bad value for money, way over priced, however you want to call it. the perspective i am coming from here is how much i expect to get out of the money i spend. I don't play short games. I play games with stories that I expect to keep me occupied for a decent amount f time. now, I'm not comparing one game to another, that's not fair. I'm keeping companies to their own standards. let us take my primary example. mass effect. now, I don't know what sort of game length to expect from the upcoming leviathan DLC, but I do know what we have had in hte past. I took a trip over to http://howlongtobeat.com/ and had a peek at the game length for Mass Effect 2 and it's various DLC. it turns out, the average and minimum game times for DLC compared to main game is less than 10%. so, by that logic, DLC should cost less than 10% of the cost of the full game. but this is not so. not only does DLC come out way above that mark, it also has no box, no book, no disc. it is often buggy and has less polish than the main game, and it comes out costing a fair amount more than 10% of the main game cost. on top of that, there is no way for it to become pre-owned and therefore get cheaper over time. I actually buy a lot of my games pre-owned so I don't tend to pay £40 for games. in my situation, for each Mass effect DLC, I would personally be looking to spend less than £2 for it. I'm really finding it difficult to justify DLC after doing all this investigation. I think that as soon as I get my trophies in ME3 I will be selling it. I had considered keeping it in order to play Leviathan, but I am finding myself less and less able to justify it.
If I had a pound for everyone of these threads made XD Anyway lots of the mass effect 2 dlc added characters, outfits, new weapons and reserch. You wouldn't expect these to add a lot of new gameplay, just to enhance and change whats already been included.
If it's DLC for a game you like, you could always sell your regular version while it's still worth something and then pick up the eventual GOTY edition.
If you're poor and can't afford DLC, don't buy it.
AtlanticRock
I didn't say I can't afford it, I said I can't justify it. sorry if these threads are common. I tried google searching it and it didn't bring up many relevant results. I thought it was a little discussed thing.
bad value for money, way over priced, however you want to call it. the perspective i am coming from here is how much i expect to get out of the money i spend. I don't play short games. I play games with stories that I expect to keep me occupied for a decent amount f time. now, I'm not comparing one game to another, that's not fair. I'm keeping companies to their own standards. let us take my primary example. mass effect. now, I don't know what sort of game length to expect from the upcoming leviathan DLC, but I do know what we have had in hte past. I took a trip over to http://howlongtobeat.com/ and had a peek at the game length for Mass Effect 2 and it's various DLC. it turns out, the average and minimum game times for DLC compared to main game is less than 10%. so, by that logic, DLC should cost less than 10% of the cost of the full game. but this is not so. not only does DLC come out way above that mark, it also has no box, no book, no disc. it is often buggy and has less polish than the main game, and it comes out costing a fair amount more than 10% of the main game cost. on top of that, there is no way for it to become pre-owned and therefore get cheaper over time. I actually buy a lot of my games pre-owned so I don't tend to pay £40 for games. in my situation, for each Mass effect DLC, I would personally be looking to spend less than £2 for it. I'm really finding it difficult to justify DLC after doing all this investigation. I think that as soon as I get my trophies in ME3 I will be selling it. I had considered keeping it in order to play Leviathan, but I am finding myself less and less able to justify it. tremault
You ever think about organizing your posts a little more? I can't get past your cluster of text.
Well, people buy it so there's no reason for companies to stop selling it. If it was really too much money then we would probably be seeing a price drop by now. Granted, I usually can't justify it for most games, but I do get it for some games. Rockstar and Bethesda usually have substantial DLC since they still follow the expansion pack approach. I know we all seem to say map packs cost too much, but it is easy to argue that $15 for a few maps and weapons isn't that bad of a deal if you end up playing it in your online map rotation for 20 hours or so.
Basically, as long as the DLC isn't part of the game intentionally taken out to be sold at a later date, I really have no major problem with it since nobody is forced to buy it.
Meh. I buy DLC that I feel is worth it to me not how someone else on the internet may feel about it. I also use more criteria in discerning what I find to be of value then merely measuring the amount of time something may take to "beat" or "finish" in one initial playthrough. So far using my own judgement in making my purchases has served me exceptionally well with a very high rate of satisfaction.
well, it is about profit. They can't give something 1 to 1 if they are looking at profit. I know some game companies release dlc, but with a bigger company like bioware being apart of EA, they are trying to squeeze the most out of a game. But gamers need to back off because a lot of the gamers try to squeeze the most discounts out of buying a game...I SAY MOST OKAY. We have people game sharing, buying used, or waiting until we get a discounted price to buy a game.
Its just a game both developers and consumers do to each other, but at least with dlc, unless its dlc on the disc like sfxtekken, then we are getting the game we shouldve gotten right out of the box....remember us gamers wanted a way to prolong our favorite games and fast...so dlc is a quickfire expansion pack....
If people wish to spend money to enhance or continue their experience in a game they enjoy, it is by no way a rip-off for those of us that see value in DLC.
If you don't like them, don't buy them. Basic principle of free market. If you want them, but think they're overpriced, don't buy them and get over it.
