TWINKEYRUNAWAY wrote:You DO get what you pay for. DLC typically isn't started until after the game has been submitted for certification.
When mass effect 3 came out, the prothian DLC found on the disk was on it during launch. I am no game developer, but from from a consumer stand point they had planned or rather held back content with these plans before the game was launched.
On-disc DLC is a little more grey, but you're still thinking in a limited fashion. Here's how game development works, regardless of what ends up on the disc at development (and it's worth mentioning that there's a timelapse between "submitted for certification" and gone gold) - games are basically contract work, drawn up as an agreement between a publisher and a developer. Once the developer's done making what the publisher has paid them to make, there's no incentive for:
a) The developer to make more without being paid for it (do
you just work extra hours for giggles?) or
b) The publisher to give away more than what they've paid for (their projections are tied into having the amount of content they planned for)
And while on-disc DLC is a little shady, don't pretend like every game that ever existed hasn't had some kind of cut content on its disc. And don't,
please don't, at risk of sounding like an entitled brat, act like games aren't "complete" because there's on-disc DLC (or any other kind of DLC). Listen, buddy, I played ME3. I played it without the Prothean DLC. I didn't notice any glaring, Prothean-shaped holes in the game as I played it. There's a vast difference between "full game" and "everything that's ever been made for a game." If the difference between "complete" and "incomplete" is 1 hour of trivial content in a 50-hour game (and it's not, like, the last hour of the game), I'd recommend reassessing your definitions of the words.
However there are companies like NeatherRelam Studios, bethesda and EA that will have one version of a game one year and re-release a more complete version the next year (and in some cases it isn't even a year).
Yes. Because who ever gets anything done in the span of
one full year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_pack
I don't mean to single you out, and by all means, vote with your wallet. That's smart. But stay smart, and educate yourself on how the industry works. Games cost far more to create than they used to and they cost less (adjusted for inflation) to buy. They often have more hours of meaningful content - many older games are long only by virtue of repetition. Triple-A studios are looking for different ways to monetize games (F2P, DLC) because they have to - AAA games get less and less sustainable as hardware requirements increase. As a consumer, of course I would
prefer getting all that extra stuff for free, but I'm not going to pitch a fit because I don't. And listen - I'll be happy to decry a game that deceptively omits an important component to a game to sell it a la carte later on. But getting upset about content that I only miss because I heard it exists? Nope.
