@Mnemoidian said:
Emphasis mine. I think that's the part people should be worried about. Demonising DLC is not the right way to go. If the game leaves you with a feeling of poor value, then you should complain about that. But I always see a lot more people complain about the concept of DLC than people who complain about (specific) game value.
Sure, there can be questionable DLC - I think that the free DLC for FFXIII-2 which gives Serah a bathing suit and Noel a suit of armor is a bit gross (and I don't really understand who it's for). But I won't condemn more content for a game I enjoyed [edit: assuming the DLC is tasteful, of course.], and didn't leave me with a bitter taste of being cheated.
What I was getting at with my previous question in this thread ("how would you feel if they put it on a disc/in a box and called it an expansion pack? for 20-30 bucks?") was that there seems to be a lot of people who think that "Expansion Packs" were much better than DLC. Which really makes my head hurt. (However, in this case, that was clearly not the issue).
While the other points mentioned are certainly real and valid - as consumers, they are wholly uninteresting to us, as our only concern is receiving enough content to be satisfied. (I'm not trying to hamper a debate on the other points... just, you know.)
This perspective is reasonable, but it might help everyone else to get a sense of how this looks from the other side. No one was really expecting Asura's Wrath to sell well at the outset. In the bombcast, Jeff pointed out that with its niche appeal, the publishers might well have figured that an initial price of 30-$40 wouldn't generate more sales than a $60 launch. In my view that's Fair enough, because what even is that game.
If you're anticipating a swell of sales later on after word of mouth (and maybe after a price drop) then it makes sense to pay attention to your after-release content, because there and only there will you able to sell content at full retail price to people who otherwise balk at the value proposition, as well as to the Johnny-come-latelys for a slow burn like Asura's Wrath.
Expansion packs don't really fit into this model as well anymore because they were a product of the limited powers of delivery a publisher had at that time, and also a reflection of the lower development lag and overhead. In the days of Heroes of Might and Magic 2: The Price of Loyalty, the only way NWC could get content to its audience was through discrete boxed things, and frankly the content didn't take as much time, money, manpower and coordination to produce. Games are big and expensive now, and any relevant content will require enough of the team (and outside teams) that it doesn't make sense to create additional content that isn't already a part of the development process (with its own budget) or as a full-on sequel later on. Simply coordinating that many entities for post-launch development is a huge headache when your development team is global.
Now, in view of all that, calling the extra four chapters the "true ending" might raise your hackles, but if it does then I suggest you're taking it too literally. I think the cliffhanger ending for Asura's Wrath is the expression of the Cyberconnect12 guys' skill at the cliffhanger, so in that Sense, the "True Ending" is the one you get by getting all the S-ranks. The DLC is exactly that; the single place it makes the most sense to invest the time it takes to make four chapters. Where else would four chapters even go? I wouldn't have been interested in a prequel set of chapters, and jumping another 12,000 years ahead would've diminished the tension they had cultivated. But I know that after that cut at the end there's only going to be more insane stuff which is precisely the part of asura's wrath I might even consider paying $8 for.
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