Downloadable Cash Cows

Time was when a games publisher wanted to continue a franchise, they published what my grandpappy called a sequel. That’s one o’them holdovers from when people still thought of games like movies, and figured that the game you bought was everything they had time to make. A simpler time, where men and women could buy a game without ever worrying whether their edition had all the good bits in it.

Now, though, the ugly spectre of downloadable content is rearing its ugly head, meaning that publishers can use the games engine to make sell new parts to an existing game. Just shell out some cash, download a neat little add-on, and suddenly your game has a whole new bit of playability to it. A great idea, sure, so long as it’s generally understood that any DLC is the result of work done after the game is released. After all, if content is ready by the time the game is done, it should be included, right?

Yeah, not so much. Recently, Bioware and EA have been in a lovely little debacle over so-called Day 1 DLC, where the added content was available on the game DVD you just bought, but only accessible by paying more to unlock it. It’s like buying a car and getting told that a back seat will be available later to buy, only to find it’s right there in the car already, you just can’t unlock the door to it.

This is in contrast to the previous entry, where the DLC introduced pretty brilliant little sub-stories like Project Overlord which changed the gameplay just enough to keep things interesting and worthwhile, without diluting the main game. The worst thing a DLC can do is make you feel like you’re getting less of a story than your rich friends.

Every publisher has their own relationship with DLC, trying to balance the needs of their bottom line profits with still keeping their fans interested and well-rewarded for buying. Valve, for example, famously released a whole new set of levels for Portal 2 free of charge, while in the case of their venerable game Team Fortress 2, they kept releasing content and add-ons, and made the core game free.

Games at their best are stories, ones you progressively reveal as you play. Any DLC should add some new experiences and side-stories to that one big narrative, and make it richer, but never crucial to the story. And when those experiences are artificially held back just to earn a bit of extra cash, the game is just product again.