Making DLC work

from Elemental Forums

One of the reasons I’m passionate about Free to Play and DLC (DLC has gotten a bit of a bad rap – deservedly so imo but the concept is still awesome) is I would like to see the base price on PC games go down. Way down. -Frogboy

DLC has problems. Can they be overcome?

By the very nature of DLC, the content available in DLC must go down, meaning less bang for the buck. If only five hundred people buy the DLC @ $5.00 you will have (at most) 2,500 dollars to spend on its development. If one thousand buy, you will have 5,000. You lose the scale of economy. How do you convince 10,000 people to buy (for example) your New Pony Models Superpack? Does that market even have 10,000 potential customers?

Contrast with how active communities will almost uniformly adopt generalized expansion packs. Expansion packs can extend the life of the core product (nobody goes out and buys a game because "that DLC looked so awesome") and can leverage greater inroads into the market with physical store space, media buzz and critical reviews. At EOL, they package well into "gold" packages. Those warchests from Blizzard are still selling thirteen years later.

 

Can DLC be made to work?

1) It needs a core product with a long life. Without expansions, DLC has a very limited time period in which it can make reasonable conversions - as soon as players are ready to move on, that DLC will be selling poorly.

  • A DLC strategy needs to be bolstered by a solid post-release series of expansions.
  • Having DLC ready early, near launch, will harness the maximum number of sales.

 

2) The reason to purchase DLC must be generalized and compelling. Niche market DLC will see poor returns, and harm the image of the DLC if the niche product is needfully sparse or lacking in content. Lessons can be learned from companies that have DLC strategies and seeing the iterations they have been through. Bethesda has tried:

  • small collections of items that might interest a player such as spellbooks and horse armour. They found they would sell, but only to a small number of people.
  • special "player homes," which offered advantages to larger categories of players. They found the market for these was small, but better than collections of unimportant items.
  • New quests, which offered "more of the same, but special" additions to the gameplay. These sell well, because the content they add to the game is what people bought the game for in the first place. In other words, they have potentially 100% interest level in their target market. You can see now that "quest additions," in the adventure genre is now Bethesda's primary output as DLC.
  • What is the key gameplay element that attracts players to the TBS genre?

3) Maximizing conversions is also essential to DLC success in an market where new material has a high cost of production. Contrast this with online Korean social communities where a smattering of 2D 16bit art is a viable product.

  • Two simultaneously released packages will compete for market share. Control and schedule release, and time it to the average completion time of the package that was just released. Note that you can use online acheivement systems as a form of telemetry to track actual playerbase completion rate: when the player has completed the product, they will be ready for more content. Note a large portion of the market doesn't actually complete content. Watch to see if they hit a midway point and then stop advancing.
  • Market saturation is bad. Players should have an appetite for content that is cultivated. If a new purchasee sees hundreds of products for sale, he will probably face decision paralysis. Firesale old content when appropriate (especially post expansion launch)

4) Multiplayer and DLC presents unique challenges.DLC can easily divide online communities into the have and have-nots; a problem further exacerbated when there are multiple DLC products. For example, a recent space strategy game was released with two DLC products, both of which changed the gameplay in fundamental ways. This divided the online playerbase considerably: players who had the base game, players who had the first DLC but not the second; players who had the first and second, and players who had the second but not the first.

  • DLC has the potential to divide online communities. The more there are packages of DLC that make versions of the game that are incompatible with each other, the more divided the community will become. Dividing small communities will kill them; and killing game communities will harm DLC sales over time.

5) DLC strategies offer interesting opportunities.

  • Many development studios have dead-time after feature lockdown, prior to and after gold, where asset creators and level designers are underutilized. Leverage them to develop DLC for launch.
  • A solid DLC strategy (that works) can allow your studio to retain more talent between releases of big titles by giving them a series of low risk projects to be released to a proven platform.
  • DLC content allows you to groom talent from QA and other areas by giving them an opportunity to work on something outside of their expertise; which can improve morale and provide cross-training that pays for itself.
  • Access to the modding community as a source of inspiration, potential talent, or partners.
  • Expectations for DLC set the bar lower in terms of "wow," factor. Radical redesigns are not necessary and are often counterproductive due to poor ability to make conversions. This translates to an opportunity to extend gameplay without requiring extensive QA.
  • DLC products can have their own ESRB rating.

