Are Game Consoles Ruining DLC? 399
A round-table discussion at Gametopius looks into the state of downloadable content for games as it has evolved over the past several years, going from an occasional, welcome supplement to being a common marketing strategy for most of the industry, frequently causing irritation over pricing and availability.
"All of the map packs so far released for the Call of Duty games have been $10 each to download on consoles through closed networks, while PC gamers could download those same packs for free off of FileShack or somewhere else. Valve's own Team Fortress 2 has received a significant amount of DLC that's been completely free on the PC. Xbox owners of the same game, however, have only received perhaps half of that content, and they have had to pay for it in $5 packs. Why is this? The idea of this kind of content delivery was scarcely heard of on consoles, so console gamers see no reason not to pay for it. But on the PC, these amounts of content are usually just considered parts of patches. Furthermore, why pay for a few extra maps and costumes when modders are making and offering new ones for free all the time?"
DLC = modding in a DRM world (Score:5, Interesting)
DLC is supposed to give to console gamers what we the PC gamers have. Stuff made by entusiast to enhance already good games with more maps, game modes, textures, models, etc..
Since that stuff can't be freely installed in a console, because a console is locked down hardware, to give that cool stuff companies make that stuff thenselves and need to sell it.
DLC is the DRM version of Modding.
Unlike PC games, console games can use extra pads. (Score:3, Interesting)
Consoles are generally used by richer people (children and adults) who, in addition to owning a computer, can afford to own consoles too (people who own consoles, in all likelihood, own computers before they own consoles).
There's a difference between owning a computer, singular, and owning computers, plural. A family of four may own one computer and one console. But unlike a console, a computer is probably not connected to a large monitor. So when one player is playing on a console, the other players can pick up controllers and join in, but when one player is playing on a computer, the others have to sit and wait. The way most PC games' multiplayer modes work, one would have to buy four PCs and four copies of each game in order to play the same game that one console, one copy of the game, and three extra controllers allow.
You didn't buy that console (Score:5, Interesting)
PC gamers purchased that PC. Often at thousands of dollars -- mine's just over $7K including the 30" LCD. When I purchase a game, I purchase the game.
Consoles don't cost thousands of dollars. Most consoles cost $300ish. The idea of the console industry is to lose money on the consoles and make it up on the games. So the game publishers pay the console makers. No one pays the PC makers except the person buynig the PC.
Lately, DLC has been an excellent way to make the games cheaper, because there is further revenue to be had on the DLC later on.
Remember, someone has to pay for that $1000 console. Congrats on paying the first $300 yourself. The next $700 used to come as $20 from the $60 games. Now it comes as $15 from the $40 games, and $5 from the DLC. Big surprise.
Stop wanting things for free. If consumers would look at things from the other side, things could be very different. Instead of wanting things cheaper, why don't you try to fund your favourite company, by paying larger prices, so that they have the money to build better things, and can then charge less for better. You don't want the same for less money, you want better for the same money.
But hey, most of my friends spend $20 per month on satelite radio. Because "it's a fine deal, for loads of content, blah blah blah". They forget that if they add up all of their entertainment dollars -- radio, television, internet, movies, restaurants, games, sports, et cetera -- there isn't enough time in the month to get the full value of all the money spent. It's not that satelite radio isn't worth $20/month. It's that television plus radio isn't worth $100/month.
But consumers are too busy budgetting dollars to know how to budget value. I find it interesting.
Lots of factors (Score:3, Interesting)
With consoles, you have to pay to get certified, and this includes any bugfixes you release. While the cost of DLC certification may be marginal, as someone else pointed out (Just assume $1 out of the 5 that DLC costs), you still have to certify all your patches, which are given for "free." DLC works to pad their expenditures in other areas in order to sell more copies.
Also, you can't really pirate the DLC from a closed network, so it's guaranteed that people pay for it. With every person that purchases DLC, you lock them into owning your game. If they bought it second hand, you now got revenue that you wouldn't have otherwise. If they bought it new, paying for DLC ensures they won't get rid of it, otherwise their DLC purchase will have gone to waste. Less used copies floating around.
I think it's the reverse (Score:5, Interesting)
DLC is ruining sales of games on consoles, at least as far as I can see.
