This topic is not about the morality of including DLC with Portal 2. If you want to talk about that, please do so elsewhere.
Probably everybody knows what this is about, but to recap: Valve included a store with Portal 2 where you can buy purely cosmetic (meaningless) items for the co-op part of the game. These items are disproportionately expensive compared to the rest of the game. There has been a lot of discussion here and elsewhere about whether this day 1 DLC is evil and Valve is betraying/extorting gamers etc. Some people have "bombed" the game's Metacritic score because of this.
I don't want to talk about the evils of day 1 DLC in this topic. There are already plenty of places where that is being discussed. What I wonder is whether making this DLC will turn out to make good or bad business sense. It will almost purely be speculation, but let's think about this.
On the one hand, every sold hat probably has an incredible ratio of profit to development costs. However, those development costs are still there, and presumably a certain number of items have to be sold to break even on the DLC. As Shamus Young points out in the text accompanying the latest Stolen Pixels [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/8827-Stolen-Pixels-A-Hat-for-Every-Head], there isn't exactly a lot of incentive to buy these items. They are relatively expensive, and you will only be able to "enjoy" them in the ~5 hour long multiplayer campaign that doesn't really have a lot of replay value.
Additionally, it seems that including the controversial day 1 DLC might have cost them some sales of the game itself. Some people may have boycotted the game, and some may have been turned off from buying it due to all the criticisms and (lower than it would otherwise have been) Metacritic scores.
So, regardless of how you feel about the inclusion of this DLC, do you think it was a wise move by Valve?
Edit: Some people have pointed out that the "game stuff" is technically not DLC. It doesn't matter. It's extra game stuff (apparently it can't be called content either) that was included with the game, and you have to pay extra to use it.
The point is that there is a controversy about it, and this thread is meant to speculate about whether that controversy will cost Valve money (that they're not making back with profit from the store/DLC). I only included the evil/non-evil clauses in the poll because I figured people may have biased views on the profitability of this based on what they think about the DLC to begin with. That was probably a mistake.
Probably everybody knows what this is about, but to recap: Valve included a store with Portal 2 where you can buy purely cosmetic (meaningless) items for the co-op part of the game. These items are disproportionately expensive compared to the rest of the game. There has been a lot of discussion here and elsewhere about whether this day 1 DLC is evil and Valve is betraying/extorting gamers etc. Some people have "bombed" the game's Metacritic score because of this.
I don't want to talk about the evils of day 1 DLC in this topic. There are already plenty of places where that is being discussed. What I wonder is whether making this DLC will turn out to make good or bad business sense. It will almost purely be speculation, but let's think about this.
On the one hand, every sold hat probably has an incredible ratio of profit to development costs. However, those development costs are still there, and presumably a certain number of items have to be sold to break even on the DLC. As Shamus Young points out in the text accompanying the latest Stolen Pixels [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/8827-Stolen-Pixels-A-Hat-for-Every-Head], there isn't exactly a lot of incentive to buy these items. They are relatively expensive, and you will only be able to "enjoy" them in the ~5 hour long multiplayer campaign that doesn't really have a lot of replay value.
Additionally, it seems that including the controversial day 1 DLC might have cost them some sales of the game itself. Some people may have boycotted the game, and some may have been turned off from buying it due to all the criticisms and (lower than it would otherwise have been) Metacritic scores.
So, regardless of how you feel about the inclusion of this DLC, do you think it was a wise move by Valve?
Edit: Some people have pointed out that the "game stuff" is technically not DLC. It doesn't matter. It's extra game stuff (apparently it can't be called content either) that was included with the game, and you have to pay extra to use it.
The point is that there is a controversy about it, and this thread is meant to speculate about whether that controversy will cost Valve money (that they're not making back with profit from the store/DLC). I only included the evil/non-evil clauses in the poll because I figured people may have biased views on the profitability of this based on what they think about the DLC to begin with. That was probably a mistake.