No, I don't believe it "ruins the value of the game".




I first consider who is complaining, and the extent of their complaints.

Many players whine "these maps should have been included!", but these same players whine about just about everything:

The same people whine that games costing tens of millions of dollars should be free or cost just $1.

The same people whine that the game is "horribly broken" and demand for a patch because of a single errant polygon allowing a good sniper position.

The same people whine "How dare they take our money for broken content" when they simply don't like how DLC or expansion content happens to integrate.

The same people whine "they Nerfed my character with a mandatory patch" while at the same time whine about how overpowered their opponents are.

The wording of your post is almost the same mentality: You didn't allow for a 99% rating. You went for "completely ruined."




Second, players have come to demand DLC.

There are the haters on both sides.

When Skyrim said they would have no DLC there was a very vocal group of people who wanted to boycott the game. So now we get Skyrim DLC and people want to boycott it for having DLC.

The same complaining minority will whine either way.




Third, it allows developers the ability to fit additional content in to their budgets and development time:

As a developer you might have $10M total development money and 16 months to build the game. That is enough money for the game and enough money for three maps worth of content. You really want to make seven maps, but you can only afford three in that cost and in that schedule. So you build three because that is the budget you can get approved.

Since you know DLC is an absolute requirement from your bloodthirsty mobs, you design it in to the game. You come up with great ideas for all seven maps. You make the game complete with three maps and spend all your budget. Then when the game is late in production --- and only AFTER it looks like a blockbuster --- you can invest additional money on more maps as DLC.





Looking at bottom line numbers, DLC has a very high cost for very little return. They still require development costs. They still require extensive QA. They require even more QA to ensure compatability between patched and unpatched versions. There is community support that costs time and money. The content needs to be certified by Sony or Microsoft and ESRB and none of that is free. Finally, because it has the ability to be patched your players will actively demand for patches and (sometimes literally) call for blood if you don't deliver updates.

Many times the financial risk of DLC is greater than the financial risk of the base game. It is generally less likely to become profitable, and if it is profitable, the profit margins are generally much smaller.



Personally from this side of the desk I wish customers would quit demanding DLC. It would make my job easier and cost us less money. But customers want it, and it adds value, so it gets created.

I don't mind DLC. I do mind DLC which is available on the same day that the game is released.

I do mind DLC which is available on the same day that the game is released.

I'm ok with it right now, although it'll make less sense when physical discs vanish, simply because of timing issues.

In my experience Art ramp down much sooner than code, generally leaving only a few people on during the last month of development to fix post-alpha issues and do small fixes. Large amounts then get shifted off to other games as the company requires but some will stick around for DLC reasons but generally there isn't enough time between final art lock down and disc lock down for said work to be completed thus you can use the disc production time to finish things up and have it ready to go on day-zero.

(Note; this is downloadable DLC, not on-disc DLC which is a strange kind of crazy...)

And that division of man power is why DLC tends to come out quickly; companies don't want to keep projects alive to product DLC for too long and ramping people up and down on a project is insane; if you left it 6 months before producing the next DLC pack for a game then chances are you'd also have to get everyone to switch source control servers, get old pipelines up and running again and sort out tools etc to get production going once again. (And chances are in that 6 months period, if your team is actively developing the engine, half your old pipelines are now unsupported as newer processes based on the 'failures' of the last project are adjusted for).

The other issue is if you don't hit quickly with DLC then people might not buy it because they are no longer playing your game, or have completed it and don't want to go back and redo chunks of it just to get at your new level which drops in 50% into the game, at which point you've run up cost for no reason and have just hurt the studio. You could argue 'but they should do it before release! Just take longer!' but with games costing vast sums to make you can't afford to miss sale windows and/or take too much longer to get your game out or it could break you.
(A game we just released had that issue; we were down to the wire for getting it OK'd by Sony and MS; a delay of one more day would have missed the street date and we only got it done because MS let us punt the game back into the queue quickly at the 11th hour, after a bug which had never been seen during the whole dev cycle caused us to fail out, because they loved it internally!)

