Interesting argument.. It depends on time horizon I guess.  If you are looking at, say, the last 3 years it's not that close.  This year, so far, I could see the argument that King Felix has been better than Kershaw though I don't know if I'd agree.  Although if we're talking just this year I could make a pretty good case that Harvey has been better than both, though it would be close on all accounts.  Nice to find a fellow baseball nerd among FE masses. 

Err... need to be on topic... on topic... umm....

Yay DLC!  More please!  Of the variety that costs money preferably.  

I think someone from stardock started this thread to make me want to spend more money.

Sneaky little bastards.

I bought Elementak when it first came out. 2 - 3 years later I get an e-mail to converge my Gamestop account and stardock accounts or soemthing to that effect. I went through the hassle of that. When it was all done it said I had games I didnt buy. One being fallen enchantres....so i downloaded it and played it liked it so i biought the LH and the DLC for as well. so them giving the game away made them more money becuase if I had to pay for it I probly would of not bought it do to the poor quality of the original.

Just my 2 cents.

 I also bought E:WOM as a pre-sale, for both me and my wife. When we got the game, I actually thought it was okay, But not good enough for me to continue playing past 1.2. Did I hate Stardock for the game? No. Why? Because it isn't the first time, nor will it be the last time I purchase a game, and not walk away feeling this is perfect, or even a good game. Happens all the time with movies, do I expect my money back or expect that a film company will give me a free ticket to another show later, no.

 But when I received an email from Mr. Wardell saying that because the game didn't live up to anyone's expectations and I would get their next game based on the world, Fallen Enchantress for free. I was blown away. I had never heard of that, and so I gave it a shot, and liked it. It is still on my computer, and I still fire it up to play it. Then I get an email, saying to go to Stardock, and look at my downloads, because I have access to a free beta of Legendary Heroes. And I began playing that at v .75. Been playing it a lot since then.

  As for the DLC, no one is saying you have to buy it, and a lot of the changes are free in a patch. I love turn based strategy games, and love having another game and company to support. Take Civ. V from Firaxis. I own it, and I own all of the DLC, and expansions for it, it is a great game, and has been out for several years. Do I regret buying any of the DLC? No, Do I think some of it, or all of it should be free? No. I for one, do not see DLC for games as an issue. I like this type of game, I will support this type of game, and I will continue to give my money to those developers that produce the kind of game I love, because if I don't, those games will disappear.  To be honest, if they had given me access to LH beta, and then asked me to pay the cost they are selling LH as an upgrade to owners of FE, I would have paid it, and been happy to do it. I actually game to the forums today, to see if there was anymore DLC coming, or any more plans for the game, saw this post and responded to it.

I got the game for free as well, so the DLC is a good way for me to show appreciation and fund future games/expansions/stuff from Stardock. If the game was just some fire-and-forget title from a major publisher then it would have been a different equation, but I picked these up because I want to see what Stardock can accomplish with all that DLC money. I want to see an awesome GC3 (or some other new thing), and Ironclad is working on some good stuff too.

Stardock hasn't asked me for an additional $10.
I thought DLC was an invitation to purchase additional content at additional cost - not a demand to do so. If you don't like the invitation then decline the opportunity. The devs (whether they be Stardock or anyone else) will realise via sales figures if their invitation was universally appealing or only marginally appealing.

I think the key talking point here is business strategy. 

Should a software developer give add-ons for free to drive future sales of the base game through word of mouth from intensely loyal fans, or should they prop their profits by selling content through DLC to already existing loyal fans, with the downfall of alienating new potential customers?

If the single-player PC Fantasy TBS genre is as narrow a wedge of the gaming pie as I suspect it is, the latter option is probably a wise business model to take for that developer.

I don't know anything about Witcher or their developers or community, so I can't intelligently comment on why the particular business strategy that game developer employed might work as well as you claim.

This has been an interesting discussion. However, I personally think the original comparison to the Witcher series is quite unfair to SD, specifically because the argument about paid DLC vs. free content is too slanted towards the customer perspective (everyone likes free stuff!) and too insensitive to the company's fiscal realities (bills and salaries still need to be paid!).  

The Witcher series has been a big surprise hit. CDProject has used the revenues for the series rather high sales to support ongoing development and cool freebies for their customers. Great stuff, lots to like about that approach, and they are fortunate to be in a position to do that for their fans. I'm a big fan of their works and have no complaints about their approach.

SD, on the other hand, had a rather massive failure on their hand with E:WOM. They took a big loss on the project. They had to sell their (presumably lucrative) online store Impulse to keep their game development division going. They then compounded the loss by deciding to 1) continue developing (i.e. spend lots of money on; employee salaries are expensive) new iterations of E:WOM which led us here to the FE and LH games, and 2) giving free copies of those new games away to disgruntled E:WOM customers, potentially further cutting into the potential revenues from these new games, but also earning them a lot of goodwill and respect from their customers and maybe some word of mouth sales.