On the PS2, it was pretty simple: The game was $40-50 new, or you could wait a year or so and buy it for $20 as a Greatest Hits release. Either way, you got the same game. Buying new, you'd pay $50 up front, play the game, sell it for $15-20, overall cost $35. Buying Greatest Hits, you'd buy for $20, sell for $10-15, overall cost $5-10. With buying the game at release costing you maybe $20 more overall, it often made sense to buy games on release day.
On the PS3, the game is released new for $60. A couple of DLC packs are released for $10 each. Then after a year or two, the entire game plus the DLC packs is released as a Game Of The Year Edition for $30. So if you buy new, you pay $60 + $20, but by the time you sell the game second hand it's worth $20 at best because of the GOTY edition at $30, so your overall cost is $60. Buy later, and you get the entire game plus add-ons for $30, resell for $20, overall cost $10. So now suddenly it costs $50 more to buy on release day than to buy and play later.
So basically, there's now a major financial incentive to wait for the Game Of The Year edition which has the DLC bundled in. For instance, I was considering buying Red Faction. However, I just saw on the PSN store that the first DLC has been released for $10. So now, I'd much rather wait and buy the whole thing in a year or two for $30.
Ultimately, I think the game companies are shooting themselves in the feet by penalizing early purchasers to this extent. I wonder if this might be why PS3 and Xbox 360 game sales have been down.
And if we're talking Valve, the way they've treated Xbox 360 owners is nothing compared to how they've fucked PS3 owners. There's no DLC for TF2 on the PS3 at all; we haven't even seen any of the fixes for the initial maps, which means that games tend to be ruined by glitchers. (Yeah, I know the "It's up to EA" excuse, but it's Valve's decision to let EA decide release policy, so ultimately they're still responsible.)
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:3, Interesting)
In general, console gaming is cheaper, the games are in general cheaper due to the availability of older games, and you can have better local multiplayer without everyone lugging around their gaming rig.
Re:Your argument makes no sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it's complacency. PC users don't stand for this shit, because they know they have alternatives. If you don't want to pay for content that should've been in the game in the first place, then you're probably going to pirate it despite whatever protections the publishers think are going to prevent that from happening. They're slowly wising up to this: companies like Valve, Bioware and Stardock release updates/"DLC" for free on the PC knowing damn well that it's going to generate more interest in the core game, equaling more game sales.
Owning a gaming PC might be considered graphic proof of having more money than sense, at least until you start seeing just how fickle PC gamers are when it comes to what games they're buying and WHY they're buying those games. Console gamers, despite the argument that consoles are cheaper, will inevitably demonstrate that they'll buy just about anything available on the service because they're starved for content and don't realize (or care) just how hard they're getting screwed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:DLC is used to fight second hand sales (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably true, makes sense anyway.
Why don't they understand price though?
I've been waiting for Assassins Creed on the 360 to drop below £10 second hand. This is the price I think it is worth and I know I can resell it for maybe £5 in a months time without issue. I can get it for £10 on eBay today. The local shops have it at £12, or £20 if you buy two games.
Just this week Live have the whole game on DLC for £20 with a resale value of £0.
Any child under 10 could tell you which is the best deal. Even if you explain the two day wait for a mail order purchase they'll understand. I'm nearly 40, so why do they take me for a mug?
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:1, Interesting)
I have not had an antivirus/antispyware/useless anti-something bloatware installed on my computer for years. I do not have a (software) firewall. All I need to use is some discretion on which stuff to run, which boils down to: "If it reeks, don't run it.", and I haven't caught a virus/worm/etc in years. Last one I got I removed manually.
Banning system? It's pretty good. Wanna play online games? If you're playing a Valve game on official steam servers, hackers get banned, period. If you're playing on some dedicated server somewhere? It's the admins' responsibility to ban them. There are some games that have a 'black list' shared among some dedicated servers. These lists contain 'offender' IP addresses, which are banned from all the servers.
Hardware you don't have to worry about. Well, I will have to grant you that one, for most people, dealing with hardware sucks. It makes them miserable. That's why so many places have a "drop your computer, we fix it, you pay us, all's well."-policy. Some of us, however, like to deal with hardware. I get all excited when I buy this new awesome graphics card, or the latest powerful processor. It's part of the PC Gaming experience for me, and I wouldn't give it up for prepackaged PC's.
