In the past, oh say, 5 years, the gaming industry has seen a massive shift in the way games are cared for throughout their lifespan. It used to be that you ponied up a decent chunk of change for a new game and you played it for a while. Then, if it was a popular enough game, along would come an expansion pack for about half the price of the original game, and it would extend the life of the game for a year or so and have a considerable amount of content in it to do so. These used to be things that you bought, in a store, on disc.
However, in the last 10 years, internet speeds have increased dramatically and made the distribution of expansion content fast, easy, and convenient. This has particularly had a profound impact on the console market, where expansion content was nearly non-existent in previous generations. Now that everyone can download expansion content on nearly a whim, it's resulted in smaller and smaller content releases. A game developer no longer has to wait an entire two or so years to compile enough content to justify printing thousands of copies and sending them to Best Buy stores and Gamestop stores. They can produce a couple maps, a few new quests, and release it to the masses quickly and efficiently and without the cost of printing it onto physical storage media. Sounds great, right? Wrong.
The problem with this, is that the ever shrinking size of content, and increasing frequency of releases makes the content itself more expensive in the end. And the ease of distributing content makes game developers and publishers update a game's content far too frequently, all for the sake of making money. I'll give you a by-the-numbers example:
Take one of my favorite games: Battlefield 3. I talk about it all the time, and my friends are sick of me talking about it all the damn time. I just simply love it. Or at least, I did. Unfortunately, my old friend and I are somewhat disenchanted from one another as of late. See, recently, DICE and EA announced a whole slew of new expansion DLC packs for the popular FPS. Four. That's right, four. Which brings the total up to 5, by the time they'll stop making content. All of which are themed to showcase all the crazy variety and awesomeness of Battlefield. Back to Karkand, Close Quarters, Armored Kill, Aftermath, and End Game. Each of these will be $15 a-la-carte. Or you can opt for the "Premium" option. For a one time fee of $50 you can get all 5 of them, plus a bunch of fancy extras, some of which are actually pretty cool. So if one were to buy the expansions a-la-carte, you will have spent $135 to play Battlefield. If you opt for Battlefield Premium, you will have spent $110 all told. And the fans, such as myself, will be playing for years, despite the entire time of development for the game's extra content being just more than one year, by the time End Game hits. Now that's all fine and dandy if you've got the change. But what about those that don't? Such as myself. Right now, millions of gamers are enjoying Close Quarters and I'm not. I simply can't afford to buy it right now, even a-la-carte. And I don't want to play, unless I'm playing with all the "big kids". And anybody whose a "big kid" playing BF3, is up to date and enjoying the latest, let me assure you.
All this leads me to feel alienated from the game I love so much. I just don't want to pick up my controller to play if I can't be mixing it up with the good players in the latest maps, enjoying new weapons to upgrade and unlockables to be had. I just plain feel left out. And so I got to thinking about this whole thing, and I had the epiphany: "What the hell is the point of all of this content?" Why does DICE need to release a few new maps and guns and assignments every couple of months? What the hell was wrong with Battlefield 3 that it needed to be updated. Just think about how much content there'll be in a short time when there's 5 expansions floating around. On average, each pack has about 4 or 5 new maps, about 10 new weapons, a few new vehichles, and other assorted additions. And if my memory serves, the game shipped with 8 maps, and around 30 weapons. So by the time all of this junk is all out there, you're looking at like 30ish maps and 80ish weapons, give or take. What. The. Fuck. DICE? Or rather, should I point the finger at EA? The massive beast of a publisher that bought them.
There's no need for all this nonsensical content! Battlefield 3 is a great game. It simply doesn't need a bajillion things in it. Star Craft had one normally sized expansion and a campaign editor, and people still play it religiously, despite it being more than 14 fucking years old! Blizzard didn't waste their time adding senseless crap onto it. They spent their time more wisely devoting their time to making sequels that took them years to perfect.
But now that expansions are so quick and easy to distribute, it makes it more worth the time and investment by publishers, like, oh I don't know, EA, to tell their minion game developers to pump time and effort into just throwing as much crap at a game as they can. Now, you've got gamers ponying up far more money than they would have (even accounting for inflation) 5 or 6 years ago for new content. Now, we expect new maps to play around in every few months from our developers. And you have people like me, relatively poor people, who have to make a decent investment just to buy the game outright, and then suffer while they watch all the cool kids go on to the new shiny toys while we're left in the corner playing with last year's crappy model. Which just makes you want to not play at all. And it's all unnecessary. You don't need to cloud a game's real genius with arbitrary bullshit. Let it be what it is. Don't milk your fan base for all their worth. You'll end up making enemies of them.
