How developers are abusing Downloadable Content for Games – Part 1
This generation has brought forward many new ideas and set new standards in Video Games. Consoles made the jump to online gaming this generation opposed to last generation when online Multiplayer was considered a PC only feature. This was great news for
console gamers but this has had an overall negative impact on the video games industry.
During the Playstation 2 era, consoles were not capable of online multiplayer. Those that were did not match the superior multiplayer available on the PC. This meant that the majority of the games available on consoles were single player only and gamers
would naturally get bored when they had completed a game.
An average gamer would be buying or trading games more often because of the shorter game-play time and since none of the games had any multiplayer, the average gamer was willing to try different games. The video games industry was flourishing.
This console generation changed all that with the addition of fully featured online multiplayer that was comparable to that of PCs. This greatly extended the games’ play time, which was better for gamers as they were getting more value from the money they
spent on the game but worse for developers as more hours for gamers meant an increase in the time before a gamer purchased another game.
These days the majority of the gamers don’t buy a game unless it’s got a multiplayer mode. This is slowly killing off developers that only focus on the single player or can’t compete with the high production value games from large publishers who have more
capital to invest in marketing the game. For example there are numerous Call of Duty clones each year but none of them have ever managed to capture the Call of Duty user base and often do poorly in the market.
Because of the rising costs of developing a current generation game, developers have stopped taking risks and have started to stick to what they know is popular in the market. This is causing monotony in the games industry as the large firms keep rehashing
old games and releasing them again and again each year.
Developers found a new way to make a quick buck in the form of downloadable content. Before high speed broadband and digital distribution, if a developer wanted to get some more cash out of a popular game that was already out, they would release an expansion
pack for the game which would keep the fans busy and interested until a true sequel was developed.
With DLC, the developers could keep adding stuff to the game over time for a small price, hence keeping their Intellectual property (IP) alive without having to invest in developing a new game.
The downside of this practice is that this makes the developers lazy and since they can successfully ‘milk’ a franchise with a single game, they stop investing in new IPs.
DLC is a great thing if done right, for example the DLC packs for Bethesda games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 provide you with hours of entertainment for such a low price, but recently developers are picking up unethical practices
and getting away with it.
Continued in Part 2
DISCLAIMER: The views and the opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of bettor.com.
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