30th August 2009, 1:35 PM
Basically this is a rant thread on the various abuses many companies have thrust upon us in this new era of downloadable content.
I will preface this with a note that I love DC, I love the concept and many developers do use it to the fullest to truly expand on a game, such as the Brotherhood of Steel pack for Fallout 3. I do this even though I'm sure people will STILL, as they often do, accuse me of hating the technology in spite of the fact I said I love it. I just hate the abuses some companies do.
With that, on with the rant!
One abuse that borders on the criminal is the downloadable "key" to unlock content that is, for a fact, already on the disk of the game you just bought. Whether free or charged, though the latter is certainly worse, this is a practice that needs to stop. There is no reason at all that I should ever have to unlock content in my game that is already in the game via a download from somewhere else. Now admittedly this practice has lessened somewhat. I'll note that it's original form was developed by Nintendo with their cruel "link up" tech which forced people to buy, say, the Gameboy version of a game to unlock content in the N64 version.
Allow me to clarify. I am not talking about content that is NOT already in the game. I'm not even talking about content that is sort of on the disk but in an unfinished state where a patch provided online adds it in by repairing or finishing the content. I'm specifically talking about 1KB files that do nothing more than tell your game "okay let them access this content now". I would say that when one actually has to pay for it, it's probably illegal. I believe there are consumer protection laws that outlaw charging a customer for the same product twice, which such a practice is, in a very literal sense, doing. Thou art guilty.
This leads me to another version of this that is more morally nebulous but still rather questionable. This is the fairly recent act of selling downloadable content for a game on day one. What this says is basically that you had the content already completed, but to make more money out of the game you decided to intentionally cut it from the game and force it as an extra purchase. Any reasonable person could figure out for a fact that had this game been released in the absence of DC, that content would be IN the game proper from the start as they'd have no reason to cut it. This isn't content they didn't have time to finish, or content they later thought up to expand the game, this is just some random bit of content they cut exclusively to boost their profits. It's morally nebulous because you never paid for it to begin with so it's not like one can make demands, but still is very much a seedy move you know they didn't have to make. Thou art... suspiciuos.
These two lead me to what I consider the newest and greatest of the DC sins. The "time limited exclusive download". This is basically what keeps Gamestop in business alone these days. As of late, more and more games are offering collector's editions with all sorts of extras from cloth maps to "making of" DVDs to helmets to batarangs. Do what they will, that extra stuff is costly to add to the set and for those that can afford it, great, it's all very well and good that such things are limited runs while the cheaper to make stuff with just the game gets a full run. Totally understandable so far. However to really set them "apart" too many companies have adopted the strategy of pre-order EXCLUSIVE GAMEPLAY CONTENT! This is a slap in the face more than anything. It reeks of both of the sins mentioned above, but more than that, they have forced scarcity they're shoving around. Whatever you may say about the first two, at the very least, it's still THERE, you can always get that content even if you wait a while. With this, if you missed out on the preorder for whatever reason, it's gone, that content is gone forever.
One might try to defend the practice by noting that often it's just something cosmetic like a golden chainsaw gun, but very often it's something more like an entire level or custom equipment or custom stages.
However there's something much worse than that. No other medium could ever get away with this. Can you imagine if a new Harry Potter book came out, but with a pre-order EXCLUSIVE CHAPTER that no one else gets to read? How about a pre-order EXCLUSIVE SCENE in a new Batman movie that no one else gets to see? People would complain and rightly so, so why do we let EXCLUSIVE PREORDER GAMEPLAY slide by without so much as a minor complaint? Normally the strategy is to ADD content to a game as time goes on, that's the advantage of DC. However, some marketers in some room have managed to actually turn this around and use DC to REMOVE content from a game shortly after it comes out! This is not the future, this isn't even the past! It's just stupid. What of those poor collectors years from now? Will any of these exclusive levels in games like Arkham Asylum or Fable 2 ever be obtainable by them? Heck what of some guy that just heard about the game and wants to pick it up? Did the geniuses that thought up this crazy plan ever consider that maybe someone who realizes they can't ever get the full game might just decide "oh well screw it" and move on to something else instead, like say from a company like Nintendo that, for all the faults one might find, never jerks around their customers in this fasion? For this sin, I judge thee super double dip guilty pants!
