Making DLC work

I think that you are making a good case that DLC is almost impossible to pull off in a way that is satisfying to the customer. You can't forget that games are art. Art initiates financial momentum when it honestly and successfully evokes the desired emotional response from an audience. When it fails to do that, it acts as a force against that momentum. The resulting time delay is the reason why bad art can succeed and good art can fail. When people expect good art, they buy. When they expect bad art, they don't buy. The financial success or failure of a work depends a great deal on works that came before.

When the few artists create great art, they create opportunities for many non-artists to cash in, who then in turn 'dry up the well' of expectation with phony works. Making quality art is very difficult, even for artists, while cashing in on others success is easy for those who are skilled in making money. This is how industries that revolve around art tend to eat themselves and go through crashes and rebirths. It's wonderful to see a new art form take flight and change the world, but then again everyone suffers when all you have left is nostalgia because the conditions to recognize quality art just aren't there anymore.

A game represents a total experience that you cannot simply divide up at will any more than you can cut up a Renior and sell 3 fifths of it. When you make a game, you want to create lasting memories. In order to do that you need to control the experience as much as possible. When you remove pieces from the work, or add pieces later that are not needed, you can only relinquish control. To restate for emphasis: You cannot increase the quality of the work by removing important content, nor by adding unimportant content! In fact, quality art depends upon keeping only what is necessary, and purging everything that is not! This is why DLC is mutually exclusive with quality art, as it violates one of its fundamental principles. What's needed is needed, and what's not needed should not exist.

DLC is a marketing ploy that has no place in quality art. It is merely a tool for those drying up the well of consumer expectations. It is a force of great evil that can only destroy.

Here is a link to my Civ5 DLC experiences that I think illustrate my argument pretty well.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/406061/page/1/#2899919

The great thing about DLC is that people are disatisfied with it AND still buy the shit. 

These are the three problems with DLC:

1) when people buy it, but don't buy enough of it to justify the cost of making it.

2) when companies make it, but don't put enough work into making it to satisfy the customer purchasing it, causing a loss of good will.

3) when companies make it expecting reams of cash, and forgo other, more lucrative business opportunities to do so.

I hope though that no one mistakes me as saying it's always bad; it can be done in a satisfactory way, but it is a new market that is poorly understood and the blunders made in it have soured the appetite of gamers, especially where DLC strategies are undertaken at the expense of a gamer's enjoyment of the game rather than to further it for an economically sound value.

Are you sure your fundamental assement of DLC not working is accurate?  I have a strong feeling that it IS working and it is working well for the businesses that use it.  I admitedly didn't read much of your post, so I might be mistaken. It might have a bad reputation, but that doesn't keep people from buying it.

I'm not a fan of DLC, but this point has a flip side: developers can become more responsive to the people actually paying for the game (rather then the loudest people on the forum). Cosmetic enhancements are great DLC because they don't affect gameplay, they're not something you can sell as a full blown expansion without being shredded by reviewers and your forum goers, and they are VERY popular with some segments of the playerbase.

Stuff like companion pets in WoW, different armor skins, guns with super crazy laser effects, shiny new models, and so on. If 1000 people buy it for $5, you get $5000. If it took one employee a week to make it, you're both well in the black and putting out something that your customers either enjoy, or aren't negatively impacted by. That also gives you money to make more of that kind of thing. You know when to stop when it stops selling, and the risk is far lower then spending 9 months building a huge expansion.

There's also a much greater cost in making a large expansion, and if you put it out too soon you can alienate customers (or too late and they'll be gone by time you are ready to ship). The expansion model is better when you're changing game mechanics then DLC is with the way DLC is handled right now, but it's a model based around the premise of shipping disks in boxes to stores and that isn't really true anymore. We can do it better.

 

Absolutely, and also true for modding and expansions . Getting the base game right is EVERYTHING. If people don't like that, nothing else you do will matter.

This will depend on a lot of things, but mostly on the type of playerbase you have. Bethesda's games don't lend themselves well to "horse armor" because only you see it, and it's not a game you're going to repeat a bunch of times. Their pricing also wasn't the best on that. Blizzard sells entirely cosmetic stuff for WoW and they sell hundreds of thousands of units.

The difference is that in WoW I can buy it once and keep using it for years, and other people can see it. It's a game with players who care a lot more about their character's appearance (and not just on the high end, good looking clothes that are entirely non-functional in combat are popular items to farm and craft for).

Lowering the cost of production matters too. Tools help with that, if it's easier for your design team to create quests, you can either put out more of them or charge less per (and get more buyers). It's hard to lower the cost of new art asssts, which is why you see so much recycling.

Yeah, it's definitely harder in MP. I don't think you can sell game mechanics changes as DLC, and you really can't do it like they did with different permutations. If they added a third one to that model it'd be so complicated as to be a disaster.

Expansions pose the same problems though, and it's only really gotten around because the expansion eventually becomes mandatory to play otherwise you can't find any players (because everybody else has the expansion).

That one is hard to solve.

You might be confusing financial success with artistic success. I don't follow the biz closely any more because I haven't seen a recovery from the kind of crash that cephalo describes in reply 1, which happened for me around Civ II/MoO III. Since the turn of the century, the TBS genre as a whole seems buried in the work of profiteering hacks, with rare exceptions like GalCiv II.

