Posted September 25, 2020
rjbuffchix: No, it may be a somewhat confusing point I'm making so I apologize but I am not making a direct analogy. I am saying that games being broken up piecemeal has become common for single player games. Which was prefaced by Horse Armor. Once enough gamers accepted cosmetic individual item DLC, such as Horse Armor, companies began pushing for more of games to be broken up and sold individually to players.
In other words supporting minor inconvenient bad practices has led to worse practices down the line.
Bethesda's Horse Armor was laughed off the yard. Did anyone really spend money on this? Not anybody I know. In other words supporting minor inconvenient bad practices has led to worse practices down the line.
What maybe paved the way for endless content additions was MS Flight Simulator. I remember whole shelves lined with boxes for single planes or airports, and they weren't cheap either. Someone must have bought all those little expansion - shelf space was valuable after all.
I guess companies like Paradox and Slitherine were inspired by that.
rjbuffchix: I don't see how this is any different. Another good example of this phenomenon might be GWENT paving the way for Cyberpunk multiplayer mode with microtransactions. And please look up "opportunity cost". In the case of Cyberpunk/Witcher franchises, we have missed out on DRM-free singleplayer games that could have been, because of how resources were/are being allocated to push DRMed multiplayer games. But I digress.
Well, after Witcher 3 people were begging for a stand-alone MP Gwent game. I guess it was too tempting to cash in on that. At least it's F2P. I doubt it drew serious resources from SP game development - it even spawned Thronebreaker as SP version. In case of CP2077 we simply don't know anything yet about how it'll work, and will be paid content. Frankly, I'm not interested in it anyway. I'm pretty sure SP and MP are made by different teams. Art assets will be double use anyway, game design is vastly different, and story telling... well.
One thing that serious binds resources is MP infrastructure, and that is managed by GOG. No wonder they don't find the time to fix the website and Galaxy development is so slow and bumpy.