I personally have no problem with paying for some DLC; I've never paid for a CoD DLC pack, for example, but I have basically yelled 'TAKE MY MONEY!' at Relic for DoW2 DLC which has mostly been small cosmetic updates or weapons which don't change the balance of the game, just give you a new way to pay. I've also recently brought the Borderlands 2 'season pass' because I'm enjoying the game and want more slightly crazy situations to shoot dudes in the face in (I've also not completed the game yet).

DLC addresses two problems:

1. people are always unhappy and want more/better/faster, no matter what you give them
2. pirating

DLC gives "more" to people who want more, at a small price. It also makes pirating impossible for these people. There may only be a small overlap (most pirates won't pay for DLC either), but there probably is one. Admittedly, most people who pirate a game likely wouldn't pay anything anyway (and despite all petty "want to try before buying" excuses never plan to), but I guess it just depends whether the content/price ratio is such that you create a "rip-off" or a "big gain" feeling.

If you can get some cool feature extra that adds a lot of fun and only costs 2 dollars, you might be tempted to just buy that. All the cool kids have it too. Now, too bad it doesn't work with your pirated copy, because they validate your serial online...

I can see the merits of that.

i'm not really sure why you have the belief that dlc stops/prevents pirating, if anything dlc would probably be easier to run with pirated software, since you'd just patch the software to ignore w/e checks it does to validate the dlc/itself from running.

Maybe, maybe not.

You need to get the DLC from somewhere, so you must authenticated online, or pirate the DLC itself (which may or may not be trivial). Authenticating online means that you need a valid serial number (or at least someone you know needs one). It also means you leave a tiny bit of traceable evidence. Maybe not much, but a little bit with every additional DLC you steal. You will probably still never be caught, but you cannot be sure, the risk gets higher every time. A company might give out "bait", which may be as easy as flipping a few bits in a texture or a sound file, or some kind of more advanced stegano-stuff.

If 4-6 months later, you learn that 98% of all cracked DLCs in the wild came from 3 of your customers you can be rather sure that this is not accidential or someone having pirated "privately" (which isn't pursuded in many locations) but you're on the tracks of someone doing this on a large scale. The police might still not get hold of the cracker, but you never know. The evidence is much harder, and the police will likely lay hands on the 3 people from which the respective DLCs originated. At least, they'll have to give plausible answers to some uncomfortable questions.
It's easy to be convincing that you don't know how one piece of software that you bought made it to a ring of crackers, or that it's maybe a mistake, maybe you had some "virus thing" (you don't know much about computers) or maybe your laptop was stolen, or someone might have copied the content at a party last month. It's not quite so easy to give a conclusive explanation when there is a trace of this consistently happening over months. And since you don't know what data they have, it's hard to come up with a good lie without getting caught in a contradiction, at least if the interrogator is somewhat experienced.

Also, you would presumably make your DLC in a way so it is "customized" to one particular installation. A 3-second brainstorming gives e.g. encrypt textures, and use the main executable's checksum plus the serial number as key. Or something the like. It is pretty trivial to encrypt some files with some key on the fly as people buy them in your web-shop.
You may even have your DLC back-authenticate online (including a validation of the original title's binaries and serial number). Since a legitimate customer must necessarily have an internet connection to buy the DLC, there's no hindrance. The only hindrance that exists is if you're not quite so legitimate a customer.

Can this be cracked? Certainly, anything on the user's computer can be cracked, we need not discuss that. However, if you spend more than the 3 seconds I spent thinking about it, it's likely that it isn't all that trivial and that you can't easily produce an universal run-this-to-unlock-crack that everyone and their mother will use.

If a particular piece of DLC costs a mere 2 dollars and only adds "some stuff", it also isn't really worth spending a day cracking it either, especially when new DLC with a varied scheme comes out every week. You'd rather get the fame for cracking the next big title before someone else does.