Meh, I always thought that DLC were a sort of business model that helps improve the competitive ability of standard games to subscription-based and free to play games, which seem to be everywhere these days. After all, games like Shogun Total War 2 sell lots and lots of copies initially, but, like movies, lose a lot of their popularity quickly. Sales help, to be sure, but such games never have the same amount of regular income a MMO or subscription-based game might. For a company like Creative Assembly, which is pretty much dependent on one SINGLE game to make money, DLC income is probably fairly important.

$5 per faction DLC is pretty bad, but there are certainly some iOS games that have similar price ranges for similarly minor improvements. That being said, I'm certainly not paying for those DLC.

I'm not making a right or wrong statement and nor do I want to get involved in copyright law semantics. I am just saying this is a 20 year old argument and it's as pointless now as it was then. What comes out day one is worth your money or it isn't. The DLC is worth your money or it isn't. You choose to buy or you don't.

Consumers hold ALL the power but act like they are constantly taken advantage of.

Perhaps the game companies should spend a few gazillion dollars less trying to get AAA award wining actors and improving photo-realistic digital eye lash rendering. Seriously, why spend big money on getting one distinctive voice like Patrick Stewart or Samuel L. Jackson when you could pay a fraction of the price hiring an actual voice actor that can give you several distinct voices. If the majority of the characters on The Simpsons can be voiced by only three people then there is no excuse for having every other character in a video game sound exactly the same. And is it just me is there a direct correlation between how good a games graphics are and how linear it is?

I would think that using voice-acting is what could make games more linear, as it makes much more time and money to voice-act ten different discussion branches into a game, instead of just typing in the text.

I was just reminded by this in the Space Rangers 2 Reboot thread, where the developers were commenting on their newer game which has sooo much text that it would be too much work to translate them to various languages, even in just text format. I presume it won't be any easier to voice act all the text either, even if we forget the storage size.

I totally agree! To add voice acting all dialog in the game must be fully tested and set in stone else you waste the voice actors time. If you have some extra time and money at the end of production and you want voiced dialog thats one thing, but to go around looking for voice actors while still writing the dialog is a bit too much. I have seen a few games where each NPC has voiced dialog but it is only the first few lines of the text tree.

Because cutting the 2 million for Patrick Stewart's voice instead of say, Mark Hammil's or someone else good at voice acting, is a drop in the bucket. The engines do a lot of the photo realism, of which you complain, automagically. No, I'm afraid the gazillions of dollars, whether well or ill spent, are not down to the common culprits you seem to blame (along with everyone else). I'm sorry, but the industry chronically underpays and overworks their developers compared to other industries that employ software devs, I suspect the same is true of the other professionals the game industry employs, and yet AR, especially payroll, is undoubtedly their greatest expense. Perhaps some great games can come from indies, and certainly the indies "won" 2011 in my estimation, but you're never going to get your next Batman or Dragon Age type game from indies. Saying those games shouldn't be made is fairly elitist, and most of the cost is paying wages, even as unfair as they are.

Your voice actor point is actually terrible, should a game employ voice actors talented enough to do that they would cost a fuckton of cash to hire. Should the game industry use their employees or other "low cost" individuals to do voice acting then you'll get the terrible voice acting that we've come to expect from the game industry over the years. I don't get this "hire people who don't know what the fuck they're doing" idea, it's not cheaper, usually, given that the results are usually substandard.

Professionals cost money and for every kid in their garage that's some kind of programming genius there's 10,000 washouts along with 100s of people who got there through blood, sweat, and tears and don't work for peanuts. You complain about spending too much on voice acting only to follow with a complaint about the quality of voice acting in video games... go figure.

Back on topic with DLC, I was at a comic store downtown and saw some of the new Mass Effect action figures. I noticed that the action figures came with DLC for ME3 and did a double-take. Are they using DLC now to push merch? I'm really hoping all of that merchandising-related DLC eventually gets included in some form of GOTY edition for ME3, otherwise it's yet another clear indicator of how EA is committed to squeezing as much money out of its customers as possible.

Yes, EA has been toying with this for awhile and ME3 they really started doing it more. IMO, this is actually a reason to be pissed at them. Right now it's stupid rifles that don't do much, but if this works you can bet it'll be more core DLC and they'll have you buying a stupid mouse pad or 10 slurpees you didn't want to get it.

Attaching DLC to merch is an actual asshole thing to do and is actually worth complaining about.

I wish I could find the article how one game developer feels the big game companies are wasting money quite inefficiently, I think one point was that they are hiring too many people for trivial tasks. Since I don't work in the field, I have to take his word.

I think the companies are free to make any kind of games they want with any budget they want, but they shouldn't be complaining if they are losing money on those big projects (except if it is clearly due to piracy, because pirates are playing the games without paying what the publisher is asking for the game). Like how so many developers try to make the next successful pay-per-play MMORPG, Fine, go ahead, but I don't feel bad at all for not buying nor playing your MMORPGs.

If the companies feel their current budgets are fine and they get enough money back for their projects, then there's really nothing to discuss I guess. Yet, I keep seeing these complaints about "spiralling development costs of games", as if they are a force of nature that can't be fought. Anyway, it is the industry's problem to figure it out, maybe that is why e.g. EA has now entered the "indie market" too, as ludicrous and oxymoron as it sounds.

I think at least the voice of SHODAN in System Shock and Victoria in Thief (Terri Brosius) was a good use of pretty (I presume) low cost voice acting. But then, it could be my tolerance for "poor voice-acting" in games is quite high anyway. E.g. the voice acting in "Gorky 17/Odium" seems to get lots of negative feedback in user reviews, but to me it is easily good enough to enjoy the rest of the game.

I think you got my point and missed it all at once about the voice acting. Spending a few million dollars for one actor to come in for one day and read a few pages of lines into a microphone is incredibly wasteful. There are numerous actors who specialize in voice acting that would have contributed a lot more to the overall game for less money. It doesn't even have to be the really well known voice actors like Hank Azaria or Tress MacNeille, there are people you have never heard of that have those same talents who would gladly take $50K for a 4-6 week gig. If a studio still insists on casting Patrick Stewart then at least get your moneys worth out of him, the man has talent. I saw him on stage doing a 1 man version of A Christmas Carol and it was awesome. Hiring the guy to read the opening monologue for Oblivion was, while very good, a waste of a good resource.

The game engines themselves may make it easier to render better quality graphics, but it still takes a lot of man hours to create them. I don't know what experience you have had with game engines but based on my experiences with them the term Automagical doesn't really come to mind.

But you are right, when compared to the huge overall budgets of some of these games there are a lot of little things that splurging on isn't going to skew the budget out of control. However those little things can add up. I a studio want to spend big money on developing a game, hey it's their money and their game they can do what they want. If they want to find the most expensive writers, voice actor and concept artists and license the most expensive rendering software and game engine while keeping an army of developers on the payroll for 5 years while it all gets put together, well that's fine. Just don't try to make me feel that I somehow owe it to the company to pay inflated prices to cover those costs.

I have also found just picking up gold editions much later on is the best way of avoiding being ripped off with DLC. I have made the mistake of buying crap DLC once before. I find with the game of the year editions/gold editions you get full content for about half the price than if someone bought at release (less if you wait for a sale).

I am sure some people worry about multi player but as I rarely play online any more so its become less of a concern, Even then even with dead communities you can often join one or two of the remaining servers.

I would rather buy cheap games with full content than buy at release with an extra $20 cost for the future DLC (even then it is the risk that the DLC would just be garbage as well such as horse armour in Elder Scrolls Oblivion).