You ever think about organizing your posts a little more? I can't get past your cluster of text.Lord_Nas3k
I did. for some reason the forum is pushing all my line breaks onto the same line. for example, this sentence is on the next line, I bet the forum will push it onto the same line.
Well, people buy it so there's no reason for companies to stop selling it. If it was really too much money then we would probably be seeing a price drop by now. Granted, I usually can't justify it for most games, but I do get it for some games. Rockstar and Bethesda usually have substantial DLC since they still follow the expansion pack approach. I know we all seem to say map packs cost too much, but it is easy to argue that $15 for a few maps and weapons isn't that bad of a deal if you end up playing it in your online map rotation for 20 hours or so.
Basically, as long as the DLC isn't part of the game intentionally taken out to be sold at a later date, I really have no major problem with it since nobody is forced to buy it.
blueboxdoctor
I totally agree with you. the shimmering Isles expansion pack was great. it took me ages to get through that. Fallout 3 had good expansions too.
[QUOTE="Lord_Nas3k"]You ever think about organizing your posts a little more? I can't get past your cluster of text.tremault
I did. for some reason the forum is pushing all my line breaks onto the same line. for example, this sentence is on the next line, I bet the forum will push it onto the same line. Are you doing shift+enter or just enter? Do just enter and it should be fine. It could also be due to your browser.
Some DLC is good (Kingdoms of Amular, Mass Effect series), and some of it's is just a money grab. You really have to research it, and decide if it is worth it.
My only real complaint is day of release DLC or stuff that comes out the first week. This should be free
i dont believe in this whole time for my money equation people rely on. ico is a full retail release that only clocks in at around 5 hours. however, its one of my favorite games ever.
that said, i never really buy dlc. i get complete downloadable games all the time, but i dont bother with side fluff. ive played the game and ill play it again if it was good, but im not into the video game gluttony thing of consuming the same thing over and over again.
Some times DLC is really kick ass, but most of the time it's just things they should've included in the game in the first place. Well, with a lot of things that would have been unlockables in previous gen games are now being sold as DLC. Overall I think we'd be better off if it were abolished. Not that I see that happening.
[QUOTE="homegirl2180"] Are you doing shift+enter or just enter? Do just enter and it should be fine. It could also be due to your browser. it seems my posts are somehow being made into raw html format. so I have to type html tags to make paragraphs.
I hear what some of you guys said about some games being shorter and the idea of time = value etc. I did brush over that in my first post by saying, I hold companies to their own standards, not the standards of other games. ICO has a certain quality, and by the pricing of the full game, the publishers assign a certain value to that amount of content and what a player can get out of it. in terms of a beat-em up, the value is probably due to the amount of characters and not how long it takes to beat the game. so for a £40 game that has 10 characters and 10 stages, then it stands to reason that an expansion pack with 1 character and 1 stage might cost around £4. I'm not talking about gamers being greedy or having unreasonable expectations. I actually think it's more to do with the value the producers assign to their own product. by any count, mass effect with a particular number of planets to explore, a certain number of hours available to play, a certain number of weapons to use, a certain number of characters to take with you.... by any of these measures, when we look at a DLC for mass effect, the value is completely wrong. to follow through an example from here other than game length, in mass effect 3 there are 7 basic characters. from ashes gives you 1 character. so from ashes should be around 1/7 of the full game price. £5.70, disregarding the cost of discs, box, distribution etc. it was actually £6.80 or something. I realise this is very in depth and maybe a bit overboard , but i'm just trying to illustrate a point.
[QUOTE="tremault"]I hear what some of you guys said about some games being shorter and the idea of time = value etc. I did brush over that in my first post by saying, I hold companies to their own standards, not the standards of other games. ICO has a certain quality, and by the pricing of the full game, the publishers assign a certain value to that amount of content and what a player can get out of it. in terms of a beat-em up, the value is probably due to the amount of characters and not how long it takes to beat the game. so for a £40 game that has 10 characters and 10 stages, then it stands to reason that an expansion pack with 1 character and 1 stage might cost around £4. I'm not talking about gamers being greedy or having unreasonable expectations. I actually think it's more to do with the value the producers assign to their own product. by any count, mass effect with a particular number of planets to explore, a certain number of hours available to play, a certain number of weapons to use, a certain number of characters to take with you.... by any of these measures, when we look at a DLC for mass effect, the value is completely wrong. to follow through an example from here other than game length, in mass effect 3 there are 7 basic characters. from ashes gives you 1 character. so from ashes should be around 1/7 of the full game price. £5.70, disregarding the cost of discs, box, distribution etc. it was actually £6.80 or something. I realise this is very in depth and maybe a bit overboard , but i'm just trying to illustrate a point.
publishers mainly just follow what has been set as a retail price for a notable game by 1st parties and expectations. its rare that they deviate from the standard 60USD for a ps3/360 game and 50USD for a wii game at launch.
buy dlc or dont, but theres no science to the pricing of it other than "this is what people are paying for it." theres no value to a lone level that isnt self contained.
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