DLC

Apologies for the radio silence of late - NaNoWriMo is being a pain in the backside, and while my attempt at a novel is indeed flowing towards a conclusion, the 'flow' is consistent to the sort of stuff you'd find oozing out of a sewer pipe, or a horse's arse for that matter.

Still, there's time for a small and poorly researched rant about the merits of DLC.  That's right - the merits.

A lot of people don't like the extra downloadable content that game developers occasionally market alongside their games.  There are a number of reasons why, so let's break them down:

• It costs too much.

In particular, I'm thinking of the furore surrounding the cost of the Horse Armour add-on in Oblivion, but there are lots of recent examples.  Crusader Kings II, or Empire: Total War for instance both charge an awful lot for software that doesn't seem to add very much to the game - be it 12 minutes of special music, or a unique unit.  For the most part though, DLC is marketed honestly.  When I look at a DLC that adds Mongol faces, I know that I'm unlikely to get unicorns or a new world to explore.  There may have been early mistakes, and even now games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution may have overpriced add-ons, but they aren't essential to the game experience.  So let the developers exploit collectors.  It does you no harm, and it does the developer a lot of good.

• It distracts from proper development.

There's an idea that tiddly little things like DLC slow down the production of other games, or proper expansion packs that add real value-for-money content.

Now, I don't think that's true - more likely it's a way of keeping in-house developers occupied' during the periods that they aren't needed.  Such periods (while rare), tend to be during the early stage of development of a new game.  Most Oblivion DLC was produced while Fallout 3 was in the early stages, and programmers weren't hitting crunch time to finish the game off.  It's simply a way for company's to keep on expertise during the slower days and not make a loss from doing so.

• It's stuff that should have been in the original game.

Except that due to time/money restraints they couldn't get it in there.  Time's usually the issue - there's an obligation to hit your release date once it's announced (or fans/potential buyers get pissy), and there are certain release periods that are no-go areas.  No-one wants their game to have to compete with a WoW expansion, or to miss the pre-Christmas buying bonanza.

And once the game's out, the funding from publishers for that game is pretty much gone.  So it's hard to justify getting programmers to work on completely free features and updates (Minecraft, being self-made, is an exception) because they should have been there - people cost a lot of money after all.  So at least by charging for it, developers can get the content out there without making losses.