Now that we are approaching the release of the first DLC pack and that we know that it will be paid for some people (supposedly that don’t download it on the first two weeks) it seems it has opened the can of worms on the subject of paid DLC. Many people are complaining primarily that it will fragment a frail community.
But I just wanted to point that what is the alternative then? Free DLC for everybody for ever? Sorry but one way or another that will never absolutely happen.
Some point out that TF2 gives free DLC all the time, but they seem to forget that the game has a paid item shop that came out last year or so precisely because Valve were not making much money from the game at that point. And yes I know, you could get all the items through crafting, but it’s the same thing with many free-to-play mmorpgs, it’s always worse and takes more time to get items for free and in the end, when it took you so long to acquire some items and then a new update comes and everybody is running with the new items while you wait for eternal random chances… you’ll cave in, and spend money, it’s a proven business model. And thought I know one of the benefits of the model is that maps are free, the item shop thing just messed my perception of the game for me and many others. What many people don’t realise is that if you care about all that the game has to offer, in the end you’ll spend WAY more money with an item shop model than with a DLC pack model.
That was one of the reasons why I left TF2 and was looking forward to Brink. I even posted on this forums before release, asking people if they thought that Brink would have a item shop, and the general consensus was that nobody wanted a shop but DLC packs were fine.
So I might make people remember that if you want more content for Brink, it’s either paid DLC packs, or a cosmetic item shop model, or no more updates, period, and sadly not even game tweaks and technical fixes. SD have to get paid for their time working and Bethesda will only pay if there is more benefit to gain, as any company would do. The only difference is that Bethesda is a company that specifically relies heavily on the strategy of releasing a game unfinished and patching it later, and this is the bad side of that strategy: it relies on post-release support from the player for the game to be fixed, meaning that even though the perception for the player is ‘I paid for a full game so I expect the game to be completed for the initial price’ it’s not like that… it’s more like ‘if you want it fixed pay more for DLC’. It’s sad and wrong but it’s the only option we have now, and I’ll take it because I genuinely love Brink.
Maybe they could just release new maps for free having only to pay for extra outfits? What about abilities and attachments? They also affect the game, so it would then be release maps + abilities + attachments for free and… only have to pay for outfits? Do you think many people then will care about paying only for outfits then? Do you think the money obtained from outfits would cover all the time spent on creating all the other extra content? Would that be enough money to make the producers interested on keeping investing on the game?
After all, we are not talking about a game that has very large and established fanbase like TF2 when they started to charge for items. It always works the same way, for example if they started charging for stupid cosmetic items like ‘coloured glasses’ on COD, many people would still buy them because they are already very invested on the game and now ‘need’ everything that it has to offer, but in a new game you wouldn’t make much money just out of cosmetic items.
So in my opinion the only factor to complain about (when we know about it) is the price itself of the DLC packs, but if you don’t want paid DLC then you won’t have more updates.