It’s always nice if you’re just going about your daily business waiting for that one game that you’ve been looking forward to for so long, when all of a sudden it arrives through the post and you thrust yourself into its magical realm where you get lost in it for hours, days, or even weeks. Then, when you’re least expecting it, the developer dishes out some extra content to prolong your happiness and time in that game world. Yes, DLC (downloadable content) can be a wonderful thing, when handled correctly.
I’m sure most people can relate to the above. Extending the life of a product to entice a higher attachment rate is what publishers want and it makes people happy knowing that the game is being supported and they get to play their favourite game for longer. This is where DLC comes in, where players purchase extra content to add to their game experience. DLC comes in many shapes and sizes, ranging from simple things like skins for your character or weapon and missions to expand gameplay, to a collection of everything, including the former.
Where did it all begin?
Before the internet became the primary way of receiving new content for a game, developers would create expansions and release them physically (digital distribution wasn’t available for games at the time). Only games that sold well or scored highly would generally receive expansions and these would be often be priced at half the cost of the initial game’s price.
The best thing about this practice was that with each expansion you know you would be getting massive amounts of content, which often amounted to being close to or more than the main game itself (Neverwinter Nights, Unreal, and Half-Life spring to mind).
Before the Internet came into existence there was another form of distribution for PC in the form of bulletin boards. Here people were able to download a shareware title (effectively a demo) where you would own the first part to a game. Once you completed that part to the game you were able to then purchase the extra content to unlock the rest of the game. It was rather a crude way to do things back then because before the internet and affordable ISPs it was extremely expensive to purchase a game via this method.
Initially you had to ring the phone number listed on the game’s splash screen. If it was an international call then it was extremely expensive. Then you were given a phone number to dial via your modem so that your PC would connect and download the relevant files, which would cost exactly the same as an international call; and to think that these modems had baud rates of lower than 9600, we’re talking speeds of less than 1200 bytes per second! For a game like Commander Keen it would take several hours to download the entire game, and that’s for a game no larger than 1MB in size.
When the Internet was invented and affordable ISPs started appearing, the gaming landscape started to change rapidly in both development and distribution. Bulletin Boards were becoming obsolete and instead web pages with storefronts were being placed on company websites.
The arrival of the modding scene
When Digital Distribution was starting to make its true mark on PC (Cavedog distributing Total Annihilation via their website in 1997), the modding scene started to take off and magazines would often have hundreds of mods for games on their cover discs. During this time, developers still kept with the same practice of delivering expansions via physical and now digital means, assuming the digital distribution platform had the main game in the first place.
As the modding scene took off, Epic Megagames (now just Epic Games) released its first FPS game called Unreal but with modding tools to allow the public to create extra content for their game. A more comprehensive toolset including Unreal’s level editor was sold to other game developers, and aptly named Unreal Engine.
Valve, after similarly bringing Half-Life out at the same time as Unreal, saw the way this was handled by Epic Games and thus also released its Hammer engine to the public. For the next few years the cover discs on magazines were filled with nothing but mods for Unreal, Unreal Tournament (released in 1999), and Half-Life. Some of the biggest games to date came from the modding scene and they all started in the early 2000s, all because of three titles and their modding tools: Counter-Strike (1999 – Half-Life mod), DOTA (2003 – WarCraft 3 mod), and Team Fortress (1996 – Quake Mod).
As Mods were becoming so prevalent and more game companies started to include basic level editing and modding tools for their games, they also saw the opportunity for not only releasing their games purely digitally, but also releasing their extra content in batches rather than large expansions like they used to.
@page
Steam explodes into gaming
In 2004, when Valve released Half-Life 2, the developer forced people that purchased the game onto a relatively unknown, unproven, and new platform known as Steam. Released a year before in 2003, it was used to allow users who owned the Half-Life game to add their serial keys to their accounts and let them download their games to any system they liked as long as they were signed in. This was a breakthrough in online distribution but it was purely for Valve games only at the time. The best feature about Steam was that users could browse game servers before they would even need to load a game; it would automatically be handled by the client.
Of course Steam had more downs than it did ups, but for what it started with it wasn’t too bad. What Valve did not expect, however, was that other companies looked at its client and not only wanted to use its service for game server checking and VAC (anti-cheat), but for selling its software on the Steam client so that it would be all automated instead. One thing led to another and we have the mighty Valve empire as it is today, making less games but becoming more of a service provider instead.
