This is a good point. My other criticism is that this games should be probably have major engine updates more frequently, which a too successful DLC market may delay.
I also think there is often limited consideration for how new mechanics impact performance. All of these games slow to crawl past mid game, which to me says they don’t really do much planning for that half of the game.
Now that you mention, there aren’t many gaming-related things as disheartening as playing a game that used to zip by slowed to a crawl due to extra mechanics and the AI taking more time to process them.
Rather than getting caught up in the number or cost of the DLCs, I would suggest looking at whether they’re worth the money. If a major DLC adds 20 hours of gameplay for $40 or whatever, I’m totally down with that, and if it’s a game I love I’m perfectly happy if they release nine of them over the next couple of years.
All the games you listed are huge strategy titles which are largely evergreen. Why should they release new Civilizations every 2 years, retrodding already broken ground, when they can expand an already amazing game?
Same deal with The Sims, which has a truly obscene amount of DLC. But I mean, if you love The Sims, why do you need a The Sims 5? Why not continue to expand the existing game?
Music/rhythm games are another great example of this. Release new songs, new gameplay modes, don’t re-release Guitar Hero over and over.
I don’t think it’s really incomplete so much as there isn’t reasonable price to get the complete experience. You used to be able to patient way for gold, complete, all these editions that included all these things and feel like you really did enter at a moment in time with all of “it.” Now it’s like so many have their version of a Sims stuff pack in addition to a ton of other content that’s you can’t really buy as an edition, jut 200 dollars during xyz sale. It’s a different experience, and no I am not a fan.
My largest issues with DLCs are when pricing doesn’t align.
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For instance: I bought the Battletech Deluxe version at launch. I got little freebies for paying a tiny bit extra, whatever. Then they come out with the “Mercenary Pack” that has the season pass included with the base game. Okay, no problem. Then they discount the Mercenary Pack CHEAPER than the season pass, and at that point I feel like I’m being given the middle finger.
Same thing happened with Dragon Age: Origins, back in the day; I had all the DLC except Awakening. They came out with a GOTY version that was cheaper than the expansion, and once again I felt more than a little @#$%ed over. Eventually, I found a hard copy of Awakening on sale at Amazon a bit cheaper, but the whole thing was absurd.
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Back on topic, I don’t begrudge publishers their efforts to extend profits as long as they’re providing benefit to the consumer, but there are some games where it really does get quite excessive and the cost alone seems to make it smell of greed rather than a desire to produce a fine product.
Releasing DLC seems like a rational response to video game prices that are being held down artificially while the cost of making games continues to rise.
Plus people buy them.
These days the only reason to pay full price for something is to get it Right Now.
They do DLC because making games costs money and the initial launch of a brand new entry in a franchise–and especially the launch of a brand new franchise–comes with a lot of risk that you’ll never recoup your costs.
The sales proposition for DLC is much more predictable: You know the size of your audience (=the number that bought the original game), can make a reasonable guess at how many of them will purchase more content (=probably 30-50%?), and have reliable channels for spreading awareness (the base game’s UI and community).
The cost of the DLC might seem out of proportion compared to the original game, but that’s usually because the cost of the original game was almost absurdly low for the work that was done.
There are definitely rare examples of games that shipped incomplete or broken and tried to use paid DLC to fix themselves. The solution to that is to read reviews and to not reward companies that pull that trick. (If, when the DLC is out, the game is now a game you want and is worth the full price point, then maybe?)
But that doesn’t mean, as others have said, you should consider a base game incomplete just because DLC exists. That’s like a gamer version of FOMO. And ascribing to developers a motive of releasing fewer features or content in a game in order to milk them for DLC (although there may be some literal cases of that you could dig up) is uncharitable.
I always buy the Founders Edition from Stardock if it is a 4x game that I think I will like. It has always paid off for me since their games are well supported.
Exactly. It feels like their long tail sales models shifted mostly in favour of existing customers who have been with the game since the beginning. I’m not going to get into effectiveness of these models, I’m sure publishers have internal sales numbers that support their pricing strategies but it does put up a huge barrier in front of what would otherwise be an easy impulse purchase for a new customer.
A lot of you have expressed that getting the vanilla games is enough. Sure, if you’re like @robc04 for whom this approach seems to work well, that’s great. What I think about in such cases is that I’m playing a mechanically inferior version of the game, which is something I don’t like and so I don’t do it. I like deep gameplay mechanics, it’s the main reason why I play games in the first place - take away the new factions and units and maps or whatever, and I won’t care - but mechanics are something I’m not willing to pass on. Paradox is generally pretty ok in this regard because they integrate the major mechanical overhauls from DLCs into their base games but not always. DLCs like Conclave, Reaper’s Due and Way of Life eventually add up, so it’s no surprise that every time a sale rolls around the steam boards and reddit are full of people asking which dlcs are must haves.
