DLC

Videogames have always offered something unique when it comes to the entertainment industry, enabling an even more complete immersion into the world with which you choose to entertain you.  You can genuinely feel like you have become the World Class racing driver you always wanted to be or lose yourself within a fantasy world where your actions have consequences on the story.

This is the kind of immersion that has lead to Videogames becoming one of, if not the major industry within the entertainment industry, but as games have progressed over the years so have the demands from the gamers themselves.  We've gone through single-player, multi-player, online multi-player, brilliant stories and characters and downloadable content.  It is the downloadable content where one of my main gripes with the gaming industry occurs.

Let me start by saying that I am not against DLC but there comes a point where it's not so much to keep gamers happy but instead an easy way to take some more money out of our pockets; Call of Duty Elite being a great example of the latter.  You don't need to release new Map Packs every month in order to keep people interested in playing your game, nor should we as gamers have to pay in order to view some more in-depth statistics of our gaming.

The Battlefield 3 'Battlelog' online is a brilliant statistics site; free, in-depth, shows upcoming unlocks and individual stats for each weapon/vehicle.  Surely anyone who needs even more detail, heat maps and the like is spending way to much time on their gaming and should be putting more effort into actual real life.  If you make a game with good shipped maps/vehicles/tracks etc and a good online experience you will retain gamers without the need to constantly churn out somewhat half rate content.

I can only guess that the Call of Duty DLC explosion is more to do with Battlefield 3 having a more complete online War zone feel, with players helping each other out, playing the objective and the draw of flying a jet into someone's face (all things that are non-existent/rare in Cod).  I used to be a hardcore Cod fan but over the past few iterations in the series I have lost all interest in the series with each game lasting less time in my collection before being traded in.

Some games have understandable DLC, games like Forza where a tonne of content is available but it is nothing more than a personal preference if you choose to download them.  It's an example of a game that would still be a great game even if there was no downloadable content on offer.  This is the kind of DLC that we as gamers should be provided with; content that might not be overly required to enhance the game but would do so if you chose to download it.

I would like you all aware that I know making the game in the first place costs money and DLC is often a way to repay the money spent on it's creation, and that it is a business at the end of the day and the aim for any business is a profit.  I know this is true but sometimes (and more often nowadays) videogame companies are taking this mass attempts for profits a little to far, and sometimes a great game can become a greatly disliked game because of this.  You don't need to ply us with more content than we could shake a rather large stick at to keep us gamers happy, instead spent a bit more time on making a great game at launch, release one or two content packs to tie us over while you work on the next game.

It's not like we have to pay film companies extra to download the deleted scenes from a film.