 50 - 100+% markup over the original game price tag. At that combined price point, they could be halfway if not fully done outright with a full sequel. Imagine cutting out half or whatever % of the original game equal to that exchange rate. Are those two quantities the same value? I say no. Horribly, undeniably no.
Except you're not being forced to buy the DLC. For example, with the original Black Ops, I was not (and still am not) a big fan of zombies, so I bought the multiplayer map packs (which I played regularly) but not the zombies-only map packs.
Also, quantities of what? If it's solely gameplay value in terms of hours played, then you may have a point in some cases, but not others.
That handful of retooled and recycled maps and quest chains they peddled to you is nowhere near worth half or more of the original game. It is naught but a backhanded scheme to charge you more for less and pad their bottom line.
Do you even buy DLC? The only time I've seen recycled maps are the FPS map packs, and that's because those maps were wanted by the community.
"Then don't buy it!" the sheep bleat, the magical chime of wool clippers twinkling in their furry ears. Can you honestly imagine if ANY other medium tried to get away with this? Books? Movies? Music... hm, well music has evolved past all that now, can get it all legally at a buck a track.
Books: some of the most famous books were sold at a chapter at a time in magazines starting over a hundred years ago. My particular favorite was the American book Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle.
Movies: The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Kill Bill, Star Wars, and pretty much any movie which was offered in 2D and 3D.
And the a la carte music selection now is no different than buying singles back when people sold music in stores.
If you really have a problem with DLC, you chose the wrong hobby. DLC was just the logical and organic development of the genre (see below). Unless they're charging you extra to make a game work (And day-one DLC does not count, see below as well)
Anyhow, just because they CAN get away with doing it does not mean we should all silently ponder our hooves while the farmer sheers us. Screw that crooked farmer. We should knock him down and eat him. We cannot eat the people at Harebrained but we can snarl and scream till their ears bleed in the hope that maybe, just maybe, we will discover that they care after all. This whole mess honestly makes me wonder if EA is innocent of the SimCity fiasco after all. Maybe Maxis really IS full of incompetent pr_cks.
It appears you're missing something really important here.
*Ahem*
[HEADING=1]GAMING IS A BUSINESS. THEY NEED TO MAKE MONEY TO SURVIVE. LABOR IS NOT FREE AND THEY NEED TO GET PAID.[/HEADING]
All that DLC, even the obvious stuff, takes time to create. It's not easy to do, especially if you need to add or change substantial mechanics to make them work (see multiplayer). As much as we like to think of them, programmers and staff need to get paid for their work. What doesn't go to them, particularly for smaller developers, go to future development. Welcome to the basis of capitalism. This isn't new [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2auI6Uz3D8I] (replace machinery and efficiency with manpower, licencing, and further product development).
Contrary to earnings reports of the big publishers (Activision, EA, Ubisoft, etc.), games are not very profitable. Only about 20% [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10106612-17.html] of titles break even, of which sequels make up a disproportionate amount (They almost never know which new IPs succeed or flop, similar to the movie industry, and, as LucasArts in the '90s demonstrated, quality is not a indicator of sales; sequels are going to be safer no matter how much we hate the practice). Not helping is the prevalence of used game sales, where these companies games are sold but they don't get a dime. This is why we have day-1 DLC: because people were reasonably intelligent and opted to buy the cheaper version of the game for $10 less than a new version of the same game, with the publishers getting nothing while the retailers pocketed up to 80% of the original costs. The companies responded with the obvious solution: make the practice of buying used game less viable by figuring out a way to raise their price after the fact. And thus day-one DLC was born, which tacked on $20 if you bought a used copy, but not if you bought a new one, effectively rewarding customers who bought new copies rather than used ones.
But, as I noted before, post-launch content DLC is not a new thing and has actually gotten cheaper in the last 20 years. Blizzard gave us SC Brood War and WC:III the Frozen Thone, Age of Empire II had the Conquors expansion, Empire Earth added two tech levels and space combat, Civilization has had 6 expansions since CivIII, HalfLife2 had the two episodes expansions. Hell, the Skyrim expansions were the first used in the Elder Scrolls sold via digital download. These expansions used to (and in the case of Blizzard, still do) cost $40 a pop unless you bought collected editions. Now they're down to $20 each and have 75-100% of the level of content they used to have. The only difference now is that I don't need to walk into a store in order to buy them. And this doesn't even cover the MMO models where expansions are practically sequels.
I buy DLC for games that I want to play more of, and I can't think of games which I have bought DLC for that weren't entire and complete games on their own (I didn't buy the Sims or Simcity after 2 and Societies, but almost everyone who looked at the Sims model and Zynga games like Farmville knows where those games were going). And when I played the DLC, I noted a distinct difference between that content and the content of the main game. I almost never buy skins or weapon packs (at least the ones not included in larger content packs), but I do buy extra mission lines and map packs. And I'm fine with this model. I get more of the game I want for less than the cost of a sequel and in sometimes less than a fifth of the development time. I want more of this game that I enjoyed, but not a half-assed sequel. DLC provides exactly that in a matter that saves costs and development time that would have been needed to develop the mechanics and puts much more weight into the development of new content. It can tell side stories that you didn't see (such as GTA IV's episodes) Even better, it can gauge whether there is even an appetite for a sequel. If you have a problem with it, then you're forgetting that this is a business and that development time is money spent on a gamble.