I’m sure the situation is similar in EU4’s case, but I honestly don’t plan to find out, because one look at the long list of DLCs tells me that I’d have to invest more time into research than I do when I’m buying a new car. Sure I could buy the DLCs in bulk - but what if I’m like the guy from CK2 thread (sorry I forgot your name, but I really agreed with you) who got tripped up by the new ‘silly’ DLCs that veered off from the historically accurate approach of the preceding ones? Then I realise that I just spend 30 or 50 dollars on shit that’s completely irrelevant to me and will end up being disabled in the DLC menu, leading to more unnecessary annoyance.
Along this line, I still think the cleanest CK2 version was back in 2.3 way back at the end of 2014/start of 2015 (Way of Life). Maybe Conclave with 2.5 in 2016.
Its funny to hear people mention buying a car, because this is the ULTIMATE DLC experience. Basically NOBODY buys the base model car. Everybody adds some extras, like different wheels, or a digital radio, or a sunroof, or a different color to the default and… all of that costs extra.
Plus with some car DLC, the DLC is actually mutually exclusive! You cant have pearl white AND midnight blue! You cant have a sunroof AND a panoramic sunroof. There is no way to get the ‘complete’ car experience.
As a consumer, I like choice. Give me Battlefield V with the campaign as optional DLC and I’ll skip that thanks. In fact I’m begging for some paid BFV DLC. Where is the eastern front? where is the panther tank? the king tiger tank? how come no mortars?
The 1% of gamers who get whipped up into outrage by professional outrage-sellers like jim sterling have managed to ruin things for the rest of us. I actively WANT more DLC. Nobody forces you to buy it ffs.
That is why I like buying the Ultimate / Gold Edition of car near the end of the model year.
Wait what are we talking about here? :D
We should note the car comparison isn’t the best, since you know the total of the additions to the base vehicle never actually exceed the initial cost of the base vehicle.
I don’t mind the DLC model. If I love the game, I will gladly contribute to help the developer and to enjoy the new additions. For the so-so games, I just don’t bother with the DLC’s, unless a major update revamps the gameplay. Furthermore, I have plenty of games to play (and not enough time) so I rarely buy on release which means I often grab games with the DLC’s included, on a discount.
Wait until you hear about a product called “Train Siimulator”…
This article is from 2016, and these 10 models have the top model that’s more than twice the price of the base model, so the DLC is more than the base model. But I read an article recently on a car site that this has become a lot more common recently in the 2019 and 2020 models than it used to be back in 2016.
In terms of the grand history of gaming, this really only came about in the past <10 years. It’s not simply expansion packs, but size, frequency, and amount of DLC. I don’t think it’s a bad thing per se, mind. But this is a very different era for sure.
Civ II is not a good comparison, though, and there’s no inflation adjustment necessary. I can’t recall how much Civ II’s expansions cost. But they wouldn’t cost as much today as they did then, because back then there wasn’t really a firm market for this sort of thing (beyond, nobodythought an expansion of just alternate game scenarios would sell at full game price), and now we have much better market understanding of this stuff since expansion/dlc/etc is such a common practice. Also, game prices have not gone up the way e.g. movie prices have. Fantastic Wordls’ release year movie ticket price would have been 4 or 5 bucks or something but now it would be 10+ bucks. But game prices are the same now as then, for a variety of reasons. Civ II (or Warcraft 2, which got a real expansion and some third party “scenario” disks) wouldn’t come close to a Paradox title (but what does?) or even Civ VI.
I agree it’s not a huge change though. It’s a natural evolution. Expansions always made sense in some scenarios. Most of the expensive work is done already (engine, loads of assets for content, etc). It’s cheaper and easier to distribute them - no need to print physical media, package materials, etc. I think we’re still figuring all of this out too, in terms of amount, frequency of release, how to package stuff, etc.
I think there’s a software issue at play here, though, that needs solving. As a content creator, I think what I want to do is offer DLC and then try to package them reasonably when the time comes. Let’s say you didn’t Season PAss, though. You bought A, E, and F. now I am selling A-F. The Grand Mega Pack is cheaper than the sums of A-F, but possibly also cheaper than B+C+D. I think you ought to get some money off of GMP. Steam doesn’t allow me to do this.
I am not sure you quite understand the comparison. I mean let’s first start by acknowledging that a lot of people buy used cars in the first place, and those can be tricked out cars that are not even close to the asking price of the new ones 7 and 9 years later. Now if we focus on new, they literally have what I was referencing, editions, packages… and you don’t have to tick 100 boxes to get them. You can get the technology package, or the sports package, or the limited edition and then way over here on the other side is the pretty much everything edition. The very idea that most people are just going down a check list and custom ordering straight from the factory instead of negotiation for the model right in front of them… is not accurate. Besides, one again, to even try and use a car comparison you’d have to acknowledge the used car market which is… huge.
Currently at 538 pieces of DLC, worth over $9,300.
And you know there are people out there that have them all.
