The Escapist Bulletin: Less is less

How do you like the sound of EA’s Premium Downloadable Content? PDLC will be short games, similar in scope to Battlefield 1943, designed to give gamers an idea of what they can expect from an upcoming retail title.

Gamers get a fun little game for not a lot of money - $10-$15 is what’s been quoted - and publishers get to test the waters before launching into a full blown marketing campaign. It seems to be a win/win situation, right?

Well, maybe.

It’s great to see developers doing things with video games that fall outside the normal schedule of releases, making good use of the structures that this generation of gaming has given us, and really embracing the evolution of gaming that has happened over the last few years.

But at the same time, the idea that Premium DLC is a marketing tool seems so central to the concept, it’s impossible not to be at least a little bit wary of what PDLC will actually mean for gaming.

Keeping with the Battlefield theme, say some PDLC comes out for the next Bad Company game, with a handful of multiplayer maps and a price point of $15. Now imagine - keeping in mind this is a thought exercise - that Battlefield: Bad Company: Warzone or whatever is gets called doesn’t sell very well: does this mean that the next retail Bad Company game gets tweaked, or does it get abandoned?

Logic - and EA’s own statement to analyst Michael Pachter – suggests that PDLC will function much like a beta and allow EA to pinpoint weak areas in its games, which in turn suggest that retail games will be retooled, but considering EA’s very aggressive cost cutting measures of late, whether or not that will be true a year or so down the line isn’t exactly certain.

PDLC is going to be especially significant for new IPs. The ability to test the waters before committing to a full game is either going to be the best thing to happen to new ideas in gaming, or the worst.

It’s unlikely that big franchises like Bad Company would get cut, but something more experimental like Mirror’s Edge is a trickier proposition. Would a game like that ever get a retail release if its PDLC didn’t sell well, or would it be retooled until it was more in line with the current trends and therefore easier to sell?

No one can blame EA for trying to make money, and taking steps to manage and minimise risk is a good idea for any business, not just game makers. EA’s new direction, although not perfect by a long way, is very consumer-friendly, and so assuming that the company will only be focused on its bottom line is unfair.

There’s every chance that PDLC will see rise to dozens of new franchises over the next few years – maybe the Mirror’s Edge PDLC in the above example gets retuned, but every effort is made to keep its uniqueness intact – but it’s naïve to ignore that possibility that this might not be entirely a good thing for gaming.