I will preface this with a note that I love DC, I love the concept and many developers do use it to the fullest to truly expand on a game, such as the Brotherhood of Steel pack for Fallout 3. I do this even though I'm sure people will STILL, as they often do, accuse me of hating the technology in spite of the fact I said I love it. I just hate the abuses some companies do.
With that, on with the rant!
One abuse that borders on the criminal is the downloadable "key" to unlock content that is, for a fact, already on the disk of the game you just bought. Whether free or charged, though the latter is certainly worse, this is a practice that needs to stop. There is no reason at all that I should ever have to unlock content in my game that is already in the game via a download from somewhere else. Now admittedly this practice has lessened somewhat. I'll note that it's original form was developed by Nintendo with their cruel "link up" tech which forced people to buy, say, the Gameboy version of a game to unlock content in the N64 version.
Allow me to clarify. I am not talking about content that is NOT already in the game. I'm not even talking about content that is sort of on the disk but in an unfinished state where a patch provided online adds it in by repairing or finishing the content. I'm specifically talking about 1KB files that do nothing more than tell your game "okay let them access this content now". I would say that when one actually has to pay for it, it's probably illegal. I believe there are consumer protection laws that outlaw charging a customer for the same product twice, which such a practice is, in a very literal sense, doing. Thou art guilty.
This leads me to another version of this that is more morally nebulous but still rather questionable. This is the fairly recent act of selling downloadable content for a game on day one. What this says is basically that you had the content already completed, but to make more money out of the game you decided to intentionally cut it from the game and force it as an extra purchase. Any reasonable person could figure out for a fact that had this game been released in the absence of DC, that content would be IN the game proper from the start as they'd have no reason to cut it. This isn't content they didn't have time to finish, or content they later thought up to expand the game, this is just some random bit of content they cut exclusively to boost their profits. It's morally nebulous because you never paid for it to begin with so it's not like one can make demands, but still is very much a seedy move you know they didn't have to make. Thou art... suspiciuos.
These two lead me to what I consider the newest and greatest of the DC sins. The "time limited exclusive download". This is basically what keeps Gamestop in business alone these days. As of late, more and more games are offering collector's editions with all sorts of extras from cloth maps to "making of" DVDs to helmets to batarangs. Do what they will, that extra stuff is costly to add to the set and for those that can afford it, great, it's all very well and good that such things are limited runs while the cheaper to make stuff with just the game gets a full run. Totally understandable so far. However to really set them "apart" too many companies have adopted the strategy of pre-order EXCLUSIVE GAMEPLAY CONTENT! This is a slap in the face more than anything. It reeks of both of the sins mentioned above, but more than that, they have forced scarcity they're shoving around. Whatever you may say about the first two, at the very least, it's still THERE, you can always get that content even if you wait a while. With this, if you missed out on the preorder for whatever reason, it's gone, that content is gone forever.
One might try to defend the practice by noting that often it's just something cosmetic like a golden chainsaw gun, but very often it's something more like an entire level or custom equipment or custom stages.
However there's something much worse than that. No other medium could ever get away with this. Can you imagine if a new Harry Potter book came out, but with a pre-order EXCLUSIVE CHAPTER that no one else gets to read? How about a pre-order EXCLUSIVE SCENE in a new Batman movie that no one else gets to see? People would complain and rightly so, so why do we let EXCLUSIVE PREORDER GAMEPLAY slide by without so much as a minor complaint? Normally the strategy is to ADD content to a game as time goes on, that's the advantage of DC. However, some marketers in some room have managed to actually turn this around and use DC to REMOVE content from a game shortly after it comes out! This is not the future, this isn't even the past! It's just stupid. What of those poor collectors years from now? Will any of these exclusive levels in games like Arkham Asylum or Fable 2 ever be obtainable by them? Heck what of some guy that just heard about the game and wants to pick it up? Did the geniuses that thought up this crazy plan ever consider that maybe someone who realizes they can't ever get the full game might just decide "oh well screw it" and move on to something else instead, like say from a company like Nintendo that, for all the faults one might find, never jerks around their customers in this fasion? For this sin, I judge thee super double dip guilty pants!
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
