Does anyone believe that the new Rock Band DLC will consist of anything more than people hitting colored buttons while their most egocentric friend does half-assed karaoke?
Now, quick, guess how someone that says that feels about Rock Band the game as a whole and then assess the relevance of their opinion on the value of upcoming RB DLC.
You’re correct in your assumption that I didn’t enjoy the game. (You’re wrong in that I did indeed play it to completion.)
Of course I am, and that’s the key variable. And I completely believe that someone would suffer to the end of a game that they don’t enjoy, even if I choose not to practice that myself. Interferes with my scheduled self-flagellation and hitting myself in the face with a shovel time. Nevertheless, you do understand that many people actually enjoy “standing still and shooting at things” (often for periods longer than 30 minutes!) and that they might be the target audience for this DLC. Right?
Please. Dislike of the base game automatically means an opinion on DLC is invalid? Guess what? I disliked GTA IV but thought the TLTD DLC was pretty awesome and a decent deal at the price for which it was sold. On the flipside, I love Fallout 3, but have been less than impressed with the the DLC so far. Amazingly, I can have an opinion on the DLC that has nothing to do with the base game!
It’s possible, sure, but not when the opinion you offer is premised on a fundamental disagreement with the core mechanics of the game more than with any particular trait of the DLC. Which was obvious in your post.
That is unlikely to be the case with your GTA4 example, or else the DLC would also have failed you. I could offer analogies, but I don’t think they would make it any clearer.
It did. And then they decided to release a bunch of meaningless content for ridiculously inflated prices and blew a lot of the goodwill they had built up.
Until it ran away and some mean ass ogre converted it into a bloody mesh of horse flesh and chain mail armor. And did that expensive armor even protect your poor horse from the ogre? Well… did it???
I love paid DLC. It means I get to choose what features are in the game I play, and only pay for the ones I want.
A bit like cable TV.
Talking of which, to all you people stressed by unlockable stuff on disk, I bet you HATE the fact that there is acble TV movies. I mean… the movie is already being transmitted to your home anyway! why can’t you get it for free, and demand they lay new cable to deliver the extra movies? :D
Thats great for the huge mass-market popular games that valve make, but what if the game is more niche?
Take armageddon empires, Lets say the dev can’t afford (due to niche sales) to release free content, but could happily release a mini expansion pack for $5.
Is that evil? Is it unsupportable?
Just because one or two of the biggest corporations in an industry can supply certain things for free, doesn’t mean everyone else is stiffing you if they can’t match it. Not every business has the same size market, especially games.
Do you buy expansions? What is the difference between DLC and an expansion? What is the difference between a model that has you pay $1 to add a new level to a game and one that has you pay $20 to add 20 new levels?
Until it ran away and some mean ass ogre converted it into a bloody mesh of horse flesh and chain mail armor. And did that expensive armor even protect your poor horse from the ogre? Well… did it???
I am a consumer of games, not a developer. I bought RE5 for 360, but I won’t buy the DLC. I have never purchased any DLC. I don’t like the idea of paying money for stuff unless it’s super awesome. So far, nothing has been super awesome. (unless expansions count; I don’t think they do)
Even being in the position that I am, wishing I could play some RE5 vs mode without paying for it, I think the complaints against on-disc DLC are pretty absurd. I see it like when somebody uses the term “lazy developer.” Effort is irrelevent. Results are all that matter. Input and Output. $60 for game. $5 for vs mode. Do you care whether the developer tried hard or not? I cannot empathize. Not even a little bit. Do you see game development as some sort of spectator sport?
I’ll do you one better. Thinking that you fundamentally deserve anything as part of a purchase transaction is just a little bit naive. As the buyer, you deserve WHAT YOU ARE BUYING. All of this wailing and gnashing of teeth isn’t about critical features being left out of games. The part of the game that you bought is still totally there and totally works. In RE5’s case, the single player and mercenaries modes are still right there, as is the co-op. That’s what you bought when you bought the product. It doesn’t matter that a theoretical valuable thing existed at the time that you bought it and you didn’t even think you wanted it until it became available - you got what you paid for. If you didn’t think it was worth what you paid for it, why the hell did you buy it?
I mean, if you carry this sort of thinking to other kinds of products it gets ridiculous. In the process of making gasoline from crude oil, for instance, you’ll separate off a bunch of sulfur. Literally shit tons of sulfur. There are open pits of elemental sulfur at pretty much every refinery in the universe because once they take it out of the gas (where you do not want it), they’ve got nothing better to do with it. Demands like “It’s on the disc so it should be free!” sound a lot to me like “Where’s my pound of sulfur, jackass!?” Because you could have totally made some badass sulfuric acid out of that if you were in the mood to do something stupid. Or played a fun practical joke on a neighbor. But because oil companies are evil and only out to make a buck you’ll never enjoy that right. We should throw a damn revolution.
When you buy a game you do not buy the company or every product they’ve ever generated. You buy what they agreed to sell you, and if they put some extra stuff on your disc to activate at a later date if you want it, you know what? - I’m totally cool with that. It means a faster download and less wasted space on my shriveled and inadequate crappy laptop hard drive.
While I can appreciate the fact that people are entitled to what they are actually buying and nothing more there is a disconnect in buying a disc with stuff on it locked away that you can’t access. Imagine buying a house only to hear the realtor say “oh, by the way, there’s a cellar on the property too. I’ll sell you the key for $5”. You bought it already, why shouldn’t you feel like you had the right to access it? That’s the emotional argument.
For a more practical argument, charging extra for multiplayer fragments the userbase and lowers the value of what is being offered for everyone. Multiplayer gaming is dependant on having people to play against and charging extra for it reduces the player base. Since player bases practically always dwindle as players migrate to new games this has repercussions on the longevity of the game.
Actually, both of those expansions (iirc) addressed concerns raised by his players. So they were not only mini-expansions, but sort of deluxe patches for the gameplay. They aren’t the best examples. If you divide up the game experience into DLC packs such that real savings are passed on to the consumer then sure. However, that’s not how business works. Giving the customer more “choices” almost always ends up being more expensive for what they used to get for the old price.
But if you ask people what is $50 worth of value, you often get a description on a game. A week later, if they add DLC, and ask people what $50 should get them, the answer magically becomes the game = free DLC.
This isn’t rational.
Like I said before, all the cable TV premium stations are sent direct into your house. Is it nickel and diming to charge you for the individual movies?
I pay £1.60 for a sunday newspaper, and put the sports section straight in the recycling. I also skip the travel and weekend color supplement. This is insane.
Charge me per section and even if the full paper is now £2, I’m better off, because I won’t be buying all of it. I actually get a BETTER deal that way.
You’ll realize that you sound exactly like the Time-Warner CEO defending bandwidth caps.
Which is to say: Yes, in principle that could be correct. But the people making the decision about what choice to offer aren’t doing so in a way that’s revenue neutral to them, are they? They’re making it so they get more money. Which means that consumers are basically getting scrod.
