Re-ranting on Video Games
DLC, like in-game purchases, is not a terrible thing if done right.
The problem being that almost no one does DLC right any more. A $70 game should not have DLC or paid expansions within its first 2 years of life. Period. $70 is full price for a premium game title which has been inflated already to address issues around reselling games.
This shouldn't bother me because I generally don't play games long enough to finish the vanilla content. And it is generally less annoying in single player games. In multi-player/online games it is an even bigger sin though. Just because you don't want to pay even more for a game you already own, and which is still relatively new you're handicapped compared to people with better, newer gear, etc...
DLC should be used to finance a cheap or free game where a portion of the game is sold cheap or free to draw interest and give people a better idea about how they feel about the game before forking over more premium prices for additional content.
Expansions should be differentiated from DLC in two ways. Amount of content and time from release. And the two go kind of hand in hand. Producing more content should take longer. If you can put out new content in less than 6 months after release (when you're also at your busiest for coding bug fixes and dealing with stability issues) then you don't have enough content to justify an expansion or charging expansion prices for it (which I guess is a 3rd way to tell them apart).
In my mind a DLC adds new quests, gear, skins, etc... minor things. They cost a couple dollars and take anywhere from a few weeks to months to develop. They should add enough content or interesting enough vanity changes to make charging for it at all worthwhile.
Expansions on the other hand should extend and evolve the game. Raise level caps, add complete new zones, add classes, features or functionality along with all of the things that a DLC would include. They should take several months or even over a year to produce and they should extend the average gameplay time by some reasonable fraction of the time the original game took. Reasonable being, at least 25%, but ideally 1/3-1/2 as long again to complete as the original.
Premium titles releasing DLC within 6 months of the games release, are to me, gambling that the allure of the game won't last and they want to scoop up more money while the game still has some semblance of newness. An expansion (if not really just DLC under a different name) in that timeframe tells me it was entirely or mostly funded by the original game release and the content was simply help back to maximize profitability. So, any game that release an XPack that soon goes immediately on the trash heap. Either I'm being lied too or scammed. And I'm not a fan of either.
There is exactly one way I wouldn't damn a company for this behavior. If the expansions can be "purchased" with in-game currency as well. If getting to the content is a work for it or pay for it scenario I don't care when the content is released. If I'm into a game and I paid $70 I won't mind grinding to get access to expansion content. If I'm into a game and lazy but still want access to expansion content, I won't mind paying for it.
The problem being that almost no one does DLC right any more. A $70 game should not have DLC or paid expansions within its first 2 years of life. Period. $70 is full price for a premium game title which has been inflated already to address issues around reselling games.
This shouldn't bother me because I generally don't play games long enough to finish the vanilla content. And it is generally less annoying in single player games. In multi-player/online games it is an even bigger sin though. Just because you don't want to pay even more for a game you already own, and which is still relatively new you're handicapped compared to people with better, newer gear, etc...
DLC should be used to finance a cheap or free game where a portion of the game is sold cheap or free to draw interest and give people a better idea about how they feel about the game before forking over more premium prices for additional content.
Expansions should be differentiated from DLC in two ways. Amount of content and time from release. And the two go kind of hand in hand. Producing more content should take longer. If you can put out new content in less than 6 months after release (when you're also at your busiest for coding bug fixes and dealing with stability issues) then you don't have enough content to justify an expansion or charging expansion prices for it (which I guess is a 3rd way to tell them apart).
In my mind a DLC adds new quests, gear, skins, etc... minor things. They cost a couple dollars and take anywhere from a few weeks to months to develop. They should add enough content or interesting enough vanity changes to make charging for it at all worthwhile.
Expansions on the other hand should extend and evolve the game. Raise level caps, add complete new zones, add classes, features or functionality along with all of the things that a DLC would include. They should take several months or even over a year to produce and they should extend the average gameplay time by some reasonable fraction of the time the original game took. Reasonable being, at least 25%, but ideally 1/3-1/2 as long again to complete as the original.
Premium titles releasing DLC within 6 months of the games release, are to me, gambling that the allure of the game won't last and they want to scoop up more money while the game still has some semblance of newness. An expansion (if not really just DLC under a different name) in that timeframe tells me it was entirely or mostly funded by the original game release and the content was simply help back to maximize profitability. So, any game that release an XPack that soon goes immediately on the trash heap. Either I'm being lied too or scammed. And I'm not a fan of either.
There is exactly one way I wouldn't damn a company for this behavior. If the expansions can be "purchased" with in-game currency as well. If getting to the content is a work for it or pay for it scenario I don't care when the content is released. If I'm into a game and I paid $70 I won't mind grinding to get access to expansion content. If I'm into a game and lazy but still want access to expansion content, I won't mind paying for it.
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