The point of all this is to say that in my opinion the company that bent over backwards to try to do right by their customers even though they were taking big losses is more praiseworthy than the company that provided lots of cool stuff for their customers for free while enjoying strong profits. I really agree with the others who have already said that what SD did in response to the E:WOM situation was probably unprecedented in the industry.

For them to want to recoup some of those losses with a couple DLC seems pretty fair to me, especially since they gave out so many copies of the game for free. And as far as DLC pricing goes, it seems pretty reasonably to me in this case. For comparison, go visit the industry gold-standard on DLC-customer-price-gouging at the EA store, where $10-$20 DLC for a few skins and a short mission adding an hour or two of new content are pretty common. 

Actually, the comparison with the Witcher is very interesting, because both companies have something in common. Regardless of what your stance is on comparative game marketing philosophy, CD Projekt and Stardock have both relied on other sources of income in order to develop games. For Stardock it's enterprise software. For CD Projekt it is (was?) localization and re-release of third-party titles. So in both cases being a "good guy" has required some supplemental funding. It seems that in business, as in love, being a good guy is just not very lucrative.

Personally I read these threads about DLC valuation, F2P vs. gameplay debates, and micro-transaction confusion, and I think: We gamers should just have bitten the bullet and taken the price hike, back when we had the chance. I would definitely take a $70 standard in exchange for getting rid of all these "creative" ways to separate us from our money.

That in and of itself is taking a stance on DLC.  The beauty of DLC, as far as I'm concerned, is it lets me decide if I want to give money in exchange for new content.  I'm picky with it, so I only buy what I think is good value DLC.  

None of that new content would have been in your $70 standard (which we're slowly creeping towards anyway) because companies didn't develop substantial additional content that they gave out for free after a games launch.  If they developed anything at all it was saved for an expansion pack which you paid for.  

Yep, and that expansion pack was a riskier proposition for the developer than an individual piece of DLC, so more often than not it wouldn't get made in the first place. In the end the only difference is that the customer would never have any idea of what was missing from their game, because it would be scrubbed away entirely instead of having a "coming soon" sign put on it. So yes, I would agree that there is a lot of misunderstanding about what DLC is and how it's actually conceived.

But at the same time, you mentioned "good value". And determining the value of DLC means that each little slice of it has to be evaluated separately by the customer. "More quests" and "more maps" for LH is a fairly straightforward proposition, but for games in general there are plenty of "3X xp boost with personalized avatar color and additional summon slot"-type of offerings out there. Which I think we can all agree is an offensive thing to even read, let alone understand. So while DLC allows games to attain a level of completion they were never before able to attain, they also cost time and aggravation on the part of consumers who don't have a lot of time and aggravation to spare.

The best solution to this I've seen so far is the "season pass" idea. I think there's plenty of room for some kind of V.I.P. version of most games, where you can receive future content for free in exchange for a higher initial cost. This way the stream of DLC will continue uninterrupted, but you can elect to ignore it by paying the money up-front and just buying the complete game.

Saying that Stardock of all companies isn't providing value is one of the dumber things a person could ever say.  They take care of their customers better than anybody, and continue adding free stuff to games after release better than most, and patch to improve games, not just to make them playable, often by adding entirely new features and at the least lots of tweaks to the game to make it better.

My mind is blown.  It's a sad day when somebody would dare to criticize one of the best gaming companies in all of time in regards to taking care of customers and games.

This game was never lacking for maps or quest variety.  The DLC is optional and isn't that expensive.  You absolutely don't need the DLC to enjoy hundreds of hours of infinite replayability.  For me, as someone who prepurchased the original FE game, I got LH for free for being a loyal customer.  I buy the DLC both to have more game and to throw some money SD's way for treating me like gold.

How many companies release a game that doesn't meet expectations, redo the game to make it better such that it's basically a new game, AND give that game away for free to people who bought the first one?  It's probably been done but I can't recall hearing about it.  They could've just said, sometimes you swing and miss and just left it at that, made a FE2 promising to be better (a more typical way of doing things), and charged everybody full price for it.

CD Projekt RED is not your typical company any more than Stardock is a typical company.  They also take care of their customers moreso than many other companies.  How about comparing more typical devs from the rest of the gaming industry to either of these two instead?

BTW, Witcher 2 enhanced edition is on sale on steam this weekend for $5.  I already own it and just can't get into it.  Too arcade-ish for my tastes.  I keep trying though and get a little further each time.  Last time I finished the tutorial. 

I guess this would be the definitive answer to the OP. Really the DLC purchase is more symbolic than anything else, it's a way to continue supporting the series and get a little something in return.

And if you don't feel all warm and gushy about the game, you can pass on the DLC and not miss anything even remotely essential. The base game is the complete game. The DLC is just a hat you can put on it.

Holy crap.  A reasonable discussion about DLC in a consistently mature "here's the reality of business" tone.  I can't remeber the last time I have ever read a thread like this.  I have never seen a community more willing to accept DLC as a good thing. 

This really says something about SD as a company.  The level of trust they engender in their fanbase is inspiring.