True Gaming

I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.

My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.

As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.

My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.

Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.

Dude we’re old af and don’t have time to finish the games themselves. We sure as shit don’t have time to play extra levels on top.

It pushed me straight back to uncompromising piracy, and a total refusal to give money for any reason unless the game is fully offline and on physical media.

No adjustment. I don't play those games.

When I played World of Warcraft, you had no cosmetics. It was the monthly subscription and the odd expansion. Everything in the game was accessible if you were willing to put the time and effort into it. Some content was very long so you really had to pick what you wanted. Some people had special fishing gear, some people had a fancy mount, and others had fancy titles.

While some of that still remains, I find way too much is accessible with money in most games. There's good and bad. You have games constantly push out new content, refreshing gameplay, and skins to pay for it. On the other hand, you have games that just try to milk their customers. I'd say 99% of mobile games are absolute disgraces.

The other facet is that I'm older now. I don't have the absolute freedom that comes with being a child. If I can pay an extra dollar to progress a bit quicker, maybe that's better for me? I don't know.

Unfathomably annoying, especially when it comes to modding games. The amount of times I've had mods or settings break because of some update that added useless content that I don't want is honestly disgusting. For the most part, I've stopped buying games near their release date because I'd rather buy the game when it's more feature-complete. The DLC scenario has become an issue in that it effectively translates to, "You will not get the game's content in it's entirety upon purchase", which is unthinkable in other scenarios.

Imagine going to a restaurant and paying the price of a meal just to be seated. If you want appetizers like chips and salsa, it costs $9.99 per bowl. Drinks (including water) are $5.99. Both for the appetizers and for the meal, you pay the waiter first, sides are $2.50 extra. After purchase, they'll give you an estimated wait time for your food, which may be delayed for any reason or cancelled altogether, even though you've already paid for it. The food comes out but it's not what you ordered, the meat is undercooked, the portions are significantly smaller than advertised, or it's actually a different dish altogether. You attempt to complain to the waiter, wanting to get the food you promised. The waiter tells you "Thanks for the feedback!" and leaves, never to be seen again. You hear grumblings from others around you that they're having the same problems. What they ordered is not what they got, or something hasn't been made properly. One guy waited all evening before they finally delivered enough food, piece-by-piece, to make up the meal he ordered. Eventually, after enough people have complained, the waiter comes back and gives everyone silverware. Nothing changes about anyone's meals, but you now have silverware (even though you likely already had some before).
You leave the restaurant, annoyed, with less money, and still hungry. You later find a social media post from the restaurant's cook complaining that their customers are self-entitled and are "expecting too much".

TL;DR - Its like fast food, but without the "fast".
... Or the "food"...

I've observed what I believe to be a fundamental shift over the design approach to games. Now this may just be my different views of the world as I grew up, but maybe there's at least a kernel of truth.
DLC was originally a good thing because it added additional content to your favorite games, giving you more of what you love. Prior to DLC, we had something called Expansions which kind of served the same purpose (in a mostly offline capacity). Then, someone got the bright idea of changing things from a content-focused approach to a monetize-focused approach. Suddenly you started seeing content stripped from the game to be sold back to you at additional cost. This is where I see the industry start shifting to avoid risk and homogonizing their titles while stripping as much as is viable to monetize. Now you have microtransactions (MTX) instead of cheat codes, DLC restoring cut content instead of providing new content, special editions to give you back your physical goods, early access instead of demos, preorder bonuses to get you to buy before you try.
Now don't get me wrong, there was always a desire driven by making money present in the industry. Most arcades were designed around brutal difficulty and unavoidable game overs to drain more quarters from you. Console games saw this take shape in the form of short-devepment licensed titles (or shovelware as it's coloquially known). The brutal difficulty of early console games was more of a leftover from that arcade game design philosophy, but didn't serve the same purpose here. However, there was a gradual shift from making money from making games to making games to make money as the industry grew.
I feel like the soul of video games development has been lost from all but the small indie developers who still do things for the love of it. The largest "triple A" publishers don't give a damn about video games, video games development, gamers, or their own product so far as it provides a return on investment. People like Kotick would eagerly and uncaringly destroy the entire video game industry if it meant a way to profit. There's no soul there.