During the prevalence of the modding scene, Sega decided to include a modem in its Dreamcast which would allow players to play online against each other. While it was nothing new to PC gaming, it was a true pioneering event for consoles, which alone forced the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube to effectively have add-ons made for them down the line to allow players to play against others on their systems. The PlayStation 2 took this the furthest by allowing games to be patched, providing you had a hard-drive attached to the console.
The arrival of MMOs on console
Square Enix took advantage of this and introduced Final Fantasy XI for the PS2 at a time when an MMO on a console was unheard of – it proved to be very popular. Sony Online Entertainment/Zipper Interactive demonstrated the patching techniques with the infamous online shooter SOCOM beforehand.
When the XBox was introduced it also, like the Dreamcast, had a modem included except this time it was a broadband modem. With the way games were being able to be patched, and Steam taking off on PC, Microsoft saw this as a good idea to create the Xbox Live Marketplace as well as its Games for Windows Live services in 2005. When Microsoft started selling games on the marketplace, it became so popular that even Sony and Nintendo had to make sure that their next consoles had a form of marketplace for digital only games.
Almost all games released up to this point were always put through vigorous testing and had little issues at release. Developers took pride in their work and made sure that before anything went gold (the point at which a game is deemed complete), the developers would sit back and be happy knowing that they did the best that they could.
Consoles set up marketplaces
With the start of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era of consoles the marketplaces allowed for games to be sold from the off, titles were also able to be patched if there were any issues, but generally these were still far and very few between. One game stood out from the crowd in the form of Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament 3, which allowed for modding on consoles for the first time ever. The drawback is that you had to own a PC in order to create the mods which is why it did not receive many mods and therefore the game sold poorly. When the Unreal Development Kit was released in 2009 it was already too late for the game, and this was pretty much the last time mods would be used for consoles during that generation.
What Epic Games were known for was bringing out free expansion packs for its Unreal Tournament games. Unreal Tournament 2004 was a prime example where it added extra game modes and maps to the game, making it truly massive in scale. Epic did the same with Unreal Tournament 3 where, even on consoles, the game received free expansion-sized patches that added so much content that the game was truly large in size.
But, while the game did not sell very well on consoles (which meant that there would not be another Unreal Tournament game to be made – until now on PC 2015 as an alpha and free), and despite it giving free content, it seemed that some companies were testing out DLC in a new way, microtransactions!
DLC for the next few years was still typically left to large expansions for games, but due to the ease of supplying consumers with game updates digitally and via a centralised platform, it seemed as if every game being released had some form of expansion. One of the first games to implement this was Super Stardust HD on the PlayStation 3 where it was splitting expansion packs into smaller DLC packs (known as microtransactions), but this did not happen until 2008.
In 2008 Riot Games (behind DOTA) announced its first and currently only game, League of Legends, and said that it would be a free-to-play title. While Android and iOS were in their infancy, there were very few games on those platforms, and certainly not free. Once League of Legends released in 2009 it changed the landscape for microtransactions forever.
Gone were the expansions, gone was the idea of needing to pay for the game to play it, and instead came something that was open to everyone that had an internet connection, a PC that could run the game (anything post 2006 at the time), and the entire game playable from the off.
@page
Putting the shackles on behind a paywall
Instead of paying for expansions and other forms of DLC outside of the game (which required a download after purchase), League of Legends could be downloaded but had content locked off behind a wall instead. Initially this seemed like a paywall in order to unlock characters and other items to use in game, but this was quickly debunked. As players started playing the game more they found that they could unlock more characters using in-game experience points (Influence Points), and once you got enough Influence Points then the player could purchase a character, extra rune page slots, more runes, and even experience boosts.
The only thing that was locked behind a paywall were character skins. While everything could still be purchased with paying for the characters, pages, etc., Riot decided that the best course of action – to allow for an even playing field yet not force a ‘pay to win’ scenario – was to have everything available to the player with only cosmetic items being paid for. Not only did this prove to be popular but within a year it became the fastest growing game ever. A year after that it had more daily concurrent players than World of Warcraft had monthly subscribers.
With such a precedence being carved into the world of free-to-play games, the mobile market started to be flooded with free-to-play games with either ads or a paywall towards the end of 2010. Not only mobile games but also console games started to have more and more DLC as part of the deal – this brought about the aptly named ‘Season Pass’.
League of Legends sets the foundations for the free-to-play model
Many PC MMO developers were looking very closely at the payment model of League of Legends and while they have done similar things, many of them included items that League of Legends has but does not work for an MMO game, such as experience and gold boosters; this started off the ‘pay-to-win’ moniker that is still present today in many MMO games. While League of Legends certainly wasn’t the first game to have the free-to-play model (RuneScape in 2001 was one of the most successful free to play games at the time).
