If they have already developed the content, then it should be released with the rest of the game, for the price of the game.
Why? Genuine question. What does it matter to you as a consumer when the content was developed?
If the point you’re actually trying to make is “if the game is developed as a whole, but then content is carved out such that the base game then feels incomplete without it”, then this is already covered: a game which feels incomplete is inherently flawed, and so doesn’t justify the price of a full game. That’s my original point - most people are actually just pissed at inaccurate or unfair pricing, and DLC can enable that (but doesn’t have to), so they misdirect their anger to all DLC instead.
When a company actually exists that utilizes your view of DLC, then it might be a valid criticism of the phrasing; but zero day one DLC released for any game has been anything but carving up a complete product into an incomplete main product and several DLCs to increase the price without increasing the price.
Oblivion was the first example of this. Horse Armor was already developed.
When a company actually exists that utilizes your view of DLC, then it might be a valid criticism of the phrasing
No, that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make - “every example of X that has existed so far is Y” does not imply “by definition, X is provably and definitively always Y”.
You can claim that all DLC that has ever existed is predatory and exploitative (I suspect there are counter-examples; but, fine, whatever, not relevant to my point). You can say that, because of past performance, you are disinclined to trust future examples of DLC or give them the benefit of the doubt. That is all reasonable. But you can’t conclude “because all DLC so far has been bad, the concept of DLC as a whole is bad and can never be used well”.
As a super-simple example - here are some prime numbers: 5, 11, 37. Are all prime numbers odd? I can give you a bunch more examples if you want!
Day 1 DLC, no matter how optional it might be in practicality, is 100% a tactic to make people feel like they need to pay more to get the “complete” version of the game.
“_Every person who has ever done in the past, has done it with and it had _” does not imply “_The only reason anyone could possibly ever do is with to achieve _”. That’s a valid reason to be cautious, but not a reason to make blanket statements about an entire category of thing.
EDIT: for Day1 DLC in particular, a totally valid and non-exploitative reason for it is “we had a release date that we absolutely had to hit (because of marketing, contracts, etc.), which necessitated calling a production halt well in-advance of the release date for QA and testing - but instead of moving on to the next project, developers worked on more stuff for the same game. If that was too complex or didn’t work out, we could drop it and no-one would complain; but if we’d kept developing it in the base game, and resulted in a slipped release date, there would be hell to pay”
Why? Genuine question. What does it matter to you as a consumer when the content was developed?
If the point you’re actually trying to make is “if the game is developed as a whole, but then content is carved out such that the base game then feels incomplete without it”, then this is already covered: a game which feels incomplete is inherently flawed, and so doesn’t justify the price of a full game. That’s my original point - most people are actually just pissed at inaccurate or unfair pricing, and DLC can enable that (but doesn’t have to), so they misdirect their anger to all DLC instead.
When a company actually exists that utilizes your view of DLC, then it might be a valid criticism of the phrasing; but zero day one DLC released for any game has been anything but carving up a complete product into an incomplete main product and several DLCs to increase the price without increasing the price. Oblivion was the first example of this. Horse Armor was already developed.
No, that’s precisely the point I’m trying to make - “every example of X that has existed so far is Y” does not imply “by definition, X is provably and definitively always Y”.
You can claim that all DLC that has ever existed is predatory and exploitative (I suspect there are counter-examples; but, fine, whatever, not relevant to my point). You can say that, because of past performance, you are disinclined to trust future examples of DLC or give them the benefit of the doubt. That is all reasonable. But you can’t conclude “because all DLC so far has been bad, the concept of DLC as a whole is bad and can never be used well”.
As a super-simple example - here are some prime numbers: 5, 11, 37. Are all prime numbers odd? I can give you a bunch more examples if you want!
Day 1 DLC, no matter how optional it might be in practicality, is 100% a tactic to make people feel like they need to pay more to get the “complete” version of the game.
“_Every person who has ever done in the past, has done it with and it had _” does not imply “_The only reason anyone could possibly ever do is with to achieve _”. That’s a valid reason to be cautious, but not a reason to make blanket statements about an entire category of thing.
EDIT: for Day1 DLC in particular, a totally valid and non-exploitative reason for it is “we had a release date that we absolutely had to hit (because of marketing, contracts, etc.), which necessitated calling a production halt well in-advance of the release date for QA and testing - but instead of moving on to the next project, developers worked on more stuff for the same game. If that was too complex or didn’t work out, we could drop it and no-one would complain; but if we’d kept developing it in the base game, and resulted in a slipped release date, there would be hell to pay”