There’s an argument, a very good argument, that whenever a game launches with downloadable content alongside it, that’s a bad thing, because that content could either have gone into the game itself or the energy spent making it could have been used making the game better.
Epic Games, developers of Gears of War 3, say otherwise. In an interview with Game Informer, Epic’s Rod Fergusson said, “What people need to understand is that extra content is something that you have to plan,” his colleague Cliff Bleszinki adding “You don’t just lift up a rock and say, ‘oh shit, there’s new levels!’”
“There are people who think that the first day of DLC development is the day after you launched. That’s not the way it works,” Fergusson said. “A lot of it is that you have to prepare and plan and manage your resources and your people and everything to allow for that.”
Saying that the industry has matured with its approach to DLC, he continued, “It’s less about shipping what’s left over. It’s not about, ‘Oh, we had this map left over’… it’s keeping the disc in the tray. In a used game culture that you have to actively fight against, I think DLC is one of the ways that you do that.”
Slick sentence, that last one. See, they’re not trying to rip you off! They’re fighting the good fight!
Epic defends pre-launch DLC development [Game Informer Magazine, via CVG]
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