The Escapist Bulletin: Is free DLC a bad gamble for publishers?

DICE, the developer behind the Battlefield games, has vowed that it will never charge for map packs for the series, saying that it wanted to keep its community happy and playing together.

Fans of the Battlefield games were understandably pleased by the news, and praised DICE for its decision. But is free DLC really that good an idea? Obviously it’s wonderful for gamers, but when considered in the wider scope of gaming, it’s a much more difficult question.

Gaming is the only medium where people expect to get more stuff for free after they have made purchase. You wouldn’t buy a DVD and expect the studio to keep sending you additional features, and yet that’s exactly what we do with games. Some developers and publishers indulge us, and so we come to expect it from all of them.

But that’s the thing: DLC doesn’t grow on trees. It takes time and money to make, and by handing it out for free, you allow a community that already has an over-inflated sense of entitlement to continue feeling like it is owed something. Free DLC devalues the content, and creates expectations amongst gamers - expectations which may ultimately end up being harmful to the industry.

Despite what gamers would like to believe, companies do not release DLC for free out of the goodness of their hearts. While supporting the community sounds like a warm and fuzzy thing, it’s naive to think that it isn’t part of a wider strategy to make money.

DICE might want you to think that it’s your buddy, but what it’s actually doing is netting itself good PR by taking pot shots at Activision’s Modern Warfare 2, which has been part of the marketing strategy from months now, starting as early as when EA assured gamers that Bad Company 2 would have the dedicated servers that Modern Warfare 2 lacks.

In a very real sense, free DLC is sacrificing immediate profit to secure a more long term revenue stream. Publishers and developers want to secure your goodwill, so when the next game in the series gets released you'll go out and buy it.

But that puts the companies in a precarious position. DICE vowing never to charge for maps is all well and good, but games are getting more and more expensive to make, and there may come a day when it's forced to charge. If and when that point comes, all that goodwill will evaporate, leaving DICE in a worse position than if it had just charged for the content in the first place.

That might seem a little far-fetched, but consider that Ninja Theory didn’t even break even on Heavenly Sword, despite the fact that it sold one and a half million copies, so the margins on games are not as high as you might think.

DLC is already a contentious product, with developers regularly getting accused of leaving stuff out to sell it to us later, and giving away significant updates for free perpetuates the idea that it’s bad to charge for content. Additional content is already part of a game’s design schedule, and its importance will only grow over time.

It will be much easier to get people used to paying now, when it’s less vital, than some point in the future when the idea of paying for extra content just seems insane.