Anyone reading this must think I have a personal grudge against consoles or something, and they'd be right. I don't like consoles for personal reasons, though I do acknowledge why some people would like them, however, the fact that each day that passes more and more games that I find myself drooling at are console-exclusives kinda disappoints me.
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:4, Interesting)
Back my dad, we used to call DLC "modding" a game, and it was free, and there were large vibrant modding communities for all games that had explicit or implicit modability. The Team Fortress guys started as a bunch of guys sitting around in Australia hacking on the mod source code for Quake 1 (before even Quakeworld).
But for TF2, they've published no mod tools except map editors, and have instead been releasing their own, official, mods for it, such as alternative weapons for each class. And charging for it on the Xbox. It's a shame, really, that they've gone so far from their roots.
I'd love to bring CustomTF into the 21st Century, but (as far as I know) there's no way to easily mod the TF2 sourcebase. So everyone loses... even Valve, I guess, since modding greatly extends the life of a game. Quakeworld is still played even today because of the mods for it.
Re:It's because the 360 is NOT profitable (Score:3, Interesting)
No one seems to want to admit it but the business model that Microsoft employs for console gaming is seriously flawed. Sony's is a little better because at least you get onto the network for free. Microsoft brags about their success but what they don't mention is that they need to over charge you for accessories (ie wifi adapters and hardrives) and they need to charge you for any little thing you do online.
It is only a flawed business model if noone is using it and it is not making money. I love the integration of XBox and XBox live. The integrated Voice Chat is indispensable once you get to use it. Log in, chat with a friend or group of friends, start a game, etc. All just works. In NHL09, which has 6 person positional team play, it is amazing. 5 friends can be finishing up a game, and I can come into the voice chat group with them in the middle of the game and coordinate on playing the next.
As for wifi adapters, etc, I prefer the way XBox did it. Why make me pay for it if I don't need it? Also, this way kids with less money can get the base system for Christmas and maybe the HD on their birthday. Not everyone can drop $600 bucks at a time.
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:5, Interesting)
"FPS games on a console are a big bag of fail IMO. Only people who defend them in my experience are ones who haven't spent years using the superior mouse/keyboard combination."
Played FPSs on PC for many years but I'll defend them on console because it's a quick and easy way to get 4-8 people playing a FPS in a room as a social activity. No lugging around PCs, making sure everyone has the right version, stuffing around with networks, etc. Bring along a projector to add to a TV, a second Xbox and controllers, couple of copies of the game and away you go.
Aiming might not be as accurate, but everyone in the game is in that same boat.
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:3, Interesting)
And I do the same thing on PS3. I've bought one or two titles at MSRP because I wanted to take part in the launch excitement, but with everything else I've just kept an eye out for price drops and picked up a preferred title when it hit my price range.
It's funny, because the PS3 was my first home console -- I'd been one of those elitist PC gamers for years before that, but as things like buggy shipping builds, Starforce copy protection, and way too much user configuration began to choke out the fun for PC gaming, I headed off to console land dreading the "oh hey it costs more for next gen" $60 pricetags. And yet, I haven't paid over half that so far this year.
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice troll account, by the way. I almost didn't notice the dot at the start of the username. The real Bruce Perens actually writes the:
Thanks,
Bruce
at the end of every message though, he doesn't put it in his sig. You might want to change that for future trolls.
Re:Different Audiences? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is these are all just "art assets". I'm not going to art and levels are cheap or easy or should always be handed out freely but these things aren't as advanced as new technology or new game play. So far everything they've been advertising could be done by dedicated modders out in the community today,
What Valve needs to do for "L4D2" is provide a demo to everyone. I'm sure the complaints wouldn't be so fierce if it was obvious what the improvements are. They need to show us what really is in the product that isn't just patch. Without this it just fuels the idea that "L4D2" only exists because the XBox 360 can't handle the aggressive patching necessary. There is a huge perception that a number of concessions were made in "L4D" that are undesirable for PC players. This behavior is doing nothing to dispel it.