As for post-launch updates, it's a complicated answer. Prior to updates, what you got was what you got, unless the publisher/developer designed to release an updated version. Since this was costly to do, it rarely happened, but it did happen on occasion; usually with games that had severe game-breaking bugs. Being able to patch a game after it released was, like DLC, both a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that it addressed bugs and made for a better overall product. Bad in that it allowed downgrading of a product, such as when a music licensed expired (See GTA). Additionally, I think that publishers/developers have become far too reliant on this function to push out bad products with the intent to fix it after launch. This is, in my opinion, fraud as they are selling consumers a known-defective product with the promise that they may fix it later. But, that's not for me to decide legally speaking.

So to address the original intent of the question, I tend to stick with what I know and avoid big name publisher titles unless they aren't riddled with soulless monetization. I also tend to wait for reviews rather than preorder so that I know I'm not buying defective trash. That's how I cope.

I wait for deep sales now. That usually comes with the downside that the game isn't as hyped up or commonplace, but on the flipside, it's been patched and surely someone on the internet has fixes to any issues that may arise.

I do buy into monetization sometimes, but I tend to budget it very tightly and only go for cheap skins, or novelty gacha characters.

The rough equivalent to large DLC existed way back before one downloaded content -- one just got the sequel.

The line between that and the later expansion packs was kind of fuzzy, in that a sequel and an expansion pack could be pretty close in size.

Also, it used to be very common, on the PC, to put out a demo to try a game. Today, that's less common. I suppose to some extent the free-to-play+microtransactions model is just a logical extension of that.

I don't really think that the change has altered how I play much. I didn't get small DLC then, and I haven't played games where I would now, though I've no fundamental objection to them. Just haven't run into a game I've played where what's on offer is really what I want.

I'd be willing to buy more radio stations for Fallout 4 and similar games. Would like more music for Solaris too. When you play a game for a long period of time, the existing stuff gets a bit old, and both shipped with good soundtracks. But for whatever reason, game studios never seem to sell "audio expansion packs" and just leave that up to modders.

EDIT: I guess rhythm games probably sell audio expansion packs, but I'm not super-into the genre.

EDIT2: I have picked up DLC that's smaller than expansion packs necessarily were, on further reflection. Paradox makes a lot of games with DLC that wouldn't constitute an expansion, for example. Rimworld's DLC wouldn't be an expansion.

But the extreme a la carte "buy an outfit" thing or "buy a character" or similar just never seemed to have anything that I liked.

I grew up with expansion packs being the norm.
There are very few memorable games from my childhood that didn't have expansion packs, and I think for many games DLC is the modern version of an expansion pack. Although DLC varies quite a bit.

Obviously there are good pieces of DLC and bad ones, and it can be hard to tell what's what. Day 1 DLC can be a big offender, but I do remember the days where games had content in them that wasn't finished.
Baldur's Gate 2 has a mod called Unfinished Business that modders finished up the content, and there is the famous Ascension mod that rewrites much of the ending of the expansion, the funny thing with this mod is that the creator was David Gaider of Bioware, one of the writers and directors of Baldur's Gate 2, due to his feelings that the expansion was unfinished he released a mod to fix his problems with it.

I don't see either thing happening in today's gaming world, that unfinished content can be finished before the game is released and then sold as DLC, being unhappy with the game's ending can be patched later on, or again sold as DLC.

My annoyances with DLC are typically pre-order bonuses, especially if they're exclusive to stores. And if they're selling very important story based content on Day 1.

I don't mind additional story content coming later, because that seems so similar to the expansion packs of years ago.

A good comparison is Mass Effect. Lair of the Shadowbroker I think is a fine DLC, it's not largely important to the plot of ME2, but it's a good side quest that is important to the character and was released about 9 months after the launch of the game.
But From Ashes in ME3 I think was terrible, it was Day 1 DLC and featured an extremely important and lore significant character locked behind an additional paywall.

