Mass Effect 3 DLC - Can Day 1 DLC be a Good Thing? - Extra Credits

[Music] all right that's enough of this long multi-part series stuff for a little while this week we're going to talk a bit more about DLC and returning to help us do that is our good buddy Mac rocking the tablet many of you are probably well aware of the hubub that went on about the day one DLC for Mass Effect 3 for those of you who missed the whole kurur fuffle the short of it is that Mass Effect 3 was launched with some arguably major story elements locked behind a $10 purchase wall how major these story elements actually are is Up For Debate but anyway the internet was none too happy about it personally I'm a little more ambivalent about it was the whole thing poorly messaged by EA yeah probably could it be a naked money grab maybe but I hope it's not as much hate as day one DLC gets I have hopes that it might actually be a positive thing to get to why day one DLC might actually be good for us though we have to talk about DLC in general and how launching a video game works let's start with this graph

provided to us by the heroes at edar because it pretty much says everything as much as we complain about Publishers trying to sell us DLC before we've even opened our copy of the game they're not doing it without reason history has shown them that with every passing week they wait to release DLC the percentage of Their audience that'll buy it drops drastically the longer they wait to offer it the fewer of us are interested in buying and this actually makes sense when you think about it we may be all excited about our new games when we're in the middle of them but given how long it takes to get through a game and the sheer number of games that come out and compete for for our attention each month once a disc is out of our console it rarely gets put back in even for new DLC and used sales only compound this all of the early adopters the very people who are most likely to buy DLC often realize that if they don't trade in their games after the first few weeks they're going to get $5 back instead of 25 For Better or Worse new games have very little time in the spotlight before we all move on so in some ways the only logical time for a company to provide DLC is either right at launch or shortly thereafter you've got to admit at one point or another most of us have probably thought to our ourselves boy that DLC sounds

cool and that game was fun too and once I'm done with these other games I'm in the middle of I should dig that one back up and then we never do and day one DLC starts to make even more sense when you couple this with another console game production Quirk certification most of you are probably familiar with this but just in case console games go through a process at the end of development called certification where the console manufacturers Microsoft Nintendo and Sony test the game to make sure it lives up to their standards this often means that the development team has to lock down the game and call it finished a few weeks in advance of sending it off for certification factor in the time it takes to manufacture and ship discs and you often end up with 6 to 8 weeks where the team has completely finished working on the game but the consumer hasn't gotten their hands on it now it used to be that at this point a team would be moved to their next project or people would use this chance to take all that vacation time they had piled up over the last few years but it would actually be even better for the consumer if this time could be used adding another chunk of content to the game unfortunately as the team still has to be paid for their time and not many companies are just going to eat that huge cost the only way we're going to realistically see this happen is is with day one DLC that either

drives sales of Collector's Editions or is paid for on top of the price of the game and I can understand why it rubs some people the wrong way but if the choice is between having to pay for DLC even though it's available on day one or that DLC simply never being made which is what would happen 95% of the time I'd rather have the option to buy the extra content for a favorite game if I want it but there's another aspect of the Mass Effect 3 DLC we ought to get to and that's to do with the Despicable money grab it's not the substantive Day One content that I can't abide there's definitely room for abuse with that but it also has some potential benefit to us consumers what irritates me more is this and this and that thing you're attaching DLC to a mouse pad and a messenger bag what do these things have to do with the game I I know it's just a rifle for the multiplayer but if companies start holding little chunks of their game hostage just to push merch how long until you see parts of the story attached to a Happy Meal maybe if you want to charge 99 Cents for it as DLC and throw it in as a free bonus on some of those items and all right fine or if you want to at least attach it to something that allows the player to participate in the game world as

something like the World of Warcraft cards or the Mass Effect 3 iOS game sure I can see that I'd like it to not be platform specific but I understand tying smaller parts of the experience to the overall experience but a mouse pad come on you might as well be attaching DLC to Slurpees at 7-Eleven please don't do that by the way also I get pushing your other games and I love the guys working on Kingdom of Amalur so I hope they get all the free marketing they can but why attached weapon and armor sets to playing the kingdom of Amal Lord demo I mean unless you're going to have the the big reveal be that Kingdom of Amalur is actually the Mass Effect 3 universe's distant past what do these games have to do with each other it's just kind of a strange immersion breaking corporate ju to position to make is all I'm saying and I can't get too mad about that one because at least it's attached to a demo so it's free it's when they start trying to use it to push full games on you that I start to get a little more worried now the Dragon Age and Mass Effect armor crossover stuff wasn't too offensive aside from the weird corporate immersion breaking thing but Dragon Age was a great game well worth buying anyway what if they had attached this sort of stuff to something else what if it had been

Dante's Inferno or Army of Two or insert whatever EA game you don't like what if the content was something more than just armor imagine if Legion from Mass Effect 2 was only unlockable by purchasing a new copy of Dante's Inferno because that's the direction I see this sort of thing heading it's just this idea that it's okay for a publisher to use DLC to push whatever products they want no matter how far a field are disconnected from the game itself that's what bothers me more I'm not saying day one DLC can't be abused as a business practice it most certainly can but at least that also has the potential to allow us to more regularly get a little bit more from our favorite games this stuff though this type of naked exploitation of the players Love of the Game in order to sell them things that they otherwise wouldn't buy isn't really what games are about and maybe it's only a minor irritant at this point because the content they're using to push this stuff is all pretty minor but if this stuff gets results I guarantee you it's not going to stay minor for very long I'm sure we'll be talking more about DLC in the future as the industry fumbles around trying to make this game making business slightly less risky but I think that's enough about it for now thanks again Mac for the pretty pictures thank

you for watching we'll see you next week [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]