By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 9, 2011
It’s easy to see the positives when a game you love releases some exciting new downloadable content (DLC). However, the heavy focus on such extras has its share of detractors as well. Charging players of the game exorbitant amounts of money for new stuff—characters, levels, and even horse armour—is not the least of these downsides. Just recently, a DLC pack for the popular third-person-shooter Gears of War 3 (GoW3) created all kinds of controversy for the way it was charging players for content that was already included on the disk.
When GoW3 shipped their game, they included the first DLC “Horde Command Pack” for the game on the disk. However, in order to access the content, they needed to pay Epic Games $10 to unlock it. It opens up a number of ethical questions. Is it okay to sell players a disk and then sell them more and more parts of what is included on that disk as they go along? Is it fair to allow players to pay full price for a disk only to find out later on that part of what they paid for is not actually accessible until more money is paid?
Players may feel that the situation is relatively harmless in the case of GoW3, but it opens the door to practices that push the line even further. After all, the very point of DLC was to add content to the game that simply wasn’t available at the time of release. If that’s no longer the case, developers may start to charge for almost any part of the game they want.
A satirical, timely indie-game for the Xbox 360 called DLC Quest is capitalizing off the idea, pretending to charge players for every action they complete in the game, from the ability to move left to the ability to pause the game. The game even mocks Bethesda Softwork’s Oblivion by offering its now infamous horse armour DLC pack – in DLC Quest; the pointless armour ends up being the most expensive object in the game. It’s funny, but it might not be too far off the mark with the way things are headed. Thankfully, as a parody, the DLC can only be purchased with in-game coins.
In the case of GoW3, the decision to include the content on disk was actually part of a plan to avoid another annoying aspect about DLC. Rod Fergusson, executive director of GoW3, told Kotaku that the decision to include the content on the disk was justified because it enabled the team to avoid their original plan of forcing all those who bought the game to download the DLC to their hard drives even if they didn’t want it, so that their games would retain functionality in multiplayer matches with those who do buy it.
“One of the concerns was we would have to have people download compatibility packs because, with a big emphasis on the extra characters and weapons skins, that whole thing is a vanity play,” Fergusson said. “We felt it was a win/win because no one is going to have to download anything huge when the DLC comes out.” I suppose in this case the term “DLC” was theoretical, since all players had to download was a tiny “key” that would unlock the data already on their disks. Sure, GoW3 isn’t a small game, so it isn’t as though players are owed the content from the first DLC pack, but something just doesn’t feel right about selling additional content to gamers that was already available upon release. The fact that their original plan was even lamer does not justify the situation.
This really isn’t the first time similar tactics have been on display. For years it has been common practice for smaller games to force players to download the entire game in order to try out the demo – with a small DLC key needed to unlock the rest. That takes up a lot of space on a hard drive, and a lot of bandwidth to download. Fergusson also told Kotaku that there are multiple other companies that have tried to trick gamers into buying content they’d already downloaded. There is also the growing prevalence of “timed exclusive” DLC, which was most recently announced to Bethesda’s upcoming and highly-anticipated Skyrim. According to Microsoft, gamers using platforms other than the Xbox 360 will be forced to wait an additional 30 days after the game’s DLC packs are released before they can play it.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about these tactics is that it feels as though the gamer is not being treated with respect. It’s a straight-up money grab. It’s time that gamers stopped playing into the hands of these maneuvers, and started demanding better treatment. If not, DLC Quest might end up being less of a parody and more of a prophecy.