 

Summary:

DLC has negative publicity right now. Ignoring that negative publicity will harm the strategy. Dealing with it in an honest, straightforward fashion will boost sales. Players should never feel cheated. The experience should be enjoyable. The cost should provide a good bang for the buck, and doing this requires high sales, precluding niche-DLC which is better left to the modding community. Modding and DLC is not incompatible: they address very different areas with different core strengths. Modding tends to produce very few finished products and quite a lot of niche material and/or game redesigns; DLC is best at finished, generalized products with wide appeal that does not *greatly* change the base game experience, but rather extends it in a logical fashion. The key interests for the genre the DLC is released in needs to be identified to maximize market appeal. TBSs have not yet hit on a successful strategy.

elemental
56,262 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I think that you are making a good case that DLC is almost impossible to pull off in a way that is satisfying to the customer. You can't forget that games are art. Art initiates financial momentum when it honestly and successfully evokes the desired emotional response from an audience. When it fails to do that, it acts as a force against that momentum. The resulting time delay is the reason why bad art can succeed and good art can fail. When people expect good art, they buy. When they expect bad art, they don't buy. The financial success or failure of a work depends a great deal on works that came before.

When the few artists create great art, they create opportunities for many non-artists to cash in, who then in turn 'dry up the well' of expectation with phony works. Making quality art is very difficult, even for artists, while cashing in on others success is easy for those who are skilled in making money. This is how industries that revolve around art tend to eat themselves and go through crashes and rebirths. It's wonderful to see a new art form take flight and change the world, but then again everyone suffers when all you have left is nostalgia because the conditions to recognize quality art just aren't there anymore.

A game represents a total experience that you cannot simply divide up at will any more than you can cut up a Renior and sell 3 fifths of it. When you make a game, you want to create lasting memories. In order to do that you need to control the experience as much as possible. When you remove pieces from the work, or add pieces later that are not needed, you can only relinquish control. To restate for emphasis: You cannot increase the quality of the work by removing important content, nor by adding unimportant content! In fact, quality art depends upon keeping only what is necessary, and purging everything that is not! This is why DLC is mutually exclusive with quality art, as it violates one of its fundamental principles. What's needed is needed, and what's not needed should not exist.

DLC is a marketing ploy that has no place in quality art. It is merely a tool for those drying up the well of consumer expectations. It is a force of great evil that can only destroy.

Here is a link to my Civ5 DLC experiences that I think illustrate my argument pretty well.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/406061/page/1/#2899919

+1 Loading…
Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The great thing about DLC is that people are disatisfied with it AND still buy the shit. 

Object Desktop - Get all of our enhancement utilities in one suite
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

These are the three problems with DLC:

1) when people buy it, but don't buy enough of it to justify the cost of making it.

2) when companies make it, but don't put enough work into making it to satisfy the customer purchasing it, causing a loss of good will.

3) when companies make it expecting reams of cash, and forgo other, more lucrative business opportunities to do so.

 

I hope though that no one mistakes me as saying it's always bad; it can be done in a satisfactory way, but it is a new market that is poorly understood and the blunders made in it have soured the appetite of gamers, especially where DLC strategies are undertaken at the expense of a gamer's enjoyment of the game rather than to further it for an economically sound value.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Are you sure your fundamental assement of DLC not working is accurate?  I have a strong feeling that it IS working and it is working well for the businesses that use it.  I admitedly didn't read much of your post, so I might be mistaken. It might have a bad reputation, but that doesn't keep people from buying it.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top


By the very nature of DLC, the content available in DLC must go down, meaning less bang for the buck. If only five hundred people buy the DLC @ $5.00 you will have (at most) 2,500 dollars to spend on its development. If one thousand buy, you will have 5,000. You lose the scale of economy. How do you convince 10,000 people to buy (for example) your New Pony Models Superpack? Does that market even have 10,000 potential customers?

