DLC

[Kriven]

Honestly, DLC is a great idea that hasn't been used to consumer-friendly effect in the ways that it could. Right now it's being predictably used by men in suits to chop games into tiny little pieces and sell them to you chunks at a time. Then a sequel comes out, and the process begins all over again.

What DLC could be good for would be to turn the majority of games--particularly multiplayer and competitive type games, like fighters and racing games and sport games--into MMOs of sorts with frequent content updates. For instance, imagine if Mario Kart 8 never left development. Mario Kart 8 comes out exactly the way it did before on the Wii U, only every month Nintendo adds a new character you could buy, or a new track, or both, or a new mode. DLC changes the way developers could be thinking about monetizing their games going forward and extending the shelflife of each individual title instead of looking at creating sequel after sequel. It could give us the best version of so many games simply because over time there would just be more characters than could be created in a single development cycle, more modes, more levels.

But DLC isn't being used this way. It's being used to remove characters from the finished product (sometimes despite the story clearly being written for those characters to have a role...) and sell them off to gamers later on.