Therumancer said:
I'm glad we returned to the topic at hand, I was concerned it had been lost.
Careful with the word "make". I purchased Soul Calibur IV, but did not purchase a single costume DLC. If I purchased the game and it stated "game code incomplete - purchase additional content to enable play", that would be making me spend money.
Each industry has shiny additions to the core product - not required for functionality but desirable. Cars and alloy wheels for one, maybe cars should already come with alloy wheels?
If we get to the stage where endings to games have to be purchased individually then I'll come to your side of the fence and join the rally against DLC.
At the moment I'm happy with it, DLC is just another variant of money making, much like a collector's edition.
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With the numbers given, $4.00 a pop profit was enough to justify the production, as that was what 1C which is a fairly big Russian company was making off of a $20 box game. With that being enough to justify the industry pushing to more than double that amount of money becomes pure greed in action.
As I have said in other posts, just because the amount of money being spent on developing games increases does NOT mean that increasing budget is justified by anything other than greed. In this case it's developers like Itigaki who get into fights over contracts worth tens of millions of dollars and things like that. I have no problem with seeking a profit but when you look at things like that and them wanting to kick the costs of increasingly ridiculous paydays back to me, I do not consider that reasonable. Basically the desire to raise prices is not because the current scale, or the one that existed BEFORE the most recent $10 increase was not generating a decent profit, but because the industry figures they could be gouging the semi-addicted hardcore gamer for more. It's about increasing levels of greed at all levels from producers, to developers whose expectations increasingly grow more ridiculous. Of course the same can be said about business in general where it's deemed that making a profit isn't enough, it's about how much "growth" you achieve and companies oftentimes try and claim with a straight face that if they didn't reach a projected growth goal they actually lost money... it seems that attitude is increasingly present in the gaming industry as well. I have no sympathy for someone crying that they only made 100 million in pure profit when they assumed ahead of time that they should get 150 million and a couple of people have to put their plans to purchuse gold plated private jets on hold.
What's more the actual cost of materials in producing games isn't that high. The money goes totally towards paying human resources. So basically what this means is that a game with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in development budget is effectively giving that money to the people developing the game, one way or another it's getting spread among the people involved. Even with seveal hundred or even a thousand people involved that is a truely staggering amount of money. Whether the majority of the money goes to guys like Itigaki, to pay codemonkeys tons of cash for writing lines of code, or both things, your basically looking at something that borders on the ridiculous. The rising "cost" of games is actually the rising greed of the game developers who demand producers provide increasingly lavish sums of money.
Now normally I wouldn't care, as I am all for people making a profit, if we didn't have people trying to claim with a straight face that the game industry somehow actually *needs* to bring in more money via price hikes, and DLC. They need no such thing, they can make a pretty bloody good living as things have been and have been proving it. It's all about the greedy wanting more, and trying to find a way of justifying it to a consumer base they are increasingly detached from.
$50 is a substantial chunk of change out of someone's paycheck as it was, $60 is more so. The desire for another $10 price increase is even worse. Then if you add another $20-$30 worth of DLC to get 'everything' your rapidly looking at a product that easily costs as much as a month's gas or groceries (depending on the person). It's even more ridiculous when you consider that we're in an economic slump, and probably will be for a while to come. As dismissive as some game companies are, comparing the price to say heading out for a steak dinner or whatever, it tends to be overlooked that buying a couple of games is a major investment for a normal person, and comes at the expense of being able to do other things. With a steadily increasing price, it is going to become an even bigger investment. The current attitude is more or less the gaming industry trying to see how far they can push things before it bursts, rather than trying to simply provide a profitable product that people can easily afford.
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As far as DLC itself goes, a big part of my point is that the extra costumes in fighting games and such have been a part of the product for pretty much as long as they have existed. PS-1, PS-2, etc... alternative costumes (if they existed) were one of the incentives added for people putting time into the game. Part of the cost of the product. With the current gen and DLC, your now seeing what was a feature being removed and sold seperatly.
As far as it being difficult to "prove", if you hang out on Gamefaqs you will notice that when games come out a lot of people sit down and go through the code, and are able to predict what is coming out in mnany cases by information already on the disc. To use Soul Calibur IV for example, the Darth Vader/Yoda data was pretty much present on all versions of the game. When the period of exclusivity was over with, people were charged ($5) to unlock the character on their disc when it was pretty much always there. Another good indication is when a DL for DLC is tiny, in which case it's not actually providing any new graphics/sound/whatever but simply opening up stuff that is already ont he disc to begin with. In many cases getting far more obnoxious than the whole "Vader/Yoda" thing.
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In response to another post I received here, being able to play a game like Borderlands without something like an item chest does not make a feature like that any less integral to the experience since it's a massive conveinence, and has been a staple of the genere for a long time for a reason. I see it as being very similar to the whole "costumes for fighting game characters" thing, the only reason it's NOT in the game when it always had been before is because they figure they can make people pay extra for it.