I'm not a fan of DLC, but this point has a flip side: developers can become more responsive to the people actually paying for the game (rather then the loudest people on the forum). Cosmetic enhancements are great DLC because they don't affect gameplay, they're not something you can sell as a full blown expansion without being shredded by reviewers and your forum goers, and they are VERY popular with some segments of the playerbase.

Stuff like companion pets in WoW, different armor skins, guns with super crazy laser effects, shiny new models, and so on. If 1000 people buy it for $5, you get $5000. If it took one employee a week to make it, you're both well in the black and putting out something that your customers either enjoy, or aren't negatively impacted by. That also gives you money to make more of that kind of thing. You know when to stop when it stops selling, and the risk is far lower then spending 9 months building a huge expansion.

Contrast with how active communities will almost uniformly adopt generalized expansion packs. Expansion packs can extend the life of the core product (nobody goes out and buys a game because "that DLC looked so awesome") and can leverage greater inroads into the market with physical store space, media buzz and critical reviews. At EOL, they package well into "gold" packages. Those warchests from Blizzard are still selling thirteen years later.

There's also a much greater cost in making a large expansion, and if you put it out too soon you can alienate customers (or too late and they'll be gone by time you are ready to ship). The expansion model is better when you're changing game mechanics then DLC is with the way DLC is handled right now, but it's a model based around the premise of shipping disks in boxes to stores and that isn't really true anymore. We can do it better.

 

1) It needs a core product with a long life. Without expansions, DLC has a very limited time period in which it can make reasonable conversions - as soon as players are ready to move on, that DLC will be selling poorly.

Absolutely, and also true for modding and expansions :). Getting the base game right is EVERYTHING. If people don't like that, nothing else you do will matter.


2) The reason to purchase DLC must be generalized and compelling. Niche market DLC will see poor returns, and harm the image of the DLC if the niche product is needfully sparse or lacking in content. Lessons can be learned from companies that have DLC strategies and seeing the iterations they have been through. Bethesda has tried:


small collections of items that might interest a player such as spellbooks and horse armour. They found they would sell, but only to a small number of people.
special "player homes," which offered advantages to larger categories of players. They found the market for these was small, but better than collections of unimportant items.
New quests, which offered "more of the same, but special" additions to the gameplay. These sell well, because the content they add to the game is what people bought the game for in the first place. In other words, they have potentially 100% interest level in their target market. You can see now that "quest additions," in the adventure genre is now Bethesda's primary output as DLC.

This will depend on a lot of things, but mostly on the type of playerbase you have. Bethesda's games don't lend themselves well to "horse armor" because only you see it, and it's not a game you're going to repeat a bunch of times. Their pricing also wasn't the best on that. Blizzard sells entirely cosmetic stuff for WoW and they sell hundreds of thousands of units.

The difference is that in WoW I can buy it once and keep using it for years, and other people can see it. It's a game with players who care a lot more about their character's appearance (and not just on the high end, good looking clothes that are entirely non-functional in combat are popular items to farm and craft for).


3) Maximizing conversions is also essential to DLC success in an market where new material has a high cost of production. Contrast this with online Korean social communities where a smattering of 2D 16bit art is a viable product.


Lowering the cost of production matters too. Tools help with that, if it's easier for your design team to create quests, you can either put out more of them or charge less per (and get more buyers). It's hard to lower the cost of new art asssts, which is why you see so much recycling.

4) Multiplayer and DLC presents unique challenges.DLC can easily divide online communities into the have and have-nots; a problem further exacerbated when there are multiple DLC products. For example, a recent space strategy game was released with two DLC products, both of which changed the gameplay in fundamental ways. This divided the online playerbase considerably: players who had the base game, players who had the first DLC but not the second; players who had the first and second, and players who had the second but not the first.


DLC has the potential to divide online communities. The more there are packages of DLC that make versions of the game that are incompatible with each other, the more divided the community will become. Dividing small communities will kill them; and killing game communities will harm DLC sales over time.

