The sad part is that the idea behind DLCs (to develop further content for a game already released, in exchange for additional money) is reasonable. Or it would be, if shitty developers didn’t abuse it to the point that it stopped being “downloadable content” to become “dumb and lazy cashgrab”.
I also think that CA isn’t just being benign with this statement, or his whole “let us not be arseholes” approach towards development. He’s being smart; player trust might be hard to measure but it has direct impact on word-of-mouth advertisement and piracy, so it’s basically the difference between “everybody knows it, plenty bought it” and “the few ones who know it pirated it”.
Another excellent example of this working is Factorio.
The original game doesn’t cost a fortune, it’s made by a small extremely dedicated team. They polished it so hard the shine made everything else look like vanta black. Playing Factorio ruins other games because the depth and quality of everything else is so poor in comparison.
The game came out in like 2013 early access. Full release completed in 2020. A decade after initial launch, they are going to offer a DLC, that will cost money.
Absolutely happy to pay for a DLC for that perfection.
the idea behind DLCs
Back when they were called “Expansion Packs” and came on a disc for players who didn’t have a good internet connection. You can trace the death of the expac and the rise of MTX in the postlaunch monetization of Bethesda’s biggest games - Morrowind through Skyrim all have entire extra games that you can graft onto them for a premium price, but then during Skyrim’s release and re-release era they dip their toes into MTX via the Creation Club, to their total embrace of the concept in FO76.
But actually I think that blaming Bethesda is a bit of a red herring. The real dawn of DLC as we know it today wasn’t horse armor, it was Halo 2’s additional multiplayer maps. Microsoft went from releasing maps for free to charging for early access to maps that became free eventually to making everyone buy the maps. At around the same time they forced Valve to charge for Left for Dead 2 maps that were released for free on PC. MS really took point on conditioning gamers to lower their expectations for post launch content.
