Why The Gaming Industry Needs To SERIOUSLY Change

Downloadable Content

Downloadable Content, or DLC, is a practice that has been in gaming for a long time. Offering expansions on the game and all sorts of extras, they differ from Microtransactions in that they are much more expensive, but actually offer meaningful expansions to the game that you only need to buy once.

Expansions such as "Blood And Wine/Heart Of Stone" for The Witcher 3 gave gamers such a wide range of activities in the experience that it felt like a brand new game. This wasn't always the case though, we all remember Oblivion's Horse Armour DLC don't we?

Some games though, have the audacity to charge gamers for content that is marketed as "DLC", but is actually found on the disc at launch, in effect charging gamers twice for the content. It's an expectation these days that games will have DLC and Season Passes, which is I'm pleasantly surprised every time a game like God Of War (2018) just straight doesn't have any.

Even games such as Pokemon are getting in on the DLC action these days, although it could be argued that the third game in every Pokemon Generation is basically a DLC expansion.