Yeah, it's definitely harder in MP. I don't think you can sell game mechanics changes as DLC, and you really can't do it like they did with different permutations. If they added a third one to that model it'd be so complicated as to be a disaster.

Expansions pose the same problems though, and it's only really gotten around because the expansion eventually becomes mandatory to play otherwise you can't find any players (because everybody else has the expansion).

That one is hard to solve.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

... I have a strong feeling that it IS working and it is working well for the businesses that use it. ...

You might be confusing financial success with artistic success. I don't follow the biz closely any more because I haven't seen a recovery from the kind of crash that cephalo describes in reply 1, which happened for me around Civ II/MoO III. Since the turn of the century, the TBS genre as a whole seems buried in the work of profiteering hacks, with rare exceptions like GalCiv II.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

This will depend on a lot of things, but mostly on the type of playerbase you have. Bethesda's games don't lend themselves well to "horse armor" because only you see it, and it's not a game you're going to repeat a bunch of times. Their pricing also wasn't the best on that. Blizzard sells entirely cosmetic stuff for WoW and they sell hundreds of thousands of units.

Yes, see my comment here:

 

3) Maximizing conversions is also essential to DLC success in an market where new material has a high cost of production. Contrast this with online Korean social communities where a smattering of 2D 16bit art is a viable product.

 

 

You might be confusing financial success with artistic success. I don't follow the biz closely any more because I haven't seen a recovery from the kind of crash that cephalo describes in reply 1, which happened for me around Civ II/MoO III. Since the turn of the century, the TBS genre as a whole seems buried in the work of profiteering hacks, with rare exceptions like GalCiv II.

I would not agree with Xia's assessment, but offering evidence would require me to decloak and stop being an anonymous consumer.

DLC is working for some companies. It works very well when there is a huge market, or when the cost of production is low. WoW is a captive market with massive numbers that really shine, since they both hit areas. It would be difficult to understate just how much money Blizzard is pulling in from that DLC; it numbers in the literal millions, far more in sales than even many triple A titles.

That said, applying Blizzard's model to a company like Stardock (or really, most video game companies that aren't in the 1 B range) is like trying to model your Mom & Pop burger joint after McDonalds. Failure will result.

 

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Expansions pose the same problems though, and it's only really gotten around because the expansion eventually becomes mandatory to play otherwise you can't find any players (because everybody else has the expansion).

That one is hard to solve.

 

I agree. Atari had an easier time of it: their expansions to the NWN series brought new content that the modders embraced enthusiastically. The community itself actively promoted the product and moved to each expansion with gusto. In 2006 they had, among people still playing the game actively, an unbelievable 99% conversion rate. Anybody would kill for that.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top


By the very nature of DLC, the content available in DLC must go down, meaning less bang for the buck. If only five hundred people buy the DLC @ $5.00 you will have (at most) 2,500 dollars to spend on its development.

Not unless you're getting a loan to pay for DLC development, no, you generally develop with the money you actually have and hope the returns justify it. If you can spend money you haven't got yet then I'd love to know which bank you're with. In fact it doesn't cost companies extra at all. The advantage of DLC is it's relatively small, and since you've already got the base game done requires far less co-ordination. This makes it ideal to work on in what would otherwise be downtime - rather than paying your coders to come in and twiddle their thumbs while you wait for the Q&A department to approve the latest patch, you have them working on DLC. It's no loss to the company, since you'd be paying them anyway. The difference is, they're now doing something productive.

 It's particularly an issue for any multi-format release. It takes up to three months for Microsoft to certify a game ready for launch on the X-box, it's better to have the team produce two or three DLC titles in that time rather than have them sit around doing nothing.

can leverage greater inroads into the market with physical store space, media buzz and critical reviews.

Became a non-issue when PC titles vanished from the retail space. In fact, I suspect getting your game on Steam at the moment is worth far more than a retail release, particularly if you're a smaller company who can't afford a full on marketing campaign. Certainly that's what the indie market are saying.


