The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

‘Built From the Ground Up for DLC’ is Not a Selling Point

Jimquisition has something to say about Evolve’s seemingly all-consuming monetization focus.  Go ahead and watch, I’ll wait here.

Here’s one example of Turtle Rock saying that Evolve was built to support DLC “more than any game ever before.”  Now, I want to be clear: it’s great to hear of a team that had that foresight and that luxury.  Building good monetization infrastructure isn’t technically trivial, and adding all of that stuff late in development or even post-ship can often mean you’re jamming something balance-breaking into a game that wasn’t built for it or, in the minds of players even worse, ripping off a piece of the core gameplay and putting it up for sale.  So a company thinking ahead about this stuff well before launch, and addressing these issues ahead of time, is good.

And having a game built around the billing model is not crazy.  I mean, Magic: the Gathering is built around a billing model of selling packs.  Candy Crush was built from the ground up to be free and microtransact.  These are both billing-model centric designs, and they work BECAUSE of it.  So why is Evolve being forced now to defend themselves for their DLC plans?

Because more frequent, better DLC delivery is not a user-facing design feature.  It’s a declaration that your game is going to be more effective at picking up your customers and shaking them for loose change than any game beforehand.  Maybe not to you but, you know, to your customers.

Put another way, Magic the Gathering’s selling point is that it is constantly growing and evolving, and has a lifespan that stretches for decades.  The fact that you have to shell out cash for every expansion is not seen as a feature, it’s seen as a side effect of a game that constantly evolves and grows.  One that people bitch about constantly.  It’s actually a consumer problem that Magic designers routinely talk about frankly as a problem that they need to address.

Candy Crush (and for that matter, NWN and SWTOR) would never say that buying little boosts is a feature.  The feature is that the game is FREE.  Energy boosts and the like are seen by the players as the unfortunate cost of doing business this way.  And in some cases, 98% of the players never spend a dime on some of these games.  Because ‘free’ is the customer facing benefit of the business model.

You do not get people excited, or falling in love with your game, by mentioning the letters D, L and C, which to consumers, has somehow picked up a letter, because it’s been made a four-letter word by game companies engaging in unscrupulous activities.  Boasting that your game allows for easy and endless expansion of CONTENT like no game before it is very different than boasting about the easy addition of DLC.  They may sound the same, but only if you’re tone-deaf to the market nowadays.  And Turtle Rock’s focus on announcing sweet preorder content before anyone knew what the game was only cements this point of view.

Experienced game designers know that if you can get people to fall in love with your game, it’s not hard to get some substantial number of them to monetize above and beyond your base price.  The good companies know they may have to  hold out a tin cup sometimes at unfortunate moments – you have to pay the bills for your engineers, and businesses are not charities.  But compare that to Tommy Palm happily boasting that 70% of his hardcore fanbase beat the game without giving him any money.  That is a man who is proud that people love his game.  It seems almost incidental that the other 30% have made King a major mobile player in a very short amount of time.

As for the billing model itself, which appears to be ‘boxed price plus lots of DLC out of the gate’, I can only say ‘meh’.  There is currently a war on, between gamers who are familiar and used to paying for a box product for $60 bucks and getting very nearly everything in it, and between gamers who have discovered through games like League of Legends and Tribes that free is a very good price for a video game.  Evolve’s business model is pretty unique in that it pretty roundly will fly in the face of what both camps want.  Personally, I’d take that game and push it all the way Free to Play ASAP, but hey, that’s just me.

Of course, all of this will be forgiven if they can make their actual gameplay seem as good as their teaser video.

11 Comments

  1. John Henderson

    Jim Sterling’s really been going for the angles lately. I didn’t think he was a particularly good writer to start with, but the fat bastard’s grown on me.

    I wonder how much of this campaign was borne out of marketeers so fascinated by the ability of some players to shell out gobs of cash on stuff like, say, Borderlands (another 2K property) and all its DLC, that they actually thought letting would-be players know that DLC would be available was something that customers would look forward to, even anticipate.

    In other words, I guess your old saw of might apply to the marketing department, not just the developers.

    • John Henderson

      Ant farming. Damn it.
      http://www.zenofdesign.com/academics-and-ant-farming/

      • Damion Schubert

        We had a very similar issue on Shadowbane. Our engineers were very impressed that we were working on being an MMO that could fit 1000 people+ onto one machine. Because it’s a very interesting technical challenge. But we never really turned around and explained to the users why this would be awesome for them.

  2. Vetarnias

    In some ways, saying your game will have tons and tons of DLC might not be an ideal selling point and makes you look greedy, but in this age where every new game is expected to have premium content, it’s probably more candid than the studios who just release a game then find ways to tack on new ways to make money off it, depending on whether the game is enough of a success to warrant it.

    I have long become miffed by, to name just one studio, Paradox and its endless collection of DLC that each time finds a way to tweak/break the vanilla game or previous DLC in a way that appears haphazard and little more than “we need to find a way to add stuff to make more money off this game”. Strategies change, tech trees are rewritten to cover a larger time period (as Crusader Kings II, for example, now starts sometime in the 8th century instead of the 11th in the vanilla game), new mechanics on primary or secondary design points (like religion in CKII, or colonization in Victoria II) make you wonder whether this is something they made up on the fly to justify buying the DLC or whether it was something planned all along (at which point can we then call the vanilla game intentionally incomplete?). That Paradox makes so-called historical grand strategy games makes it worse, because it must still pretend that the game world it offers is historically accurate in addition to being a functional game.