That said, I do have some annoyances with DLC:
An abundance of cosmetic DLC in single player games is whatever for me, but if the game doesn't have a way to unlock other cosmetics in game, it feels like a cheap cash grab.
Pre-order DLC especially if it's store-exclusive and ESPECIALLY if it's not available for purchase later- I would like the ability to have a complete game.
Having to wait for all DLC to come out before I can feel like I'm playing a complete game. Although this isn't always new, as things like the D2 Battle Chest, Neverwinter Nights Platinum Edition or Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete Edition existed when I was a kid as well, where we were buying individual expansion packs as they released or we waited for the special editions.

I don't care for how games are now. I'd rather Kentucky windage bugs than half the dev team monetizing nonsense.

depends on the DLC. some DLCs are like expansion packs. not a fan of microtransactions but love included updates like minecraft, terraria, satisfactory etc

I have never purchased a single microtransaction. I don't see the appeal of having a green shirt, or paying to win (buying in-game currency that I can use to level up, etc.). The second one in particular just defeats the purpose of why I play games (to learn to get good at them and exercise my skill). Any game that prevents me from winning using skill alone is not even a "game" as I would define it.

DLC is different. These days I rarely buy games on release. I wait for the dust to settle with frothy g4mers complaining about review scores and woke characters, and for all the inevitable QoL patches etc. to roll through, and pick up the game later on at a steep discount. For a number of reasons, I only play single player games, so missing out on the initial influx of players doesn't bother me, and I have a mammoth backlog anyway. If the base game was cheap and I enjoyed it, then I'll think about getting DLC. My favourite game is Nioh 2, and the three expansions for that game are all very substantial. I paid $15 or something for the base game and then like $20 for the season pass later on.

The adjustment? What adjustment 🤣

That is to say, I basically just didn't. Sometimes I'll grab a DLC that adds something I particularly want but usually I play the game first and then it's a waste because I don't actually go back through to play the DLC stuff :| :-\ And microtransactions... ugh. So often they're not micro, and never are they actually independent of the game itself when they have any mechanical effect. It's never "Here's the game, but if you wanna skip a bit you can pay for that" but rather "Here's the game, slowed down by 30%. If you want that 30% back then pay up!" Gross. Fair cosmetics (that is, it's still possible to play the dressup minigame without paying (/more) for it) to support an indie or free-to-play thing are fair, though, I think.

DLCs, when done right, aren't the worst. Like others have said, it's just expansion packs rebranded. The memes about selling you the rest of the game after releasing it was funny. It's wild how people used to be up in arms about is what the norm is now.

What I entirely missed the train on is the GaaS/season pass nonsense. I can't wrap my mind around it.

I've come around to it Expansion pack tier DLC like From put out are fine, we had those before the horse armour. Working in development now, I can see the crazy costs in any content creation. Well managed games can create ongoing funding streams that let the games reach their full potential that software as a discrete product can't without the most permissive publisher backing. For me they need to take the approach of, "we're trying to get people to pay out of a sense of gratitude rather than obligation" to make me want to spend though, I typically won't even think about it unless I've gotten a couple of dozen hours of entertainment out of them already and want to see them continue. It's a high risk model though as most people probably only have room for 1-3 live service style games in their life and no one really wants to be hanging around the also rans. I mostly play PoE, Genshin, and MTGA (lapsed) for context, and have spent several hundred at least on each of them. Feels very worth for the entertainment I've gotten out of each of them, but I could have in theory played any of them f2p.

I hear a lot of talk about micro transactions and shot, but I rarely see them in the game i play so I don't really care about them at all. I played league of legends, but stopped 3 years ago. I never felt the need to buy anything in league, because it doesn't affect gameplay. Now I mostly play single player games and at max there will be dlc that are almost always totally optional or sometimes there will be cosmetics you can buy that are also totally optional.

I would be very interested of hearing people who really hate micro transactions explain why they hate them so much. If it's an online game were you paying gives you an advantage, that would be really shitty. But all micro transactions I see are just optional cosmetics that I can ignore.

Nothing has changed for me.

