Publishers today are starting to move their attention towards DLC as a means to bring in more revenue after the release of the game. I personally have no issue with this itself, I am more than happy to support the developers of games that I love and in the past have purchased a huge amount of DLC content. However it's the downsides to this DLC frenzy that is slowly starting to take over the industry. With the shift towards DLC as a source of revenue, developers are starting to cut support for custom content in games. I have heard many reasons for this from developers including the comment from EA about fans being unable to use Frostbite 2, which as someone who has toyed around with creating content I was deeply offended by. What is starting to irritate me more though is that fact that we are seeing games released on much shorter life cycles, which are actually lacking content because developers want to shift DLC later on down the line.
Console games especially suffer from this problem, while PC is starting to move towards free to play to avoid this problem. One of the reasons that people are complaining about is the fact that single player games are now increasing in price, and having less content resulting in shorter completion times. RPG's such as Skyrim and Mass Effect don't really suffer from this, but shooter games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield can easily be completed in just a few hours. If you have no intentions of playing the multiplayer, this works out at around £10+ per hour of game play. That's a story for another day, as I am here to talk about day one DLC.
Releasing content on the first day is something I don't agree with if it is for a fully comercialised game retailing at £40+ R.R.P. DLC packs are usually around £6.99-11.99 on the Xbox, a price which usually translates on to the PS3 and PC releases. There is no reason that this content shouldn't already be on the disc come release, but even worse than that is developers pulling content out of the game to release as day one DLC. This is something that we are starting to see a trend with, which developers usually use the fact that the DLC comes with the collectors edition as an excuse for this. I wouldn't mind but it usually costs more to get the standard game and DLC than it would for the collectors editions which usually sell out fairly quickly. Battlefield 3 actually did this fine for me, as the content wasn't ready on release so they allowed you to download it for free in the future if you had the collectors edition.
Mass Effect 3 has however had its disc data mined, which has resulted in people finding half of the day one DLC already on the disc. This is yet another kick in the customers teeth from EA, who are very rapidly starting to show the industry that they actually don't care at all and are more interested in the short term than long term financial gains. It's the equivilant of buying a directors cut edition of a DVD, only to get home and find out that while the content is on the disc you need to pay extra to view it. I hope this is a practice that we see disappear very soon, but I sadly doubt that is the case.
With the rise of free to play games, and the rapid increase of mobile gaming on smart phones and tablets, big companies like EA will start to lose out a huge chunk of the market. It's not like the graphical quality or drive space of these devices is behind, the rumored iPad 3 specs is looking likely to be more powerful than the PS3. Big companies like EA and Activision could lose the huge share of the market they currently monopolise. When you look at the PC market, they don't seem to have even close to as big an impact at the minute and companies such as Valve and Riot are leading the way. The only foothold they have is Battlefield 3, which disappointed a lot of PC gamers who felt like they had been ignored for the console players, and Starcraft 2 which is currently a phenomon thanks to e-sport scene exploding has seen huge success.
Sadly it looks like day one DLC is here to stay. It's becoming more common and I can only see it being an expected feature in the future. With Microsoft and Sony trying to lock down their consoles even more and not allowing free to play becoming a feature, it seems to be a bleak future for console gamers. The casual players most likely won't stand for stuff like this and have no brand loyalties, they just play games because they are fun. The only people getting hurt here are the long term fans that put EA and Activision on the map, something neither company seems overly bothered about.
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