Ok, I went a little overboard there on the last reaction. But the message was clear from gaming news sites. They weren't going to stand for $40 Batman DLC! Solidarity with gamers! I guess...? Wait...I thought we all liked DLC...Didn't we? I wrote a very unpopular blog years ago that was rebutting a post made by the head guy at CTRL ALT DEL who was defending DLC and how great it is for gaming etc. And his opinion was reflecting the voice of gamers at the time, most agreed with him that DLC was fantastic. Getting more content out of a game you love? Great! Pay for it.
That's not the aspect of the argument I disagreed with however. What I hated was the practice I was seeing where developers were clearly done with certain things they were charging separately for like maps in CoD (especially "retro" maps that they've already done for previous games), or characters in fighting games that were already ON THE DISC WHEN WE BOUGHT THE GAME (Capcom SFxT). I went through a diatribe about the shoddy practices of DLC, and lamented at days of yore when a game was sold to me for $50 that it was done and that the full experience was thus rendered to me as intended. Instead the full experience is now segmented behind pay walls that were otherwise unknown to me upon purchase. Now, it's just expected to see something like a Season Pass like what we see here with Batman.
Except, though, now suddenly gaming news sites are angry. Why? We've dealt with the $50 CoD Season Map pass for well over 6 or 7 years now, Borderlands had its $50 season passes all over the place. Bethesda would split its DLC into $10 or $20 increments with the expected Game of the Year edition to be released less than a year later for $60...which is what normal gamers paid for the game without that extra content initially....So it comes as a complete shock to me, utterly surprising that suddenly my complaints about DLC are being reverberated by gaming news sites. But why now? It's awkward timing isn't it? The whole gamergate thing has finally died down, many sites changed their policies as a result, lots of people were fired, the backlash was felt, and made waves.
Are these sites suddenly being more receptive to their audience now being against these anti-consumer practices like this DLC crap? That's my only guess why they're doing this, because otherwise it's entirely hypocritical to have never brought it up before this. This has been going on for years after all with plenty of other developers doing it openly and freely and the only real backlash I ever saw to it was against Capcom for Street Fighter X Tekken when we found their DLC on the disc we already bought. Somehow Bungie got away with it when people found their DLC on the disc of Destiny and posted videos of it though. No one complained about that.
The inconsistency of all of this is what pisses me off though. So far they've been fine with Activision, and EA shoving $50 map packs at them, but SUDDENLY Warner Brothers has the gall to charge $40 for a season pass and everyone flips their shit. I don't get it, I can only speculate, and that's essentially the point of this rant. I'm just looking for some consistency here, that's all. Will this be a trend though? We'll see...a new Call of Duty comes out in November after all. Then there's god knows what DLC going to be attached to the new Star Wars Battlefront.
Will they complain about it, or will it get a pass like usual? Who knows. They're probably getting paid off by them and Warner Brothers forgot to cut the checks for this one most likely.
*Gamers keep whining and I keep whining about them whining*
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