" @brukaoru: I understand that, but just because something is finished doesn't mean it would make it to final cut anyway. In the old days of console development there was no chance of making the secondary sale, as there was no venue to charge for it anyway. Stuff like these heavy rain short stories likely would have never been thought of, and if it had they would have been added ONLY once the main game was polished and done. There would have been no point in running this stuff through a costly QA process. No one would have known about it, and it would have been canned either in internal QA(non-congruent storyline that is non essential and costly to debug and feature check), or even in brainstorming. This handcuffed developers, your feature set and storyline has to be much tighter, once development is on track it is prohibitively costly to add in new ideas and thus non-essential stuff is scrapped early on. Now they know there can be a new point of sale, and these ideas have more merit as DLC. I'll again bring up Borderlands as a great example. Zombie Island of Dr Ned is an item that could easily have been simply axed mid dev cycle. They were behind schedule, it is completely non-essential, and has no tie in to the main storyline. In earlier days, this content would not have been made or would have been saved for eventual sequel sets, expansions etc, or if VERY lucky, a free download on PC(although that was exceedingly rare). A secondary thought as to these Heavy Rain stories is that yes, they'll be done on or about release date. Developers don't have a lot of leeway in determining their release dates. their schedule dictates what they can do. Once a game goes gold and the master heads off to manufacturers so disks can be pressed, theres some time between then and release time, and nothing can be changed. This is time devs can use to add DLC that is ready on release day etc. I'm not sayng that's what happened here, but adding a few new things in the mean time and QAing them to be ready on release can add a great extra income source, and won't be ignored by devs. Stuff that has been story boarded/prototyped/begun development can see some extra time. As to value added, I agree some of it will be "essential" for fans who want everything, but they have a completely playable game exactly the way it ships. Its up to the consumer at that point to decide which if any DLC is of high enough value to purchase. Be that new armor, a new quest chain, a new zone, a different story, whatever. If it is a good value for the extra content, it will sell. If it isn't enough value for the money, it won't sell. Personally, i bought Zombie Island, but i havent bought the forza car pack. I feel the borderlands stuff was more value than the new cars in forza, but that was my choice as a consumer, and I'm not bitter that I don't have the cars from the forza DLC. "
There is a reason software publishers and devs love the idea of digital distribution - to kill the used game market and charge extra for content. 
Log in to comment