Why Gaming Sucks: Retailer-Specific DLC
Despite the protestations among the wide-eyed navel gazers within the world gaming community, the video game industry is, at its heart, very much a business. Individuals (such as myself, oftentimes) can go on ad infinitum about the jaw-dropping technical majesty of a car taking a perfect turn in Forza 4, or the beautiful art direction of games such as Okami or Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and a tear may even glisten in their eye as they’re discussing just how they felt when Sephiroth stabbed out Aeries in Final Fantasy 7*; but to the cold-hearted businessmen who produced and financed these games every previous example I just gave was to them nothing more than an excuse to write something marketable on the back on the box.
*Yes I’m aware I chose the most cliched video game death possible, but it was still emotional to me damnit!
Video games are a business, and in fact a rather large one these days, outstripping every other non-pornographic form of media entertainment. So of course when one has a goose as golden as the video game industry, what else can you do but throttle it for all it’s worth in an effort to squeeze as much money out as possible? I mean, that’s just Business 101.
Don’t fool yourself, if a businessman got the chance he’d eat you and everyone you cared about
Enter, retailer-specific downloadable content. Now, the concept of downloadable content for minor add-ons, such as different costumes or player models, never really struck a chord with me in the first place. Granted I’ll grudgingly hand over ten digitized dollars for something interesting or substantive, but a couple dollars just to see Ryu wear a differently coloured karate outfit, or to allow Dead Space Guy to wear a different set of space engineering armour, seems like a dumb waste of money even for someone who has prided themselves on spectacularly bad purchasing decisions.
They may have cost over a hundred dollars but it’s a small price to pay to watch my neighbours sleep through their bedroom window
But when game producers started making business deals with distributors over exclusive baubles they could give away only within their store, alarm bells began ringing. And although the trend started coming into the public fore some time last year, it wasn’t until this year where things went, scientifically speaking, f’ing mad.
Our first culprit? Netherrealm Studio’s release of Mortal Kombat in April. Depending on which store you went to buy a copy, you would get one of three different costumes for the “classic ninjas”, Sub-Zero, Scorpion, or Reptile, as well as a the ability to use a classic fatality. Considering that people only ever play as the ninjas in a Mortal Kombat game it was kind of a big deal for some. Especially if you consider they were essentially locking out two fatalities regardless what you did.
And the reason why most came to Mortal Kombat in the first place is to see gut-wrenching fatalities like this
Gears of War 3 also went down this path earlier this year, making a number of multiplayer skins exclusive only to certain retailers, as well as recent release Battlefield 3, which had different retailers giving out skins, gamer icon designs, and most controversially exclusive weapons based on what retailer you bought from.
The piece de resistance, however, has to come from Batman Arkham City. Not only were there over seven different retailer-specific costumes, the information about where one could go to get which costume they most preferred became so confusing and convoluted, especially when factoring in the different retailers for different countries, or how some countries were getting a specific costume while others weren’t, that a damn guide had to be written and distributed to clarify. Look at it here, and tell me you didn’t get a little dizzy trying to read all of that.
That’s a hell of a lot of Bat right there
The fear from retail-specific dlc, in my mind at least, isn’t so much regarding the fact that “Oh damn, I can’t pimp out my batman seven different ways and I’m torn up about it”, it’s an unease at just how far producers and retailers are willing to push these agreements. Sure today it’s just baubles and trickets, but what if multiplayer maps or modes become retailer specific? Wait, never mind, they already did that. What if producers even decide to start cutting out parts of the stories of high-publicity games, selling the purchasing rights off to the distributor with the highest offer? I can’t imagine game developers would allow that without making one hell of a fuss, but at this point it doesn’t seem crazy to me.
I mean the guys that made Mortal Kombat allowed fatalities to be locked away. FATALITIES. Anything is possible after that.
