DLC on Videogames

It has become standard practice for some companies to ship out games that are not complete and the missing features are added later as DLC. You may ask; “What’s wrong with that?” There’s actually plenty of wrong with it. Here’s a fun analogy to put things into perspective:

Imagine that you go to your favorite pizza shop. You glance at the menu, and you decide on a large pepperoni. They even give you a free drink with it! They hand you the pizza, pay your $12, take it home and enjoy it. That’s how many of us used to buy any type of game we wanted, and it was perfect.

Today, you go to your favorite game store retailer and you pay your $59.99 price tag to take it home. Now let’s use the same pizza analogy when you try to play your game:

  1. Day one patch, downloads the entire fucking pizza so your disc is useless. Even then, the dough is not fully baked.
  2. An upcoming patch in 3 weeks will fully bake your dough.
  3. Cheese is DLC.
  4. Pepperoni is DLC.
  5. The sauce is full of clumps. The next update removes it, and is now DLC.
  6. The free drink featured in the ads is for pre-orders/early access only and you can’t have it.
  7. Two months later and another $50 worth of DLC, that pizza wasn’t that good anyway and you didn’t even finish half of it out of frustration.

Okay maybe is not THAT bad. Except EA, they really are that bad. But do you remember when you used to beat a game to get your “DLC” at no cost to you? Get that extra character costume, or find the secret silver coins to get even more fun stuff like a Crystal sword or some fancy paint job for your shiny tricked out car.

Nowadays you have to fork out more of your hard-earned cold cash to get just about anything and in my opinion, is become worse and they are ruining the industry. Is it just me that thinks this way?

 

2 Comments

  1. James

    Here’s actually a very good breakdown of the Day One Patch issue.
    Basically, due to console build certification, the disc releases are months old, and only submitted so they can actually meet the release date. Day One Patch is the actual intended release, that updates the originally certified build to what the developers intend their gamers to play.
    http://kotaku.com/why-day-one-patches-are-so-common-1784967193

    Reply
  2. bert

    You forget two important reasons why DLC is not what we want:
    – These games will never turn into vintage collector items. The disk is simply worthless in 10 years.
    – These games suck up all your HD space, as the games are near complete downloads after a while.

    Reply

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