Idea: Small, paid DLC in addition to free DLC?

[Echo35]

I'm something of a collector, not in an egregious sense but in the sense that if I like something, I want to own it and have it available for later.  If I like it, similarly I generally want to own all of it, and if that comes at too great an aggregate cost it is frustrating and a turnoff.

Whenever a game (Particularly a table top/board/card/etc game) releases a lot expansions and I start to get angry, my friends wonder why. This is why. I love collecting things and having complete sets (Hence why I have all 7 expansions for Arkham Horror and have yet to play with them all at once, largely due to the fact that I'd need a conference table to make it all fit >.<). One or two full expansions, or 4 or 5 micro expansions are fine, but beyond that, it just gets silly. Every time I see Railworks on Steam it annoys me, because there are entirely too many packs for that. I used to be into model trains as a pretty involved hobby, and even that didn't cost that much!

[x4000]

With AI War I intend to keep doing expansions for a long time, but that's because I don't plan to do sequels.  So it will likely be an expansion every 8 to 10 months until... whenever people stop wanting them.  I think the end volume is less important than the rate at which stuff like that comes out, personally, but I know that might vary.  When too many expansions come out too fast, that's frustrating for me, too.

I haven't played Arkham Horror, but I really do love Descent, which is also by FFG (and in fact, I created a faster variant of Descent that is still pretty well liked).  I have the fist three expansions to Descent, but I still haven't played all of the quests with them, and there are already at least a couple of more expansions since then that have been released.  I'm glad to have the extra content, most specifically the new monster figures, but after a certain point it just loses me -- mainly, when they increased the rate at which expansions were coming out.

But, on the other hand, I don't begrudge them for that.  If they can sell that many expansions, and the core Descent playerbase really wants that many, then I'm not going to gripe about it.  What I have is complete enough, unlike in the sense of little DLC microtransactions.  Those expansions are separate products, in a sense -- whereas missing cards in a CCG/TCG, or unbought DLC for a base game, generally means there is something "missing" from the initial product, or that's the sense it gives me.

Yah, so convoluted and contradictory, in many ways.

[Haagenti II]

I feel among brethren.

Looking around my den, I see sad remnants of uncontrolled collector's mania:
- a full set of Europa wargames. About 12 interlocking games. The total map area is something like 11' by 6' and it must have more than 10.000 playing pieces. Where will it fit?
- an almost full collection of every wargame ever published by SPI (more than a 100). When will I ever play those?
- 200+ books on poker (about 4 times more than I read for my Masters, but at least I read all of them)
- a formerly complete set of one full bottle from every single malt distillery in Scotland (at least that is slowly depleting, but if you drink about a bottle every two months, and you have 100+ bottles left...)
- a rather too large set of Infocom games

Fortunately most new hobbies are digital, or I'd have a serious problem.  I wonder how much space 560GB of MP3 would take on audio CDs. Would it have its own Schwarzschild radius?

"a generalized interest in collecting, possessing, and retaining objects" - from the wiki page on Anal Retentive

[Gankenstein]

No, please. Bad idea. "Oh hai, you just bought a game. Now, the really cool bits of the game have been divided into a gazillion tiny installments which you will need to purchase when we release them. This makes good marketing for us, and we know that you, the customer, will be happy to pay us for marketing ourselves. A release plan? Ohnoes, stuff will be released as we see fit and each release will be hyped as a must have. The good news is each of these minireleases will not cost much (transaction fees from third parties such as your bank may apply though)".

Srsly, micro DLC may be a salespersons' wet dream but it's more about "Oooh, shiny" than delivering a well balanced game you can play for a long time.

A game, you may sell me that. If it's a good game, you may even sell me a subscription and/or some expansion packs (I did subscribe to WoW for almost four years & purchased two expansions). Selling me pieces of an infinite puzzle, well I hope I'm too smart to be tricked into that.

[x4000]

Selling me pieces of an infinite puzzle

That's a really good way to describe it.  I've never really seen it put that way before, but that's really nails why I'm uncomfortable with microtransactions (and even "free to play").

