The Gaming Industry Needs To Stop Bleeding Players Through Endless DLC

[joram]

With all due respect Pip, the Panzer Corps model of DLC is one of the worst offenders.   Some may see it as an a la carte approach but I see it, well, let's just say unfavorably.   So much so that I rarely buy from Slitherine anymore and the few I have only on deep discount.

[Steelgrave]

joram, I couldn't disagree with you more. The Panzer Corps DLC's kept the game fresh and interesting for me for quite some time and I still like to roll them out. In fact, I'm playing Soviet Corp now as part of my weekend lineup. Panzer Corp, since you brought it up, is perfectly intact and playable out of the box with no additional purchases needed. The DLC's present players with new options and situations, pretty much what one would expect from a DLC. Now, I don't necessarily feel the same warmth about Order of Battle, but like Panzer Corp, the original game is perfectly fine as a stand alone and doesn't require you spend another cent if you don't want to. I'm not sure what you think a DLC is intended for if not to add quality to a game and extend your hours of play. Like Panzer Corp or not, they certainly achieve that goal.

[mikeck]

Like I alluded to before, some don't seem to distinguish between a finished game that adds DLC later and an unfinished game. Take Stellaris. If they released the game and you weren't able to invade planets or there was no diplomacy....stuff you HAVE to have in a 4x, that is unfinished and making people pay for the compete parts is wrong. But using DLC to add new races or a new element such as a detailed espionage system is fine.

DLC is not only a great way to ensure developers have a $$$ motivation for keeping the game fresh and new but allows players to pick and choose what they want to spend money on

[Gusington]

Soviet Corps is one of my favorite DLCs. Just shows that DLC is fine if it is something a gamer digs at the right price.

[Steelgrave]

Totally agree with the last two posts.  O0

[Gusington]

The Panzer Corps series is a pretty unique example - if you take all of the DLC and put it into one package, as they've done - that is just a huge game to release all at once initially.

[airboy]

Totally agree with the last two posts.  O0

Me too.  Order of Battle DLC adds e entire new theaters which I have liked a lot.  Papercorps was a little more cut and paste, but not bad.

[jomni]

The quoted article talks about Battlefront Multilayer FPS.  It's a different ecosystem than our wargames.
Waiting may not work. If you join late, a part of server population may have already moved to other games.  If you don't get DLC goodies, you are barred from joining certain servers. And I would think most servers would always run the latest and greatest. This leads to suboptimal online experience. But the big companies would always want to add (paid) content to these types of games to keep the server population, which is crucial to an online game, alive.  An alternative model would be free-to-play. But most of these games end up as pay-to-win which brings about another set of problems.

[FarAway Sooner]

As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it's a free market and vendors can price their product however they want to.  A better question might be:  Is it good long-term for the gaming industry?

Given that only a small handful of titles/shops seem to take this approach, I don't think it's that harmful.  But it does run the risk of being something that works okay for short-term revenue but could choke off longer-term revenues as players get fed up with the approach.

The weak-sauce DLC I've seen offered for HoI4 is one reason I've held off purchasing the original game, though.  Your mileage may vary.

[Phantom]

In some respects I guess the gaming industry has learnt from (& muscled in on) what the modding community used to do - how many have played excellent Rome Total War mods for example - all of them totally free & done by enthusiastic members of the community.
The industry has seen this & learned - I'm guessing there'll be far less open source games out there in the future - you want an accurate doctrine Roman Legion or a well drawn Panzer IV - you'll pay for it in future I suspect, which is a shame as the ability to tweak a game can make it far more enjoyable for the user/customer.
I adjusted the speed of infantry in Total War games for example - which IMO was ridiculously fast in the vanilla versions- & its a little annoying to think that in the future I may have to buy a "realistic infantry speeds" DLC for $10.

[RyanE]

So in a perfect world, to the anti-DLC crowd, which of the scenarios is better?

1) 2 years in development and released in 2017 and then 5-6 DLCs over the next year that cost a total of around $70.
or
2) 4 years to develop but is launched complete in 2019 and costs $69.99.

Keep in mind that Command, one of the most complete games you will find and is supported incredibly well with free updates and free new features over four years listed at close to $100.  The devs took a pretty big beating for that pricing and it took 5 years to develop.

[Destraex]

I guess the other thing to remember is that back in the early 1990s games were always around $100 complete on release, no DLC and rarely any patches. So we paid once, got a game that was complete but of limited scope. Rarely were expansions planned, I am guessing that is because the teams were broken up as soon as the title was complete. Where these days teams are kept working on a long term plan for years to come. Sometimes they were just left with whatever bugs they had, they were not well supported. Mind you most titles were simple enough back then that bugs were rare.

[jomni]

Last time software were products.  Now they are a service.

[MengJiao]

Last time software were products.  Now they are a service.

  There's also a constructive marketting side to the DLC model.  The base game (particularly in games like DCS RoF and Mius Front) is a kind of big demo and if you want you can put a lot of money into the whole game.  I wish Naval Action had been built more like that.  As it is I've paid next to nothing for a game that (for me at least) is a tremendous grind.  I wish they would just take my real money and give me some 6-pdrs.

[joram]

Respect the opinion of those who disagree but I feel that kind of dribbling of content has the opposite affect for some like myself.  If that makes me an old fogey,  then i guess i will just own that!