Just Cause Developer against DLC – Video Games Update
Christofer Sundberg, the founder of Avalanche Studios, says that downloadable content (DLC) and forced multiplayer are not the only way to extend a games life and keep players engaged.
Just Cause 2 was published by Eidos Interactive for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the PC in March 2010. Many believe that the game had breadth taking graphics and the largest open-world area found in any sandbox game. The game was received positively by
the gamers and it managed to sell over 2.90 million copies since launch across the three platforms.
Sundberg believes that developers should focus on developing a complete game first, a fully standalone experience that would not need DLC to extend its life. "As most publishers and developers have run around as headless chickens the last three years looking
for a way to make money DLC was definitively a tool to try to keep players engaged, but how many games have been truly successful with DLC? Not that many,” says Sundberg explaining that DLC doesn’t help extend the life of a bad game.
Sundberg has also criticised the nasty habit of cutting out important bits from the game to repackage them as DLC and said, “proper DLC that adds VALUE is great but so far very few games have motivated me to actually pay for the DLC. I've just paid for the
c**p that developers decided to cut because they didn't have the time to get into the game.”
It’s nice to see a honest developer for a once but that doesn’t change the fact that even Sundberg won’t have any say in the matter if the publishers, Square Enix or Eidos, decide that they want the company to develop episodic DLC for a specific game. This
would be used to support the game throughout the year after launch, which is usually the case with most games these days.
In the end it all falls down on the gamer to influence the market with the power of their wallets. Bogus rip-off DLC will never end if gamers continue to support it, as it will only get worse.
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