Downloadable Gaming

Downloadable content has been going through the motions lately with many of the AAA titles running elite ‘membership’ style deals featuring regular but not groundbreaking extras. It seems like a shame to keep seeing new skins, maps and modes when the majority of players want substantial content being thrown into the mix too.

I love a few extra maps on Battlefield as much as anybody but I don’t expect to have to pay £10.00 every few months for a couple of environments that weren’t chosen to be in the original box. Actually that reminds me of the Gears of War incident from last year where the content was contained on the game disk but players had to buy it separately in order to grant themselves access.

Downloadable skins, challenge maps and multiplayer modes might satiate some gamers, but that's never been the case for me. I play video games for stories, for characters I care about and want substantial content delivered for the price it is going to cost me. If I’m spending £10.00 on content (around a quarter of the full retail price) I expect 25% of a full game included in the additional content.

 If you promise me downloadable content such as Red Dead Redemption's Undead Nightmare, Fallout 3’s Broken Steel or Mass Effect 2's Arrival, I'll painstakingly maintain my saves and refuse to loan out discs so that I can play again when the expansion comes. If you go the Dead Space 2 route and just give me a new gun for multiplayer or a nice new character skin, chances are I'll never come back to your game when I'm done with the single-player campaign.

From a personal perspective I’d rather have less regular but chunkier content than minimal monthly releases. The developers that go dark for six months and come back with a new couple of story hours such as Harley Quinn's Revenge (….and hopefully Dawnguard) grab my attention more than those offering me the chance to play a deathmatch on a golf course. 

Lots of single-player franchises are tossing in multiplayer to try and keep gamers from selling back their games but they need to start realising that we love those games because of their single player story. It makes sense to think that a game focusing on single player should offer single player content. If a developer has built an amazing world, why don’t they want to give us more of it?