Even hardcore audiences love DLC – when it's done right | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Bethesda's $2.50 horse armour DLC for Oblivion turns 18 this year – a realisation which made me feel like I was about to spontaneously crumble to dust and be blown away on a breeze.

There's an entire generation of gamers to whom it would be very challenging to explain why the launch of this seemingly innocuous add-on was such a pivotal moment for the industry's development; why for the best part of a decade afterwards, an eye-roll and a snorted exclamation of "horse armour!" was a devastating put-down to almost any DLC plans.

Attitudes have undoubtedly softened over time, especially in younger cohorts who have grown up with most major games having paid-for add-ons of various types, but there is still a conventional wisdom which says that more "hardcore" consumers, and older consumers, really don't like paid-for DLC in general.

That's an oversimplification of the attitudes involved, but it's not entirely unfounded – at least, it's certainly in line with what we see in online discourse around game announcements. If you listen closely you can hear an audible groan rise from the server farms of Discord and Reddit whenever a game is announced alongside details of its add-on content season pass, as has been common practice for the best part of a decade now.

The assertion made by the loudest detractors – and clearly believed by a not insignificant chunk of the audience – is that complete games are having parts sliced off them and repackaged as DLC, with the true, full game that we "should" have been getting at launch only eventually being sold as some kind of Game of the Year edition further down the line.

It's a narrative that tickles the two foundational prejudices of the internet's self-styled angry and/or bitter gamers – that publishers are greedy, and developers are lazy.

The robust and generally well-founded pushback to this narrative from developers is straightforward – that while they generally have ideas for DLC in mind before a game launches, it's not the case that