Words by Greywolfe
Gaming is expensive, this much is a fact, but the industry is making it far worse through various means. Some of which I want to document here, but most of which I basically want to rail against, because...well, we’ve already established that I’m an old fart, and these new pricing models need to get off my lawn.
You'd open the box and it would contain a manual! A game disk! Sometimes extras!
Back When Buying A Box Meant Getting A Whole Game
I am from long ago and far away. In those olden times, when you walked into a computer store [or bought your games from a magazine catalogue] you’d generally go shopping for maybe one or two games – games that you figured you could trust, because review scores and word of mouth had lead you to the conclusion that those games were worth your time. Of course, this could be different: sometimes, you’d look at the back of the box and be blown away by what you saw there, so you picked that game up on a whim, but the important thing was: that was a whole product. Sure, sometimes you paid slightly more for your whole product, [because pricing metrics weren’t established then. In one sense, the modern industry’s “$60 game” is far more palatable than the daylight robbery that used to occur for certain cartridges] but when you put it into your system and played it, what you got at the end was what was exactly on the disk/cassette/cartridge.
Games would sometimes come with additional scenarios.
But That's Just One Scenario
Pretty soon, developers realized that they could capitalize on creating the art, sounds and game play for a given title by issuing scenario disks. These would take the original game and add extra story or new units or bonus missions to the game. Win/win. They didn’t cost as much as the base game, exactly because they were “scenarios.”
From this ethos sprang the idea of the expansion. And again, expansions were typically a great idea, because they would update the game with balance patches [if necessary] and add a ton of new, unique content that the base game never got. Lots of people swear by “Lord of Destruction,” Diablo II’s add-on, precisely because it enriched the game so much: Two new character classes, more story, a bigger stash, hirelings. All these things were not present in the original game and all of them grafted a new layer to Diablo II that ensured it’s longevity. Lots of people still have time for that game, even if its successor has come out, because it was just that polished [in the end, of course. And there are still balance issues, even now.]
Publishers don't see you, they see this.
Then Publishers Started Seeing Dollar Symbols
Before I start in on how bad this all has gotten, I want to make one thing very clear: Publishers have never been on the side of the consumer – or, for that matter, the developers. Developers want to make a great game that people can play and enjoy. Publishers are a semi-necessary [the landscape is quite different than it was when I started playing games] evil that give developers tools, space, money and time to build a game. For that particular privilege, very often, the developer signs its soul away. You don’t get to keep your IP, you live and die by how the publisher wants things and – if you’re lucky – the publisher pays you.
To get right back to the point-at-hand, publishers don’t see you. Not as a customer, anyway. They see you as a thief, and they worry about what you’re going to do with “the product,” right to the point where they often try to lock it down, but at the heart of all this is the fact that you are just a walking wallet to them.
The whole mess of downloadable content got started thanks to Oblivion’s horse armour. And it’s a misnomer to boot. If it’s just “downloadable,” then you shouldn’t have to pay for it, but alas, you needed to pay $2.50 for purely cosmetic armour that went on your horse. For it to actually constitute “downloadable content,” it should be free. So, instead, this misnomer should be renamed. Perhaps “paid downloadable content” would be a good name. It’s one extra letter that would more accurately reflect what you’re getting.
As we’ve gone along, downloadable content has gotten worse and has generally broken up a singular experience into little extra bits that you need to pay for. So your $60 game becomes $80. Or $90. While these little pieces of content are all incremental, they don’t do – generally – what an old expansion pack used to: they don’t rewrite the rules of the game and give you something new.
There are sidesteps in the DLC dance: sometimes, it’s on the disk when you buy the game and you have to pay extra to “unlock” [a bizarre term if ever there was one] the new stuff. Or worse, still, it’s “day 1 content” – stuff that should really have been on the disk, but which the publisher wants to sell you as an “added bonus.”
Then, too, there is “exclusive content” that you can only get if you pre-order the game – a broken practice if ever there was one. The idea, of course, is that you pay the publisher more up-front for a game you don’t know anything about in the hope that you’ll like it and want the “extra stuff” they’re giving you.
Or worse still, the platform exclusive, where a publisher put a great deal of money into what should have been a multiplatform release but isn’t, because of publisher [not developer] meddling.
All of this fragments the core game into pieces that people then struggle to talk about. Did you buy the version of the game from EB Games and get the exclusive two-week only DLC? Congratulations. My game is now vastly different from yours, because I ordered mine from GameStop. Can we talk about them? Yeah, kind of. But I can’t tell you about the secret mission on level two, because you don’t have it.
Games which started as whole products have become little puzzles for gamers to assemble.
In Conclusion
Is this healthy? No. It benefits exactly one set of people: the publishers. The developer might get lucky and might see a trickle of extra money, but the only people to whom any of this matters is the publisher. Gamers get stripped down games that they have to buy piecemeal – this is on top of their already considerable outlay on computer parts/console setups. Developers get additional headaches as they try to wrangle “the product” into a shape it was never meant to be in, and the publishers? They rub their greedy hands all the way to the bank.
