FOREWORD: I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite some time, and only got the motivation to do it today. Here goes.

Paid DLC. Some people don’t have a problem with it at all, and buy it up by the boat-load. I do, and I’ve pretty much boycotted it since the whole idea came about with my 360 nearly 2 years ago. What annoys me is that, in today’s day and age, companies feel the need to hike the price up on the actual retail product in the first place with content that, honestly, should have been on the disc / download in the first place. Piracy isn’t an excuse for this (DRM is another issue I’ll moan about at a later date).

My main gripe with DLC is that it’s a hidden cost that isn’t made clear when you buy the game in the first place. Sure, it’s completely optional in some cases (borderlands etc) but in cases of matchmaking (Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Burnout Paradise) DLC coming out is basically restricting you from playing parts of the game you could happily enjoy at launch (for example, new map packs may restrict certain lobbies, or new DLC cars may be F1 or something else way overpowered) – it is basically a gaming tax.

I have nothing against custom models etc. that don’t de-balance the game (Killing Floor’s Character packs are doing it right) but only in cases where the original game isn’t designed as a cash hog with way overpriced retail costs.

Coming back to MW2, think of the price that’s going to cost you on 360 – you’ve paid £40 for the original game, great, then there’ll be two 360-exclusive DLC content packs which will probably be £10 a pop knowing Activision, then probably another one for the other consoles maybe (another £10), so by the time everyone’s moved on to Episode 3 you’ll probably be £70 lighter than you started, all going to one very bitchy company. Indeed, there’s already been content found (Global Thermonuclear Warfare etc, even though @fourzerotwo stated that it was unused content) that will probably come out as DLC.

I’m not trying to pick targets here. I could target pretty much every company out there and they’ve probably put paid DLC out into the internets, but Infinity Ward are probably the biggest offenders. I can perfectly see the valid reason for DLC, boosting profits and deterring pirates (even though it probably rarely works) but when it’s your money you’ve just spent and you’ve gotta spend even more on DLC, that’s what annoys me. Sure, the Cerberus Network is a step in the right direction (giving free DLC to those that got it new, charging people who didn’t) but that’s still penalizing the average gamer that gets quite a fair bit of his stuff pre-owned. What if EA suddenly decided to shut it down? There goes your DLC (ME2 requires an active connection to use DLC) What if your storage decides to give way? There goes your DLC (some platforms keep it, though the recovery process can be daunting in some cases). There’s so many things wrong with paying for DLC, and that’s why I end with the king of all paid DLC: not charging for it at all.

Fuck yeah.

This article was fully written by luaduck, who has only ever bought the Mythic Map-pack because his friend was bitching at him. Any resources used in this article are copyright their respective owners.

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