Has there been data about timed exclusive DLC making more money?

With the release of Dawnguard, I am curious if it actually benefits Microsoft in anyway.  They seem to do this a lot, but does it actually do anything?

Yes it gets people to use their service over others. It's instant gratification

There is no data because Microsoft wont release it. (probably)

It is publicity for the system, same logic as exclusive titles. MS classes it the same way as advertising.. Is it good for the publisher? Hard to say as figures are rarely disclosed - but it is a chunk of money up front which is always good for the books.

Way back MS got slated for "wasting" $50m on GTA4 DLC, but the reality of the deal - loan against sales - meant MS recovered a lot of that cost and RS got cheap financing. A win for both.

Absolutely there is data. Remember Ryan explaining at E3? "they don't just make decisions arbitrarily, they have some of the smartest people in the world feeding them every metric you can think of".

You don't just make bets when you're throwing millions around.

While I'm certain it helps them it would be difficult to quantify in any case. In practical terms there's so little difference between the two HD consoles now any positive differentiation is to their benefit.

Yeah, there's no way that actual "data" could possibly exist on this. For that, you'd need to have some way of knowing how much a game would have sold of the 360 if MS hadn't invested in the DLC... which is impossible to know. There's no such thing as a control group in this situation. The best they can do is look very, very hard at people's buying habits and make some educated guesses. There are probably a hundred pages of detailed analyses of the situation, but not hard data.

I bet it works out for them otherwise why continue to do it?

seems like a pretty good way to make their machine the 3rd party game machine of choice. Especially for those gamers who have PC + 360 + PS3. probably also the group most likely to be spending money on DLC on release day and want to play it NOW rather than wait a month or so.

I think they throw money around because it helps keep up appearances. It's probably hard to put a dollar value on perception, but I imagine keeping people in your ecosystem leads to more people subscribing to your service and it probably works out for them even if the sales of the actual DLC don't really change if everyone gets it tuesday vs just xbox.