I hope you're only referring to the microtransactions shit Ubisoft pulled with Black Flag and not with the entire spectrum of extra content there is.

Pretty much. Michel Ancel's games (and to a certain extent Ubisoft Montpellier's) are the only Ubi games I'd even consider buying.

There are quite a few video games sold on Steam which have their expansion pack(s) sold separately and are labeled as a expansion pack in the Steam store page description.

Rome: Total War - Alexander is one of them go look on the Steam store page.

I will argue what a expansion pack is, what a DLC is, and what a add-on is. As much as I want.

Well...

Don't buy terrible games like Battlefield, I'd say.

Where did you take that definition from?

Physical console games are indeed DRM-free, unless you consider copy protection to be DRM, in which case most physical PC games wouldn't be considered DRM-free either.

I agree with it. Let's take a famous game, oh... Final Fantasy 13-2. Quite a few DLC's are individual clothing addons. Sure there's at least one or two DLC's for free, but quite a few other outfits are simply that, single addon's that don't add much to the game unless you really want to see a character prancing in some other outfit.

Then we have expansion pack, let's say, Morrowind - Tribunal. This adds something like 100 quests, new maps, new armor, weapons, clothing, and another 10 hours of gameplay. (I think 200 Megs of content, while Bloodmoon had 400 Megs of content I think).

Now let's see what should have been a DLC had it been an option at the time. Halo 2, which had a map pack. This included 4-5 maps.... and that's about it...


Small changes/mods should be DLC and should be extremely cheap (25 cents maybe) while an expansion is a large addition to the game, enough to warrent $5-$10 dollars.

First link is directly to a post that says word-for-word what Johnathanamz copy-pasted here. If memory serves - this isn't the first time I've seen this on GOG forums alone, since I distinctly recall thinking how much the numbers have been drawn from the deepest confines of OP's rectum.

The second one basically reiterates a thing I've learnt as freshman - that words are usually a more... "fuzzy" than clear-cut matter.
Is a grain of rice a pile? Hell no. Are two grains? No goddamn way. Will one more grain added to something that isn't yet a pile make it a pile? No. Therefore PILES DON'T EXIST.
Empirically we know that PILES DO EXIST.
Contradiction.

Oh - DLC? Same sort of deal. If we make a distinction based on size, we can't really make a CLEAR one. That's why things like "at least 50 missions" constitutes ass-backwards thinking in my eyes. It's like a digital man living in an analog world. It IS, of course, A solution to the sorites paradox, but it's the most primitive and absurd one, the one we discussed in the lecture immediately ("we could simply agree on a contrived limit") but just as quickly discarded as only useful in bureaucracy.
This says nothing about the insanity of trying to merely enumerate every thing a developer could add to a game. It is said that a fool persisting in his folly would become wise... That's based on the assumption that one, when confronted with absurd consequences of his thinking, would naturally give up on his line of thinking, seeing it as erratic.

There's also the issue of "Morning Star versus Evening Star". Both are Venus, right? They denote the same object... but DESCRIBE it kinda differently. In this sense DLC and expansion packs may as well be the same thing, but with the former being a pejorative term and the latter a positive one. The former is "they want our money", the latter "they are making more stuff for us". Hell - it makes it possible for people to never buy DLC, 'cause when they buy it, they'll call it something else. DLC, in that sense, is the expansion pack you don't buy.

I could also dwell on how some people need to understand that, in theory, there could always be "more", and there is no reason one should deny himself every thing in particular based on being unable (or unwilling) to own all the things at once.

These discussions mostly lead nowhere... in no small part thanks to the fact that they're mostly disputes over definitions of words -_-.

You can only play it on one specific platform, you can't make a backup copy and if the disc or device fails then you're screwed. No that's DRM, it's just not horribly draconic DRM.

Let's consider DRM to a different media. DVD's. DVD's you can play on any DVD player and any computer. Some DVD's contain encryption, which means only select players can decode it and thereby include DRM (Course the keys were leaked so most DVD rippers can decode it now). Richard Stallman has publicly refused to buy any encrypted DVD, and will stand by that. If everyone did that then the world would be a very very different place...

Don't you think what you said is far too much of a stretch? Especially the "one specific platform" thing. Going by your logic, every game that only has Windows support would not be DRM-free because it requires a specific OS to run (Windows).

And about not being able to make backups, then you have to accept that most physical PC games ever released are not DRM-free because they had some sort of copy protection.

No, the executables don't prevent you from running it on another platform, they aren't encrypted or the OS doesn't do a specific signed encrypted block before trying to load them. As for Windows only that's merely an API preference, WINE is able to run and play quite a few windows programs and games (not all, but a lot). Some games have even had the engines re-written (like for Quake, I think Open QuakeGL? I think...)

Agreed, although copy protection I've seen more in the form of CD keys rather than anything else. Even floppy disks back in the old days had copy protection as part of the disk's low level formatting where it would reference impossible sectors and could possibly trash your floppy drive attempting to copy it, but not from running it.

Full disc copy protection usually has been bypassed by making a full raw copy using something like Alcohol-120% or Daemon tools, then mounting it as a virtual drive. Curiously there's very little copy protection in a Unix/Linux based system as I recall. Otherwise dd won't work...

Again, you're stretching it too much i think. You are not supposed to run these games on WINE or other stuff. Only Windows is officialy supported. When you go to GOG or Steam you won't see any signs like this: "this game runs on WINE". You're basically on your own.

And i guess the same applies to consoles. You can emulate console games on the PC. And it's perfectly legal to do so IF you own the console, the game and extract the BIOS yourself.

My reaction to Ubisoft's comments is that you don't say "resistance is weakening" about something that is truly a good value for consumers. I would expect to hear the phrase "resistance is weakening" if someone is talking about a seasonal flu outbreak.

Well, it is on gamesindustry.biz, an industry website as opposed to a gamers' website. The funny thing is that there are so many publishers that give interviews there thinking that they can trash-talk their customer base just because they're addressing industry colleagues, but then end up having mincemeat made out of them by those very same colleagues for being delusional or completely disrespecing gamers.