RANT TIME!!!

Tuesday’s lecture inspired me to host a lively discussion on one of modern gaming’s finer points, premium content or DLC.

Lets go back to early 2006, I am sitting in my friend’s garage playing Xbox 360. I am pissed off. One of my favourite developers, who had several years earlier made the masterpiece Morrowind, had just severely let me down. Their new game Oblivion, had converted the free, and frequent downloadable content of Morrowind, into ‘premium content’ at a premium price.
“What the crap!” I thought to myself out loud, “No ones going to pay that much for something that should be free!” But, alas, some of my fellow gamers must have betrayed me and paid for it as the price was never removed and they even ended up releasing the DLC content in a retail package.

The plague began to spread, once honourable companies were reduced to whoring themselves in the DLC market. I agree that Dragon Age Origins was perhaps an all time low for the DLC market. The game was good, and I liked the game economy, gold, silver, copper, standard fantasy game stuff. However I did not like the “Hail warden, would you like to pay $15 USD right now to unlock this essential part of the game experience???” It was so blatantly obvious that the extra content was available upon the release of the game, and that the game was not complete without it, but there was no way in hell I was going to satisfy their lustful need for more cash. Those bastards! In fact I’m unsure if I even want to buy the sequel now.

However there’s more than just DLC out there these days preying on innocent gamers. Take a look at World of Warcraft. They sure know how to milk it for everything it’s got by putting a price on everything, and not only that, their marketing department makes half ass explanations for everything. For example they claim that a large portion, of the monthly subscriptions goes towards making fantastic new content. Yet, very little seems to change in the game until the yearly expansion pack comes out, which you have to pay for of course. Another item my espionage mission revealed to me is that it costs $25 USD to merely move your character from one server to another. The cost is justified by Blizzard as a way of stopping people moving their characters around all the time. I’m not buying it at all. If this were the actual reason then they would just put a time limit on moving a character. Sometimes I sit in bed and try work out how much this evil company is milking from the innocents, people who thought they would just try it, once. I must move on though.

Another type of premium content that I actually find quite amusing is content for web-based games such as Farmville. For a start, Farmville isn’t even a real game and secondly the only reason people would buy stuff with real money for their farm is to perhaps, try and impress friends or random people with the special edition barn they have on their farm. This brings me to my final, point. Companies will continue to charge money for things in games, because no matter how ludicrous it is, someone will buy it. When I was at school, one of my friends owned a game website, which he had supposedly written (copied most of the source code) in PHP. The game was entirely text based and on top of that, it was horrible. The game was free to play, but had premium content to buff your game character i.e. database entry. The thing that was amusing was that the website topped out at around a thousand users, many of them paying good money in vain trying to gain an edge over another one of my friends and myself, who were given endless amounts of premium content for free. One user actually paid $700USD to beat us. This was a very poor buy, as all it granted him or her was some increased numbers in a database, and the ability to change the colour of his or her name.

Anyway I should probably end this here. Let me know if you have had any ridiculous experiences with premium content.

- James