The Problem With DLC

The future of media is, according to most large distributors, directly downloaded content. This new form of media would allow people to purchase content without ever leaving home. Movies and TV shows could be directly downloaded to our TVs, cell phones, or iPods. But in the arena of video games, the “future” is already here: Downloadable Content, referred to by gamers as “DLC.”

DLC was intended to be the future of gaming. When you finished a game, the producers could distribute additional content for a minimal fee to allow gamers to continue to enjoy their favorite games. In addition, smaller games can even be downloaded in whole to your console’s hard drive without worrying about ever leaving the house. All of this sounds ideal for both avid and casual gamers, so what’s gone wrong in the first 2 years of DLC?

Two of the three consoles have made a mark in the DLC market, Microsoft (and their XBox 360), and Nintendo (and their Wii). Sony (and their Playstation 3), has now just started to catch up and allow content downloads, but their model is based almost completely on Microsoft’s, and for all intents and purposes for this analysis is the same, albeit less used and less monetarily successful.

Nintendo’s DLC is in the form of the “Virtual Console,” which allows for gamers to download their favorite classic games from the Nintendo systems of the past (NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64) and a variety of other consoles from the 1990s (Sega Genesis, Turbografix 16). The Virtual Console’s price structure is that games are priced based on the console they were released on. Original NES games from the 1980s cost $5, while more recent Nintendo 64 games cost $10. Nintendo released these games as “direct ports” which means that no changes have been made to the games: no updated graphics, no online multiplayer, and no updated controls for the Wii’s motion sensor controls. A purchase of these games allows for the classic replaying of the nostalgic games of our past.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past for the SNES is one of the most popular Virtual Console games.

Microsoft, on the other hand, launched DLC with their XBox 360 console a year before Nintendo’s Wii was launched. They feature a similar feature to Nintendo’s Virtual Console called XBox Live Arcade (XBLA), which features both classic arcade titles, and new independently created games. The major difference between the Virtual Console and XBLA is that the retro games like “Missle Command” and “Pac Man” are offered with both the classic graphics and updated High Definition graphics, as well as online multiplayer. The price structure for the games is rather arbitrary, set by the publishers and Microsoft, which means each game is sold at either a $5 or $10 price-point with no real explanation of why.

UNO, the card game, is among the most popular titles on the XBLA

More importantly, the XBox allows for additional content to be downloaded to lengthen the story of a game, or add additional features. Again, these prices are determined by the game’s publishers, and they range across the board from $.50 to $10, usually relative to the amount of content included, but the prices are chosen without explanation, and sometimes the content for one game is bigger, and yet less expensive because the publisher chose to release the content at a lower cost to the consumer, while other games have overpriced and minimal content.

One of the most popular DLCs on the XBox is for Rock Band, which allows up to four players to simulate being in a band and playing real music from well known artists. The DLC for Rock Band has included songs to add onto the game including those from famous artists such as The Police and Metallica. Each week the developers of the game release 3 new songs, with just about 100 songs available now to add onto the original 58 included in the game. Each of the songs is sold individually for $2, or in a pack of 3 for $5.50.

Rock Band has among the most successful, and positive DLC.

The downside of DLC is that developers and producers of the games have begun to exploit the system. A recent DLC for Virtual Fighter 5 turned out to be already on the disk for the game, and the players were paying to unlock something that was included on the disk. Gamers have grown increasingly upset over the past few months with DLC of this nature, as they feel it means that developers aren’t selling a complete game, and rather selling a portion of the game, and allowing the rest of the game to be bought afterwards at an additional cost. The view of the gamers is that eventually this will lead to retail games only allowing you to plah half way through a game before requiring you to pay to “unlock” the rest of the game, which is already on the disk. While this may be an extreme example, the beginnings of this consumerist model of selling people what they already have is already taking root in the video game industry.

Another common problem with DLC is Digital Rights Management (DRM). If you own an XBox 360 which, even under warranty, dies, and you have it replaced, you can only play DLC if you are logged into your account online (which is not the case on the original Xbox you downloaded the content onto). The claim from Microsoft, is, of course, that without this strict DRM, people could easily copy their games onto other systems. but Microsoft also had to increase their warranty on the XBox 360 to 3 years in the past year because the failure rate of the system is so high, meaning a majority of these gamers will deal with this issue in the next three years.

While DLC is an attempt to make gaming easier and more enjoyable for the gamers, it is also a money grab by publishers and console makers. The Wii’s Virtual Console, while selling us games from the past, is ultimately just selling us many of these games again at a premium. Similarly, with the Xbox Live Arcade, we are being sold many games from our past again at a premium. And more disturbingly, with the new content, oftentimes it’s features and content that were already included on the disk, but locked by the publishers only to be sold to gamers later. Downloadable Content is already making it’s mark on the gaming world, but so far, it’s not a very good one.

(Topic C)