EA seemed to be bucking the current trend with their DLC plans for Titanfall 2 in 2016 and now it has also been confirmed that their next big multiplayer game, Star Wars Battlefront II, will also let all players enjoy any gameplay specific DLC for free. This is good and welcome news for the whole industry.
I play a lot of multiplayer games with my friends back home. It is one of the ways we can stay connected and feel that we are keeping our friendships alive when we live on opposite corners of the earth. One thing that has become a real point of contention in the last couple of years is the question of season passes and DLC.
We play a lot of Battlefield and other squad based shooters and usually coordinate what game to buy, sticking with it for a year or so before we change it up with something else. This way we can get familiar with the mechanics and setting of the game over the lifetime of its online community. There is nothing more frustrating than the following scenario: you’re on a server with your pals, things are going well, your squad is working as a well oiled machine together then at the end of the match, someone gets kicked because they don’t have the DLC for the next map in the rotation. Beards are stroked in anger, teeth are gnashed in frustration, and fists are shook at the sky.
While the above description is a slight exaggeration and may come off as a bit of entitlement, I would like to serve two points as to why this is bad for just about everyone.
Firstly, pricing and the structure of the DLC can be frustratingly unclear: do I buy the deluxe version, the digital deluxe, the game of the year, the ultimate edition or the season pass or do I but it piecemeal? Logic would say that if you buy the most expensive one you would get everything, but the “best value” buttons of F2P games have somewhat conditioned me to completely ignore the highest tier since it is usually just full of crap you don’t need. The pricing is also something that has to be addressed -often the DLC will run for as much as the base game or even more in some cases. During sales it sometimes reminds me of razor companies that will sell you the razor for cheap but the blades are premium afterwards.
The value of games has been up for debate lately, too – as our medium has advanced technically, the production costs have gone up. It is fairly natural for any business to let the end consumer pick up the tab for higher production and advertisement costs; it’s just the way business is done. $60 seems to be a hard barrier nowadays and developers and publishers lean on DLC to pad out their profits. You could make the case that the price for a game like Battlefield is actually 120$ with an entry level at 60$.
While I don’t necessarily fault them for trying to earn more money to cover their costs, it could be handled in a more consumer friendly way. If the map rotations or lists simply excluded you from participating in the DLC rotations, it would be another matter. As it is now, if you didn’t buy the latest DLC you might find yourself having to leapfrog between servers because the new maps come up in rotation. This at least seems to be semi-intentional, you want to dangle the new and shiny in front of the old players as much as possible in the hopes of getting a sale, but you might just end up pissing them off instead. This is especially true for latecomers, who recently bought the game only to be prompted to spend more in order to play with their friends or other people.
The second reason this is bad is because it splits the player base. A game like Battlefield 1 is designed to be played by 60 players – if there are a lot fewer than that, it just doesn’t feel right on the big open maps. If a large proportion of players did not buy any DLC or just some of them, it means that the players get divided and the game can get abandoned much earlier than before since everyone has a hard time finding full servers on the maps that they like.
This is why it is heartening to see a big publisher like EA go out and change this model and I hope more of the big ones follow suit. I am pretty sure they still want to get their $120 somehow, but it seems they will stick to cosmetics and other F2P fluff. Hopefully they will not implement a stamina meter: 5 deployments left, 7 hours until refresh. Oh god, they wouldn’t do that, would they?
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