"On-disc DLC an 'ugly truth,' says Gears of War designer"

Apr 10, 2012 15:39

Hey look, it's Cliffy B saying something stupid again. He seems to do that a lot.

"When you're making a game, and you're getting into a ship cycle, there's often three or four months where the game is basically done. And you have an idle team that needs to be working on things," he said.

You know what that "idle team that needs to be working on things" could be working on? How about... (bear with me here, because I know this might be a difficult concept to grasp) ...A NEW GAME ALTOGETHER? You know? Like how it used to be in the ye olde days of yore (i.e. less than a decade ago), before DLC became an apparently mandatory thing for every game to require?

"And often for compatibility issues, [on] day one, some of that content does need to be on-disc. It's an ugly truth of the gaming industry. I'm not the biggest fan of having to do it, but it is one of the unfortunate realities."

*shaking my head*

For one thing, if it's already on the disc (and, thus, should have already been in the base game, of course), it is not, by the very definition of the term, "DLC," aka DownLoadable Content. Well unless, that is, you subscribe to the redefinition of the term "DLC" to mean "Disk-Locked Content" which I've seen being bandied about.

Also, if you intend for your game to have future downloadable content, but you somehow can't make your game able to accommodate that future content without surreptitiously including that content in the base game, then you are a bad game designer. Simple as that. Either that, or you are just plain greedy and no longer give a shit about how bad it makes you look. That's a possibility, too.

Bleszinski noted that a way to eradicate the issue would be for titles to be distributed digitally.

"If we can get to fully downloadable games, then you can just buy a $30 horror game and just have it, and that stuff will thankfully go away," he said.

Riiiiiiiiight. Because games currently available via solely digital means like Steam and such surely never have any DLC at all ever. *eye roll*

Oh, wait, no, he just means that the "problem" of people finding out about on-disc DLC won't be a problem anymore because there won't be a "disc" for the DLC to be already burned onto, and thus nothing for people to get pissed off about, presumably. After all, who will care if the content was deliberately cut out to be sold extra as DLC long before the game went gold if you can't tell that this is the case due to not having an actual physical disc to check, amirite?

/me watches the video game industry (or, at least, the parts of it represented by the likes of Epic Games, Capcom, EA, and so on, anyway) continue to spiral down the toilet (while, sadly and frustratingly, far too many gamers still wait with their mouths firmly affixed to the other end of the sewer pipe).

game industry stuff, games, dlc, cliffy b says stupid things, rant

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