98% of the games I buy are on sale, most of the times they’re bundled with DLC and if they aren’t, I set a sale alarm for the DLC I’m interested on. Microtransactions are not an issue either. I’ve enjoyed COD, CSGO, LoL, Fortnite, and other F2P microtransaction-riddled games without spending a dime, or by just spending trivial amounts (less than $30 in a 5-year span).

Back then, we had expansions.. Also, pre-internet days, micro transactions came in the form of secret stuff locked behind passcodes that were only published in magazines or super expensive official guides, which as a kid, you could only dream of having as a birthday present or so.

The transition is fine although I’ve noticed the complexity of almost every UI is through the roof because of necessarily integrating the currencies and store and purchase management. But you also can’t minimize or make the stores invisible because I want to know if the game is trying to sell something at some point of sale. I guess I’m annoyed at how devious it can be. IAP are fine but keep it clear and simple, from the store to currencies and the true cost.

Some older casual gamers get overwhelmed by the steps between turning on a modern game and starting to actually play, or recognizing games that have a grind, or in-game economy, or even understanding how dlc for something like destiny works. And it’s all hidden behind marketing bs so you don’t know how the economy is setup until you start playing.

[Warning: Is 3 comments long]
[Tldr: I'm too experienced and jaded to be the industry's target ez-prey dolla-dolla demographic, but trying to be hopeful]
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It was first expansions that you could buy. Like add-ons to the game that added content. You'd buy them in a store and have to install them separately over/in the original game.

Then they were served over the internet and would just install themselves.

Then there were patches and stuff.

Then... Those started to sort of blur together. Different companies would give them to you for free, others would charge you for it. Most pc titles only charged you for the big additions, and PlayStation stuff was also largely free services. But Microsoft on xbox was like lolno u gota pay. And everybody followed suit.

And now you pay for the game, the expansion, skins, save slots, storage space for items, quality of life fixes, new audio, etc.

And now it is the sole purpose of the "game" studios, the worst thing to happen:

"Games As A Service"

You pay for everything and the game is designed around selling stuff. It's not fun, it's bad quality, it's expensive, and it's just the way things are now for everything except small foreign indie studios.

Specifically those things together. Small AND Foreign AND indie. I was looking at what games I actually liked playing in the past ten or so years, and almost every single one was a small studio, in Scandinavia or croatia or Asia, and was an independent studio. I was SHOCKED.

I get that games in the 80s and 90s (I'm only 33 but I know my history, I started gaming in the late 90s) used to cost 60-70$ and have gone DOWN in price despite massive and constant inflation. But instead of accounting for the real need for now cash to still develop games with the same scale, features, depth, and quality by just increasing the price, they've chosen to itemize the price behind the lie of a free trial of an intentionally limited and frustrating "game" full of mechanisms to coerce you to constantly spend money.

I've worked in construction, and this is the same unethical behavior a lot of contractors do. They start out with a low price, and "find" problems that you're basically forced to do change orders on. It's super predatory and deeply unethical, and the same thing that the game industry is ALL moving towards.

I really wish studios would just come out and say "this is how much the game costs us to build if you want lv 1 quality, this for lv 2, and this for lv 3. This is how much we forecast it will cost you players for each level." And just try to gague interest and make the best possible game possible within some forecasts, with maybe ranges of price with the final price being different at the end. I know that's probably too much to ask, but GaaS is soooo, so frustrating.

I love gaming. I played, in their eras, a lot of the greatest games of all time. And NONE of them felt like you were ripped off. Not even for the mediocre titles. And it feels like the scopes of games now are just taking a decent minigame from some masterpiece game of the past, adding in some extra features, polishing it up a bit, selling it at full price, then selling extra bits piecemeal to try to make even more money. Like, bro, that was a MINIgame in ff8! You didn't even have to play it, it was just there if you needed a break from the rest of the game!

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It's made me appreciate my library more.

These days I hardly buy new since games are so expensive. And I only buy DLC if the game itself has earned the money I'm going to spend. I keep that mentality with any games that have additional costs. I spent a ton of time playing Genshin Impact, so when I put money in the game it felt like it had already earned that much based on the enjoyment I got. I try to stick to that as much as I can.