DLC was supposed to bring ease and convenience to gaming. It's done that most definitely. But inadvertently, I think, it's caused publishers and developers to get dollar signs in their eyes when they realize how easy it is to distribute any content they want to make. And it's caused some of us to become outsiders looking in, as friends play in sandboxes we just can't afford to. I'm now in staunch protest of quick, easy expansions for games.
However, in the last 10 years, internet speeds have increased dramatically and made the distribution of expansion content fast, easy, and convenient. This has particularly had a profound impact on the console market, where expansion content was nearly non-existent in previous generations. Now that everyone can download expansion content on nearly a whim, it's resulted in smaller and smaller content releases. A game developer no longer has to wait an entire two or so years to compile enough content to justify printing thousands of copies and sending them to Best Buy stores and Gamestop stores. They can produce a couple maps, a few new quests, and release it to the masses quickly and efficiently and without the cost of printing it onto physical storage media. Sounds great, right? Wrong.The problem with this, is that the ever shrinking size of content, and increasing frequency of releases makes the content itself more expensive in the end. And the ease of distributing content makes game developers and publishers update a game's content far too frequently, all for the sake of making money. I'll give you a by-the-numbers example:
Take one of my favorite games: Battlefield 3. I talk about it all the time, and my friends are sick of me talking about it all the damn time. I just simply love it. Or at least, I did. Unfortunately, my old friend and I are somewhat disenchanted from one another as of late. See, recently, DICE and EA announced a whole slew of new expansion DLC packs for the popular FPS. Four. That's right, four. Which brings the total up to 5, by the time they'll stop making content. All of which are themed to showcase all the crazy variety and awesomeness of Battlefield. Back to Karkand, Close Quarters, Armored Kill, Aftermath, and End Game. Each of these will be $15 a-la-carte. Or you can opt for the "Premium" option. For a one time fee of $50 you can get all 5 of them, plus a bunch of fancy extras, some of which are actually pretty cool. So if one were to buy the expansions a-la-carte, you will have spent $135 to play Battlefield. If you opt for Battlefield Premium, you will have spent $110 all told. And the fans, such as myself, will be playing for years, despite the entire time of development for the game's extra content being just more than one year, by the time End Game hits. Now that's all fine and dandy if you've got the change. But what about those that don't? Such as myself. Right now, millions of gamers are enjoying Close Quarters and I'm not. I simply can't afford to buy it right now, even a-la-carte. And I don't want to play, unless I'm playing with all the "big kids". And anybody whose a "big kid" playing BF3, is up to date and enjoying the latest, let me assure you.
All this leads me to feel alienated from the game I love so much. I just don't want to pick up my controller to play if I can't be mixing it up with the good players in the latest maps, enjoying new weapons to upgrade and unlockables to be had. I just plain feel left out. And so I got to thinking about this whole thing, and I had the epiphany: "What the hell is the point of all of this content?" Why does DICE need to release a few new maps and guns and assignments every couple of months? What the hell was wrong with Battlefield 3 that it needed to be updated. Just think about how much content there'll be in a short time when there's 5 expansions floating around. On average, each pack has about 4 or 5 new maps, about 10 new weapons, a few new vehichles, and other assorted additions. And if my memory serves, the game shipped with 8 maps, and around 30 weapons. So by the time all of this junk is all out there, you're looking at like 30ish maps and 80ish weapons, give or take. What. The. Fuck. DICE? Or rather, should I point the finger at EA? The massive beast of a publisher that bought them.
There's no need for all this nonsensical content! Battlefield 3 is a great game. It simply doesn't need a bajillion things in it. Star Craft had one normally sized expansion and a campaign editor, and people still play it religiously, despite it being more than 14 fucking years old! Blizzard didn't waste their time adding senseless crap onto it. They spent their time more wisely devoting their time to making sequels that took them years to perfect.
But now that expansions are so quick and easy to distribute, it makes it more worth the time and investment by publishers, like, oh I don't know, EA, to tell their minion game developers to pump time and effort into just throwing as much crap at a game as they can. Now, you've got gamers ponying up far more money than they would have (even accounting for inflation) 5 or 6 years ago for new content. Now, we expect new maps to play around in every few months from our developers. And you have people like me, relatively poor people, who have to make a decent investment just to buy the game outright, and then suffer while they watch all the cool kids go on to the new shiny toys while we're left in the corner playing with last year's crappy model. Which just makes you want to not play at all. And it's all unnecessary. You don't need to cloud a game's real genius with arbitrary bullshit. Let it be what it is. Don't milk your fan base for all their worth. You'll end up making enemies of them.
DLC was supposed to bring ease and convenience to gaming. It's done that most definitely. But inadvertently, I think, it's caused publishers and developers to get dollar signs in their eyes when they realize how easy it is to distribute any content they want to make. And it's caused some of us to become outsiders looking in, as friends play in sandboxes we just can't afford to. I'm now in staunch protest of quick, easy expansions for games.