[laxrulz777]

Selling me pieces of an infinite puzzle

That's a really good way to describe it.  I've never really seen it put that way before, but that's really nails why I'm uncomfortable with microtransactions (and even "free to play").

As a reformed comic book junkie let me be the first to say that I'm perfectly okay pissing my money away in search of pieces of an infinite puzzle 

[OniRyo]

Way I see it the best way to go about it is instead of making small mini-content packs that people have to maintain a large checklist of what they have, you can either subscribe or buy a pack (depending how you want to set it up) of content which will eventually be released free later on in like 3 months time or something like that.

This may seem absurd but it actually works fairly well for everyone. There is a website i used to frequent to help learn FL Studio (music editing software, i still cant use it lmao  ) called warbeats.com and what the guy would do is the paid members would get access to the videos as they came out, after a month or so they'd be posted to the free section. Was a nice little way for people to help out as well as get stuff early. Could be used in AI Wars so the paid dlc costs pretty small (From 50-cents up to $1-2 pending how much is in the that particular installment) then after something like 1 or 2 months it gets re-released as free-dlc. Those impatient or just want to help financially support Arcen could pay to get'em early while the rest who don't think that particular release is worth while for whatever reason can just wait but not feel like they are getting slighted in the long run.



Alternatively, the option to 'subscribe' would be good. Paying one low flat rate (maybe around $5?) and you can get all the paid-dlc content for the next 6 months as well as all past updates. This provides people an easy way to get it all in one go and ongoing content without all the micro-transaction hassles that normally would occur.

For those who don't want to subscribe there could be some sort of bundled offer with each expansion where all the updates between the previous expansion and this one, for ease on both ends it would just be a second version of the expansion which comes with all the content bundled up so there aren't multiple installers required. I'm thinking around +$5-10 over the base expansion cost (assuming of course there is a large enough amount of paid dlc)


Of course you could always mix-match these methods as you see fit , the key (if you're going to go ahead with any form of paid DLC) is making it worth while and also making it EASY to get in bulk since the people who join AI Wars a year from now will not want to buy a few dozen mini-expansions or pay a lot for 'bonus' stuff (or even pay for bonus stuff for that matter since that makes many feel like they are being forced to pay for extra content which changes nothing about the core game) Imo the 'pay for it early' is the best method.


Anyway it's getting late here so my sentences are going to start getting exponentially less coherent but figured I'd toss in my 2-crystals worth on the subject

[eRe4s3r]

Subscribing for DLC and your idea - 2 words ... Hellgate London

[RCIX]

I'd honestly just stick with expansions. I can tell you right now that i wouldn't like it because my budget is tight and i barely have room for a few games here and there, much less little content packs every other week (as much as i'd like to buy them).It would drive me up the wall for all of these cool things the be out there and unable to buy them!

[OniRyo]

Subscribing for DLC and your idea - 2 words ... Hellgate London

Never played, figured it would be another blizzard "spend 500 game hours trying to get the uber unique drop only to have some n00b running a bot grab it out from under you his first week playing" bs like Diablo 2..... plus when it came out my comp wouldn't run it anyway heh

Personally I'm not thrilled about the idea of paid DLC at all but i figured if it was gonna happen figure toss out some ideas that might make it slightly less annoying/bothersome (ie: reduce the inevitable wholesale piracy that would occur)

[x4000]

Really, I think this who idea has pretty much died out here in the thread, aside from if it becomes a last resort at some point as an alternative for just closing down the company (hopefully not).  We're a long way from anything remotely so dire as that, so I think we can pretty much table this for now.

[Velox]

Really, I think this who idea has pretty much died out here in the thread, aside from if it becomes a last resort at some point as an alternative for just closing down the company (hopefully not).  We're a long way from anything remotely so dire as that, so I think we can pretty much table this for now.

     The fact that this is your response when the results of this discussion can basically be summed up as "we don't like this idea, but it would probably make money" is yet another reason that I'm planning on buying anything you publish.

[x4000]

Thanks, Velox. 

[Echo35]

Subscribing for DLC and your idea - 2 words ... Hellgate London

Not the only example.



Thanks for the money gaiz! I'm goin to space while my game shuts down!