1) It needs a core product with a long life. Without expansions, DLC has a very limited time period in which it can make reasonable conversions - as soon as players are ready to move on, that DLC will be selling poorly.

Not necessarily. Alexandria was DLC released for Children of the Nile, it came four years after the release of the game. The developers stated on their forum they'd sold more copies of the game post-Alexandria than they had prior to it.

And DLC can also be packaged into gold versions. See Empire/Napoleon Total War GOTY edition, Oblivion GOTY etc.



2) The reason to purchase DLC must be generalized and compelling. Niche market DLC will see poor returns, and harm the image of the DLC if the niche product is needfully sparse or lacking in content.

How would that work? If it's niche DLC, we're assuming only a small portion of the user base will buy it, so how could that harm the image of the DLC for the majority, who'll never play it? The thing to note about DLC is it's considerably cheaper than developing the full game and doesn't have to bring back a lot of money to pay for itself. Hence it's ideal for exploring aspects of the game that would only appeal to a certain niche of the user base; certainly it's a lot cheaper than trying to do so while in development.

 Again, look at the Empire / Napoleon TW DLC. Most of it is reskins of units only likely to appeal to those interested in history, yet it sold quite well. Or look at Railworks 2 on Steam, I'd argue the entire game is niche, the DLC moreso (we're talking £5 to have a train reskinned in the precise 1980 - 1990 livery of WestCoast rail) yet it's evidently successful, as evinced by the fact there's more than £150 worth of it on Steam right now. Then there's Battlefront's games, again a fairly niche market in which they quite successfully sell DLC, and even justify above average prices on the basis of it being niche.


4) Multiplayer and DLC presents unique challenges.DLC can easily divide online communities into the have and have-nots; a problem further exacerbated when there are multiple DLC products.

Total War and Dawn of War both managed fine with it. One by being fully compatible with the base game, the other by being single player only. Then you have AI War which lets you deactivate DLC content to allow you to play with those who don't have it, or lets them play with the DLC in trial mode (time limited). Multiplayer is only a problem if you assume the developers have the IQ of a sponge.


DLC has negative publicity right now.

It does? You should mention this to EA, Bethesda, Bioware, Activision, Ubisoft and a host of other companies. They'll no doubt be surprised to learn that DLC has negative publicity, considering they've been selling it by the bucketload for the past five years. I think you're confusing a vocal minority with the majority.

 

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

My first post was so long winded that I actually violated the principle I was trying to put forward, so let me get to the heart of the matter.

DLC must either consist of important content, without which the original work must suffer, or it must consist of unimportant content that has little or no value. Therefore it is mutually exclusive with quality art.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Became a non-issue when PC titles vanished from the retail space.

Respectfully, the present tense of this proclamation indicates you and I inhabit different realities. A continued discourse between you and me would be futile and serve neither of our interests.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree. The way to make DLC work is that customers know from the begining how much stuff goes in each game/expansion/DLC and how much will it cost.

It is much better to say "We are releasing the game with 3 factions, and 3 more will be released in the form of DLC" than not saying anything, and then "suddenly" selling those 3 extra factions.

And of course customers should not feel that those 3 factions have been removed from the game just to be able to sell them later. Tey must see that having only 3 factions at the begining has made the game either cheaper or better (or both).

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting OliverFA, reply 12
And of course customers should not feel that those 3 factions have been removed from the game just to be able to sell them later. Tey must see that having only 3 factions at the begining has made the game either cheaper or better (or both).

Isn't that impossible though? You can only design the game for either 3 factions or 6 factions. If you design for 3 factions, than the additional 3 can only be superfluous, If you design for 6 and release 3, you are releasing an unsatisfying, unfinished product.

You might, with certain constraints, design a game for an unkown number of factions, but then you are making things hard. It's like trying to create the next pop star, but limiting yourself to only using camels. "Gurrrglegurglegurgle" might top the charts initially from the novelty of it, but you can't build an industry on that. Your only chance to make a great game is to throw out all these useless considerations and focus entirely on the play experience.