Bostur said:
Eric the Orange said:
Extra Credits makes an interesting counterpoint.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/mass-effect-3-dlc
Paraphrasing one of ECs counterpoint:
Publishers needs to get DLCs out quickly before people lose interest in the games.
That's indicative of a much larger problem: That most games just don't have any staying power anymore.
I apologize for the length of this reply, but there's a lot of forces at work here.
Feel free to skip to my conclusion.
Back before games had "DLC" they had "expansion packs" instead, the idea was to hold the player's interest for a longer period of time, SOMEHOW. Some games did this legitimately by providing more content, but some padded out the game's length (traditional repetition or worse, grind).
Some of them had strong modding support, and those were the sorts of games that lasted a LOOONG time (Morrowind and UT99 spring to mind).
That's in part because these games weren't designed to be beaten in a day then swiftly forgotten so they can get to the sequel. Why the change? Well, in part because of Tech/Graphics Inflation and the inflation of development costs, but an even larger part is just that the publisher wanted to make "blockbusters" where the games played in part like movies, first attempted (badly) by FMV games, but later re-pioneered by industry shakers like Squaresoft (Final Fantasy 7) and Bungie (Halo).
Gameplay and new mechanics began to become peripheral to cutscenes and glory-shots. Today, your generic shooter is likely to feature sweeping camera shots, fully-voiced cutscenes that last several minutes long, and "Baysplosions", often in the middle of a level.
(Which has its own profound effects on gameplay design, but goes beyond the scope of this already too long argument)
What I'm laboring towards is this: not only the amount of content the average game contains has decreased over time, but the TYPE of content has in part, taken away from gameplay. So in order to bring the play time closer to its old standard, they release DLC.
But just to make DLC a more appealing choice, most Publishers have gone out of their way to keep user-created-content out of their games. This is a big reason why consoles are the primary market over PCs; it gives the publisher a virtual monopoly on all post-sale content.
You think that single-player-only Phalanx rifle in ME2 was patched into the core game code for COMPATIBILITY? How well do you think it would sell if some amateur could mod something similar (or BETTER) into the game themselves?
The growing emphasis on multiplayer is done to keep people playing longer without actually adding much more content. Multiplayer is variant enough to accomplish this by itself as long as it doesn't suck.
In fact, all the elements Bioware added to ME3 seemed to be playing for time in ways that didn't require them to add to the overall story. This is the only rational reason I could think of for Bioware to add multiplayer to their narrative-driven trilogy, and so late in the game at that. It certainly wasn't because the combat might be good for it! Mass Effect's combat is childishly easy and bland to begin with.
(Yes, there are exceptions like Little Big Planet and the Bethesda mega-games, but they are by far the minority among AAA games.)
So the end result is this: Shorter, flashier games, backed the publisher flexing their monopoly power to shove as much DLC out as quickly as they can because they know their game isn't likely to sell strong for very long.
ASIDE:
Consider this: Used Games have higher resell value under such a system because gamers are far more willing to just buy it, beat it, and sell it back. If nobody perceives that the games will be worth keeping, then they have more reason to put more used games onto the market, and more quickly.