Yes, see my comment here:

I would not agree with Xia's assessment, but offering evidence would require me to decloak and stop being an anonymous consumer.

DLC is working for some companies. It works very well when there is a huge market, or when the cost of production is low. WoW is a captive market with massive numbers that really shine, since they both hit areas. It would be difficult to understate just how much money Blizzard is pulling in from that DLC; it numbers in the literal millions, far more in sales than even many triple A titles.

That said, applying Blizzard's model to a company like Stardock (or really, most video game companies that aren't in the 1 B range) is like trying to model your Mom & Pop burger joint after McDonalds. Failure will result.

I agree. Atari had an easier time of it: their expansions to the NWN series brought new content that the modders embraced enthusiastically. The community itself actively promoted the product and moved to each expansion with gusto. In 2006 they had, among people still playing the game actively, an unbelievable 99% conversion rate. Anybody would kill for that.

Not unless you're getting a loan to pay for DLC development, no, you generally develop with the money you actually have and hope the returns justify it. If you can spend money you haven't got yet then I'd love to know which bank you're with. In fact it doesn't cost companies extra at all. The advantage of DLC is it's relatively small, and since you've already got the base game done requires far less co-ordination. This makes it ideal to work on in what would otherwise be downtime - rather than paying your coders to come in and twiddle their thumbs while you wait for the Q&A department to approve the latest patch, you have them working on DLC. It's no loss to the company, since you'd be paying them anyway. The difference is, they're now doing something productive.

 It's particularly an issue for any multi-format release. It takes up to three months for Microsoft to certify a game ready for launch on the X-box, it's better to have the team produce two or three DLC titles in that time rather than have them sit around doing nothing.

Became a non-issue when PC titles vanished from the retail space. In fact, I suspect getting your game on Steam at the moment is worth far more than a retail release, particularly if you're a smaller company who can't afford a full on marketing campaign. Certainly that's what the indie market are saying.

Not necessarily. Alexandria was DLC released for Children of the Nile, it came four years after the release of the game. The developers stated on their forum they'd sold more copies of the game post-Alexandria than they had prior to it.

And DLC can also be packaged into gold versions. See Empire/Napoleon Total War GOTY edition, Oblivion GOTY etc.

How would that work? If it's niche DLC, we're assuming only a small portion of the user base will buy it, so how could that harm the image of the DLC for the majority, who'll never play it? The thing to note about DLC is it's considerably cheaper than developing the full game and doesn't have to bring back a lot of money to pay for itself. Hence it's ideal for exploring aspects of the game that would only appeal to a certain niche of the user base; certainly it's a lot cheaper than trying to do so while in development.

 Again, look at the Empire / Napoleon TW DLC. Most of it is reskins of units only likely to appeal to those interested in history, yet it sold quite well. Or look at Railworks 2 on Steam, I'd argue the entire game is niche, the DLC moreso (we're talking £5 to have a train reskinned in the precise 1980 - 1990 livery of WestCoast rail) yet it's evidently successful, as evinced by the fact there's more than £150 worth of it on Steam right now. Then there's Battlefront's games, again a fairly niche market in which they quite successfully sell DLC, and even justify above average prices on the basis of it being niche.

Total War and Dawn of War both managed fine with it. One by being fully compatible with the base game, the other by being single player only. Then you have AI War which lets you deactivate DLC content to allow you to play with those who don't have it, or lets them play with the DLC in trial mode (time limited). Multiplayer is only a problem if you assume the developers have the IQ of a sponge.

It does? You should mention this to EA, Bethesda, Bioware, Activision, Ubisoft and a host of other companies. They'll no doubt be surprised to learn that DLC has negative publicity, considering they've been selling it by the bucketload for the past five years. I think you're confusing a vocal minority with the majority.

My first post was so long winded that I actually violated the principle I was trying to put forward, so let me get to the heart of the matter.

DLC must either consist of important content, without which the original work must suffer, or it must consist of unimportant content that has little or no value. Therefore it is mutually exclusive with quality art.

Respectfully, the present tense of this proclamation indicates you and I inhabit different realities. A continued discourse between you and me would be futile and serve neither of our interests.

I agree. The way to make DLC work is that customers know from the begining how much stuff goes in each game/expansion/DLC and how much will it cost.

It is much better to say "We are releasing the game with 3 factions, and 3 more will be released in the form of DLC" than not saying anything, and then "suddenly" selling those 3 extra factions.

And of course customers should not feel that those 3 factions have been removed from the game just to be able to sell them later. Tey must see that having only 3 factions at the begining has made the game either cheaper or better (or both).

Isn't that impossible though? You can only design the game for either 3 factions or 6 factions. If you design for 3 factions, than the additional 3 can only be superfluous, If you design for 6 and release 3, you are releasing an unsatisfying, unfinished product.

You might, with certain constraints, design a game for an unkown number of factions, but then you are making things hard. It's like trying to create the next pop star, but limiting yourself to only using camels. "Gurrrglegurglegurgle" might top the charts initially from the novelty of it, but you can't build an industry on that. Your only chance to make a great game is to throw out all these useless considerations and focus entirely on the play experience.