The PC suddenly got flooded with free-to-play MMO games in the 2009 and 2010, each of which had their own way of using the free-to-play model, and most were far from being any fun to play. Subscription-based games like Aion started seeing its player base drop dramatically globally and NCSoft had to approach the game in another light by introducing a free-to-play system alongside a tiered subscription-based model. I left the game shortly after this happened to Aion due to the way the system was set up. Needless to say it was done in a way that unless you paid for a full subscription your progress was hindered badly.
Turbine also changed its Lord of the Rings Online model to a free-to-play model too but allowed you to earn turbine points for each major event you completed in the game, allowing you to eventually spend this on the game’s expansions or other perks that were locked off unless you paid for a subscription. This was a marked improvement over Aion’s setup and Turbine’s revenue ended up being higher after the switch to a free-to-play model than they had received when it was subscription based.
With the free-to-play model being a proven source of income and the subsequent influx of free-to-play games being made available (even on consoles), the revenue of free-to-play games exceeded that of purchasing games annually. Larger publishers saw this as a good idea to push extra DLC and seemingly cut content in their games or lock them off unless consumers purchased a ‘special edition’ that was already available on the disc. While overall this might work for a free-to-play game, having it implemented into a full priced title was a very cheeky move that seemed to pay off for the companies. It forces players to purchase the special edition just so that they could have what would have otherwise been the normal edition, which could be deemed highly unethical. EA has been notorious of this practice, especially with the Battlefield titles.
Games now feel like beta tests
Because of internet speeds and bandwidth now becoming less of an issue, game developers have, in recent years, been releasing games earlier than they should really be, or are seemingly using the player base as a beta test, except beta testing a full release copy! Recently there have been three games of note that have criminally been like this, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, and Batman: Arkham Knight. There have been many games that have been released with bugs prevalent at launch but patched in later, but nothing quite like these three games, the latter of which took things a step too far! I suppose a special mention should be given to Aliens: Colonial Marines, but that’s a whole other story.
The last two Assassin’s Creed games have been nothing but a massive buggy mess at launch, and even after patches the games still continue to be heavily bugged, but it seems that instead of fixing the bugs as quickly as possible, the developer instead introduces new features such as in-game DLC. Considering these are purchasable products, they have been adding free-to-play models into them while the game itself should not have been released in its state.
Only eight years ago games were being released with very few bugs, and there were only patches if there were some balancing issues requiring attention. Now it seems that the larger publishers don’t care about the quality of the product and just throw it out to consumers with half the content locked behind a paywall, even if it’s already on the disc, all because they’re trying to cash in now that internet speeds are much faster, and we’re all connected in a digital world.
The crossover distinction between DLC and patches should theoretically never have been called into question. They’re two very different entities however in this day, the distinction between DLC and patches is starting to merge,causing a lot of frustration with not only myself, but I am very sure yourselves as well.
I’m not sure whether I should go into Batman: Arkham Knight without going on a rage over the PC version. Even after its re-release recently it is still in a shambles.
@page
And it’s downhill from there
Perhaps the worst offender of this whole saga is Take-Two’s Evolve. Despite Evolve’s concept being solid, it failed to attract the user base it could have. Incredibly, this was a game that was made available to pre-order before any gameplay footage had been shown, all that was shown was an image of a monster with the words ‘EVOLVE Pre-order now’. Not only that but it was also revealed to be built from the ‘ground-up’ as a DLC-based game, yet you still had to purchase the base game.
There was little content available for Evolve at launch and the player base dropped far too quickly as a result. When the new content came out then, it’s no surprise that it didn’t sell well as you had to pay an arm and a leg for it. Recently, 2K released a new DLC pack for Evolve but the content (like other games too) for these season passes tend to be miniscule compared to the expansions of over 10 years ago.
To break the mould of DLC, however, is Larian Studios. Its acclaimed Divinity series is well known amongst the PC crowd since 2002 and the developer has become synonymous for offering free expansions to its games, similarly to Epic Games with its Unreal Tournament games. With Divinity II you were given quite a sizeable game, but for those that purchased it, the Director’s Cut was free!
Divinity: Original Sin had a similar fate but far more unprecedented. The original game was released on PC and it was a very big game. In order to do everything, it would take a good portion of your month to play, but when it eventually got released for consoles as the enhanced edition, Larion Studios released the same expansion for free to all PC owners. This wasn’t just some simple expansion, however.