    If video games are to be considered art, the people who make them should realize that at one point there is a final state in which it is released, at which point it outgrows its creator, and that every change to it thereafter desecrates the work itself, even when the change is carried out by the creator. Otherwise, you get someone like George Lucas thinking that he can do to Star Wars whatever he wants, good or bad, because he’s the creator/copyright owner (before Disney)/grand poohbah of sci-fi wisdom, etc. I think, instead, that the George Lucases of the world must be prevented from carrying out such changes, good or bad, because as a cultural product Star Wars has ceased to answer exclusively to its creator and now has to answer to something which transcends him, and that is the history of cinema, of pop culture, of art.

    The video game is unfortunately consumed, and will ultimately be destroyed, by this fatal attraction to newness, by its desire to transcend not its own creation process but the system of planned obsolescence that characterizes much of cultural production and has steadily grown apace in recent years. (That’s why we now get remakes of films after ten years, for example.) You could argue that this is no worse than an author who publishes a sequel to his own work, finding dubious ways to get around the inconvenient parts of his earlier writings (e.g. Sherlock Holmes isn’t dead after all) to better attach the additions. But much of the haphazard game DLC development invariably involves not making the additions compatible with the initial game, but the initial game compatible with the additions. They don’t want to make the frame fit the painting; they want to make the painting fit the frame.

    I don’t want to defend Evolve here, but at least they seem to have some idea of what the dimensions of their painting will be, and tell you to plan your frame purchasing accordingly. I would have argued that on this level alone, that was a good sign; unfortunately I know they will inevitably add new DLC as long as there are people willing to pay for it.

    Is all DLC bad? Not necessarily. Imagine a golf game that offers more golf courses as part of the DLC but otherwise leaves the basic game untouched. I’ll start complaining, however, if they reduce the sand wedge’s range on all game versions to accommodate that crucial new DLC bunker paradise on the 7th hole that was found too easy in late testing.

    And let’s not forget the impact on games reviewing because of this, as it too has been dragged down the hole of planned obsolescence/DLC mania. What good is a review of Crusader Kings II published in 2012, apart from historical interest, if Paradox changed everything in the game since then?

    Beyond the ethics of DLC, the danger is that historians will no longer be able to make out the history of video games in this era if the video games industry is systematically committed to fitting a diesel engine on Theseus’ ship.

  3. Trevel

    Arguably, every released game is “intentionally incomplete”. There’s always features the developers wanted to include that get cut in order to actually release the game, whether gameplay options or unfinished areas. Having some of these show up as DLC is not a bad thing, given that the other option is ‘not at all’.

    What I’m trying to say is, I would pay $10 for the kotor2 levels that were cut.

    • Tylor

      Or give some bucks for a Xenogears “Disc 2” DLC.

  4. Talarian

    More curiously, what big studio **doesn’t** build new games from the ground up with DLC in mind? This seems like a silly distinction to make in the first place from a technological standpoint.

    • Vetarnias

      Which is why I tend to be wary of buying new games instead of waiting several years and hoping they’re compatible with Microsoft’s latest OS. I’m hoping for a certain sense of finality in game design instead of being exposed to the whims of the designers as they go along and pretend they’re stuck in perpetual beta. (And I’m sure Steam Early Access horror stories must have made people more aware of the dangers of incomplete games you have to pay for.)

  5. Vhaegrant

    DLC… where to start :/

    There was a time when it was thought good enough to release a game with its core features, maybe release an expansion pack or two and then, as the march of technology had pushed the hardware further, release a sequel and start the cycle again.

    That was before the internet and the ability to stream content directly to the consumer. And, it’s recent enough that many will have a strong pull on their desires to have a complete product upfront in a single price, fits all box. But that’s changing.

    The dangers of DLC have been stumbled upon by many publishers, intentionally or accidently.

    For DLC to be of value it must have an inherent value in itself.

    It must look cooler than the vanilla gear, or more controversially it must have better numbers than the vanilla gear (this is the point it nears the line of Pay-2-win, and steps over it completely if the DLC is the only means of access).

    DLC carries with it a bit of baggage, it’s assumed to be a feature that was held back so it could be charged for, or an exclusive deal for pre-orders (you know, that time before you see gameplay or reviews). A level of baggage that’s not really encountered by the term ‘Expansion’.

    Most gamers I know crave ‘Expansions’, because they expand the game in new mechanics, higher levels, increased difficulties. They may come with fluff and vanity options but the core of an ‘Expansion’ is to give greater depth to the challenge.

    In many of its forms DLC stand as a way to bypass the skill gated content, or give you an advantage beyond your skill set.

    I think the nature of DLC challenging the importance of skill, and what elements should be obtainable through skilful play, lies at the heart of why many gamers feel slightly uncomfortable in its presence.

    • John Henderson

      DLC can be done well. Bethesda seems to have figured out how best to market and create them such that they don’t just look like a bilk.

      Fallout New Vegas’ DLC was a tour de force of design and writing. Four parts of a completely optional story that nonetheless fits into the main campaign, that put together tell the story of the player’s Ultimate Nemesis, the guy who stands against everything you’re for, no matter what, and has a bone to pick with you, and history. Just barely believable and demented enough to make sense. All very rewarding. Old World Blues had the best writing I’ve seen in years.

      • Vhaegrant

        I’m not disagreeing that DLC can’t be done well. It’s just a shame it has so many examples of being done poorly.

        Bethesda has had a bit of a learning curve on the DLC experience, I remember the controversy over the Oblivion horse barding 😉

        Adding extra story, that falls into the fuzzy blurred lines between what is DLC and an Expansion.
        It might not have any new game features as usually encountered in a true expansion, at the same time it is offering more content that has to be worked through to get the frilly vanity stuff that looks cooler than the vanilla gear.
        This is the sort of half-way house I like.

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