The adjustment has been gradual but the signs were always there.
I remember the last time I bought a Civ game. Civ3. The physical CD launched on day one was just junk as it was buggy as heck with frequent crashes. Had to dL a 5 gig 'patch' (whole game on the disc was less than that). Then you had to buy multiplayer separately and the ability to mod needed another expansion. This was 2001.
Now my multiplayer is mostly free to play and my single player game purchases are considered with many updates and a lot of reviews before I buy.

I still haven't used a DLC yet, and definitely no mjcro transactions. I always wondered how DLCs work, do they add more levels to the game and you continue your save, or is it a new story mode added to the main menu...

I held out on getting a steam account for ages, till 2005, and even then only used it for valve games. It wasn't until 2012 that I got anything that wasn't part of a half life collection.

At this point I've more or less made peace with the concept of digital only gaming, and generally prefer the convenience, even on consoles, but I also don't bother owning consoles I can't modify, and have no hangups about pirating things to try or to have a copy I can control. For instance I've had to pirate red dead 2 despite owning a copy because the Rockstar launcher refused to work offline at the time.

As far as changes to what I buy and play, that's a whole other thing. I almost exclusively play single player titles. I keep one live service game at any point, just as a matter of having something to play communally when friends want to jump into something, used to be destiny, now it's fortnite, but the overwhelming majority of my gaming is in stuff like 7d2d, raft, cyberpunk, fallout, skyrim, that sort of thing. There's not exactly a wealth of microtransaction going on in those (barring fortnite).

And it's not like we didn't have "dlc" in the 90s, we just called em expansion packs. Starcraft had brood war, warcraft 3 had frozen throne, half life got blue shift and opfor. Are all games dlc that big? No, but most of the games I play do get sizable chunks of content. And we definitely got updates to all those.

Hell, even Pokémon games got patched back in the day via link cable, although with regard to console gaming by and large such things didn't start happening till consoles started going online.

(I'm sure my answers would probably be a little different if I hadn't grown up on pc gaming tbh)

I used to experience FOMO over games in general. There was always some kind of technical advance to marvel at. But that ended in the past decade. Some of it because age, but also because my approach to games changed: it wasn't that important to see more content, especially when the content was getting relatively less risky and more predictable in most cases, the same kind of "put 3D people in a scene and animate them kind of poorly with bad movie dialogue" stuff over and over.

So I tend to pick up games after there's a lot of DLC and get the bundle depending on what it adds. The microtransactions are an "almost never", at most they're another obstacle to gameplay and I'll go find something else if it's too much.

The correct microtransaction for me is how pinball works: I play to see how much I can get out of one credit. If I meet the conditions to get a free credit I may play again, or consider that a win and walk away.

I find it shapes how I choose games. I like to be a completionist. I choose not to play games that have tons of dlc that is part of the core game.

Examples: I skipped out on the new soul calibur. Unlocks are a huge part of the appeal of mastering tourney games.

I skipped out on Stellaris and don't really play cities and skylines. It feels incomplete when you play it.

I do play some games and buy dlc because the xpacs feel like it's renewing and changing the game: Xenoblade 2, sims 4 (actual xpacs), crusader kings, grim dawn

And some games I'm just lucky enough that the devs just keep giving me thousands of hours of work for free: terraria, Stardew, Starbound, Subnautica, monster sanctuary, anything by larian studios, etc

I love it when a game is well thought out and complete but I wholeheartedly understand the need for patches and dlc to extend sales of an IP for the stability of small gaming companies.

Games are actually different in so many ways other than this, that I can’t make a straight comparison, other than to say that before DLC, you just bought expansions on a disc, and before that, you had to buy an entirely new “Turbo” or “Super” edition of the game to get any updates.

Contrary to what you might think, games received updates far earlier than the introduction of DLC and Micro-transactions. Doom, for example, had many update patches post launch. Only, the game wouldn’t update automatically. You had to know that the patches existed, and where to find them to download them.