A reply I made on a public forum, regarding over-saturation of DLC in the gaming marketplace:
Prepare for a book:
The problem with this train of thought, in my opinion, is that it doesn't tally former customers. Picture this, if you will: Johnny Gamer buys Game X-2. Game X-2 releases as a title that ends on a cliffhanger. 3 weeks later, that ending is finished with DLC that was on the disc. Johnny Gamer, frustrated, buys this anyways, because he wants to see the end of the story he's already invested so much time into. Johnny Gamer therefore drops the 15 bucks and finishes the game. Complete, yet, still angry; Johnny Gamer goes onto the internet to complain and swear off buying from this franchise again.
The developer of Game X-2, already has his money and cares not for his "idle" threats, as the next game, Game X-3, sells almost as much of the same type of DLC, as before. The developer/publisher(DP X) now truly believe Johnny Gamer to be a sucker who just wants to whine. Unknown to DP X, however, is that Johnny Gamer has been keeping his promise. Johnny Gamer, and those like him, have been falling prey to less of these types of milking tactics. They just don't realize it. Seeing only the bottom line, they believe the market has mostly remained unchanged, not realizing that new, younger, gamers have just been filling the shoes of those like Johnny Gamer. Eventually, though, people read enough of the complaints, the younger generation has to start buying more of their games with their own money, and the dedicated former fans are nowhere to be found. The franchise dies, and the developer either doesn't know why, or doesn't care. They have more cows to milk, anyway.
^ I guess that's just how I !feel! a lot of these companies are being run. You have a few people at the top, wanting to make as much as they can, in the short time they work for DP X, because they get big bonuses for keeping shareholders happy. The problem with that, though, is that 10-20 years down the road, the company doesn't exist. The employees have been laid off and lost a lot of their benefits, their educations' have now been wasted, and our hobby is no longer worth the time/money/hassle it demands. So gamers have moved on to knitting...or whatever. Which pisses me off, because I don't like knitting. It just doesn't seem like a very sustainable economic model to me. I believe they could make a lot more money over a longer period of time, but, it's just not what they're interested in.
For me, it's already been heading this way for a while. I got tired of new Madden's not improving, so even though I LOVE football, I stopped buying them. I was promised that Assassin's Creed's story would be a trilogy, so after the 4th game not finishing anything, and having cut out chapters re-sold to me, I gave up. I got tired of it dragging on and on. Which is sad, because I would have loved to see more if they would have just finished the damned story first, then gone onto all the other sides. I've given up CoD and Street Fighter and various other games, because it just felt stressful to see a newer, more "complete" version released just a few months later. When I buy any games like these, I will either buy them when their "complete editions" are less than full-price, if at all. If I had felt like I wasn't being sold the same game over and over again, I feel like things may have been different. They would be getting a lot more from me in the long run, that's for sure. I used to feel like I couldn't get enough of the franchises I loved. Like the 1-2-3 year waits were just so long. Now I feel like they're far too soon. And that's no way to run a company, in my humble opinion.
