With the ever growing popularity of the digital market on Xbox Live and PSN companies are keeping their games fresher longer with Downloadable Content ex. Maps, Gametypes,Weapons, Player Skins, etc. The problem with this is many factors come into play when either setting up DLC from the beginning of development when creating a game or setting up DLC after a game has released.
When to release content?
Usually the best time to release content is within the first three months of the games release closer to the tail end of that time when the game starts to slow down from all the marketing hype. The worst time to release conent would be within a short time ( a few weeks to a month) of the initial release date, because then your consumers will ask well if it was this close to release why wasn’t it on the disk to begin with?
Pricing
Different items on the marketplace will cost different things at different times. The pricing stucture is usually not in control of the developer but the person running the service, after all this is a business to make money. Time and time again we have heard from developers that they have created a theme or pack of gamerpictures because they want to thank the fans so they give it as a free gift, but what happens is that to effectively pay for the resources and costs to run servers, networking stuctures and other costs the marketplace owner has to put a price on the free content, which in turn doesn’t become free anymore. Usually the free content has a sponsorship and has their ads running within the content so the consumer can enjoy the free content, a good example would be some of the Gears of War themes sponsered by GameStop, or Halo 3 themes sponsered by BestBuy.
Price stucture and Content Received
Good examples of what you can expect and company’s have done correctly with their pricing stuctures. Rock Band/Rock Band 2 you know for a fact that almost always you can count on a single song costing 160 MS points ($2). Some cases they will have 80 MS point songs or even song packs which if bought seperately will cost you more money then the discounted bundle price or now showing up full albums.
Do we need a constant structure for all marketplace content?
People need to understand something about how your money and you voice is heard when it comes to pricing stuctures and satisfaction of content. A good example is map packs for the most popular games. Everything that you buy on the marketplace is a consumer testing to see how much money you would be willing to spend for the ammount of content received. If you think that it is too expensive to spend $10 on 3 maps when the year before you spent $10 on 4 maps and the majority of the community spends the same $10 for less ammount of content, what do you think will happen? The next time a map pack comes out it will have 3 maps and you still pay $10 because they know that is what your threshold for money will stop at for the content that you want. Recently there was a big uproar across the internet about the release time and price of the Gears of War 2 Combustable Map Pack which consisted of 3 maps for $10. This is normal pricing as we know it, but it was released 5 weeks after the game initially launched and the multiplayer has major bugs, glitches, and exploits that would ruin your gaming experience so why would we want to spend money on a broken game. Some people decided to by the map pack regaurdless of the problems and were happy with their purchase. I however did not buy the map pack untill the second patch release and looking back now, I am not too happy with my purchase because i just dont play the game that much because it is fustrating to play, there is still many issues that need to be resolved.
Is it true Down Loadable Content or is it Un Lockable Content?
It may come to a shock to some people about how programming and games work when purchasing content. When downloading content you should expect the file size of the content your downloading to be high in Megabytes (MB). If your downloading content that say has an exact number of 108kb you are most likely downloading a “Key” that allows you access to the content that you already own and are not downloading anything new. The newest case of this unlockable content has come of Castle Crashers and their “King Pack” which allowed new characters and a new animal orb. (If you didn’t know that castle crashers had a hard time with networking and the multiplayer co operative play it took many months for the Title Update to come out and address these issues for a 4 play experience to be smooth.) I don’t mind purchasing content for games that i like to enjoy with friends or if the content price is low enough, the content was 160 MS points ($2) without thinking i purchased the content on the web marketplace and then when i turned on my xbox it downloaded so fast i needed to check the download size of the file i was downloading turns out to be 108KB which is an UNLOCK KEY, basically meaning i paid $2 for content that was already purchased on my console, there was nothing truely added to download. Let this be a warning to everyone when purchasing content no matter what the cost check the file size before purchasing your content to make sure that you are getting actual DLC and not ULC. On the upside there is ULC that is basically cheat codes and if you have money and are too lazy to do it with normal progression of the game by all means spend you money on cheat codes, if that is what you want to do.
Jon, excellent post. As always, your content is very informative and fascinating. Another example of free content that became 200 points was the Premium Braid Theme. The developer did not want to take anyone’s money. He just wanted to thank everyone for their support.
Gears of War is a story of its own. All I want to tell them is FIX your game FIRST before you start selling other content. Epic, you would have more support if multiplayer was fixed. That’s why you’re still #4 on the weekly Xbox Live Played Games list.
THe UNLOCK KEY. *UGH* Don’t get me started on that. I bought the Castle Crashers ULC and I was severely disappointed. Your tip has helped me in not purchasing future DLC.
I look forward to reading this blog.
I know exactly what you mean about paying for unlockable content. It’s just not right and EA is probably the most guilty of this.
One thing to keep in mind though is that sometimes auto updates add this content. As an example, LittleBigPlanet for PlayStation 3 has a lot of premium content for purchase like new costumes and such. Each piece of content, however, is about 1MB. What happens is the content is added into the game’s auto-updates and gamers can purchase the key to access the content. This allows everyone, those who purchased the premium content and those who didn’t, the ability to play the content with their friends without splitting the online community into several groups. It seems deceiving at first but this is probably the best method I’ve seen for adding downloadable content.
Great post, MDK.
I look forward to reading your blog regularly. You make a good point distinguishing between DLC and ULC. Similarly, I too, regret having purchased the Combustible Map Pack. The MP game is completely broken – a dog’s breakfast.