Larian Studios has simply put almost every development studio to shame by not only releasing, initially, a game that felt as close to bug free as possible, but the expansion is easily over double the size of the original release and incorporates even more interaction, quests, and ways to do things than ever before – well over 10000 improvements. Let me say this again – this was 100% free to all that purchased the seemingly bug free original beforehand!
It’s time for developers to put consumers first
So, what is happening with publishers in the last five years? It seems like they took one look at the popularity of the free-to-play model and tried to incorporate it into fully released games, especially before launch as ‘special editions’. They’re not exactly special unless they give me something like a figurine, soundtrack, and other physical items, otherwise it’s just locked, need to pay for, DLC that’s already available.
Studios need to stop this practice as it is starting to not only hurt consumer’s pockets as they can’t afford to spread their wealth across multiple game developers, but the fact that patches are seemingly becoming part of the DLC criteria too.
Fortunately, EA has recently given a nod that the next Need for Speed game will have free DLC and you will not need to purchase anything else after the base game. Perhaps this is a positive stepping stone, but with EA’s current track record it is very hard to believe if it will stick to it, but let’s hope that it does.
A recent game that is currently available for pre-order is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Quite what Square Enix was thinking with its revenue model I don’t know, but picture this: you purchase a game and you have several ways to complete a level depending on the direction you have taken your character. Sounds like any typical Deus Ex game doesn’t it? Ok, now take this scenario. Let’s lock out all of your abilities and have it based on how many people pre-order the game so that the more that pay then the more ways you get to customise your game. An interesting idea, but seriously what is Square Enix thinking? You can’t do that for this kind of game, especially Deus Ex where the whole point of the game is to have everything unlocked from the start and you choose your own way to play the game. Thankfully with such heavy negativity aimed towards Square Enix, the idea has now been scrapped.
Destiny is perhaps the one that resonates the most with players, especially with recent articles showing how Activision short changed the user by forcing Bungie to cut the game into parts and sell them as DLC instead. Remember ‘The Dark Below’ and ‘The House of Wolves’? Well, they were initially not expansions but instead part of the main release of the game. The first true expansion of the game is ‘The Taken King’ which really did add a substantial amount to the game.
The fact that Activision forced this upon Bungie is quite criminal, showing that all the publisher cared about was money, and not about the consistency of the game. With such a forceful interaction on Activision’s part some of Bungie’s key figures left the company, it was that bad and serious. Activision has simply ripped the soul out of that company and it’s heart-breaking to hear.
Hitman is another crazy strategy from Square Enix where instead of doing an episodic game, the publisher has the nerve to tell consumers that they should buy the game at full price with such little content. New content will be added throughout the development cycle when it’s ready. It seems to me that this is an excuse to throw the game out of the door just to help get funding. It sounds suspiciously like an Early Access game, something that Square Enix denies, but let’s face it, it clearly is an Early Access game no matter which way they spin the words.
How can the DLC issue be addressed?
So, what can publishers and developers do to try and make the DLC issue acceptable again? Well it should be pretty obvious to them, especially Ubisoft, that a game cannot, under any circumstances, be released in such a buggy mess that it will otherwise cause dissent amongst consumers towards the gaming industry. Another thing that is even more important is the use of DLC; strike it immediately from the seemingly paid patches and remove it from the purchasable games in-store. It feels very wrong to have a store within a game that you have already purchased.
There are some exceptions where having in-game purchases is acceptable, namely MMOs because they have servers to provide for. There is a place where this system can be used elsewhere but the nickel and diming is coming to a point where it is so over-saturated that it is putting too much pressure on the industry as a whole.
If developers, for the time being, could just go back to releasing a game and having large expansions, then it will be better initially. Once that is done then, sure, they should look into other payment models that could be implemented or abridged in the future, but not without many considerations and tests rather than throwing out something random to the consumer and expect them to be happy and go along with it.
These past years have been so messy that it makes me wish, sometimes, that I was never part of the industry, but then you have developers like Riot Games, Larian Studios, Epic Games, CD Projekt Red, and others that always seem to get it right and not piss off the consumers but embrace them instead.
Over the coming months I’ll be intently watching to see how the trend for DLC and patching continues. Hopefully, the people who buy the games will be put first, but until then I would urge consumers to stop pre-ordering pointless on-disc DLC to force developers and publishers to do the right thing from the outset.
What are your views on the current DLC and microtransaction situation?