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Analyst Says On-Disc DLC is ‘Just Plain Greed’
Sometimes right, sometimes wrong game industry analyst Michael Pachter has thrown in his opinionated two cents on the more recent controversial act of having DLC already stored on a game disc.
DLC delivery methods weren’t much of a matter to him overall, but he does believe that DLC is matter of greed, and that hacking a disc for the content you’re supposed to pay for might actually be legal.
“Yeah, it’s just plain greed,” he said on his show, Pach Attack.
“The answer is that simple. I think that DLC has been so successful that publishers are trying to get a jumpstart and if you put it on the disc it allows them to unlock it when they feel like it. A few years ago, we didn’t see DLC for typically six months after a game launch and I think it was Red Dead Redemption, but Take-Two kind of pioneered and launched DLC like a month after the original title and it was super successful, now you’re seeing a lot more guys do it.
The stuff on the disc, some gamers feel entitled to because they bought the disc, so they should have a right to anything that’s on the disc, and that’s a dicey one, you actually do own the disc and I think, theoretically, if you could crack the code on the DLC you probably would be allowed to access it without paying. And I’m not even sure that’s stealing because you did, in fact, buy the disc. That’s about as close as you can get to legal piracy.”
Among all considered publishers, Capcom has certainly been the most under fire for the act of on-disc DLC. Believe it or not, it did recently back out of its beliefs on the practice (at least in writing), admitting to its community that the company is listening to the complaints and considering alternatives.
What say you, hard-working consumer? Dos thou prefer off-of-disc downloadable content?
I beseech thee on this, place thine comments below.
[via CVG]
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Sadly DLC in general is becoming a money grab and a way to trick consumers into spending more money on junk and now with microtransactions its only going to get worse(thanks a lot valve) its only a matter of time before we start having to buy individual missions for a game story, as it is their starting to chop of the games ending to sell to us later.
+1
Starting? There are plenty of episodic games already, it only takes an EA of sorts to do that with a huge title.
F**k DLC. No kidding. The pure idea of DLC is good. I’d be willing to buy it. However, devs are getting the idea that they can cut content from games and turn THAT into DLC. Or, better yet, lock content on-disc and make us pay EVEN MORE to access something we PAID for. Bioware started off great, but they fell victim to the greedy lure of DLC and skull-f**ked the ME series. Patcher is right. At this point, I don’t even know what is legal, illegal, piracy, legal piracy, or whatever…
I’ve actually stopped buying Capcom’s stuff because of Super/Ultimate additions and on Disc DLC. Every time I buy something from Capcom I later feel I’ve been screwed.
It’s wrong and that’s why Capcom is stopping it. Look I know a lot of you would say but you need the character data to fight against the opponent so having it already on the disc is better but that’s the trick. DLC use to be about continuing the life of games after you already finished all the content. When they already have the character data then why not include that with the original game.
You need the data to fight an opponent that has it, meaning if you don’t play online you have all that chunk of data that it is yours, but its not.
Also, we don’t live in the dark ages of gaming anymore, they can give you the core data in an update after the dlc is released and stream the rest as you fight it.
DLC is infuriating =/.