GamerSushi Asks: Standalone DLC?

Dead Space 3 Awakened

With the release of Dead Space 3’s new DLC Awakened, DLC has been on my mind these days. Publishers use it as a way to increase profits due to lower sales and higher budgets. But there here are more than a few gamers who think all DLC is evil and should have been in the game in the first place. Such a view is ignorant of the realities of game development, as there is a period where a game is finished, but before it has been shipped that allows developers to come up with ideas for DLC. Yes, even Day 1 DLC.

One of the main purposes of DLC is to keep gamers from trading in their games the moment they are done with them. Which doesn’t make sense to me because it’s not like you can get another sale out of that person. But you can get them to buy DLC, which leads me to an idea I had: why not make DLC standalone? By that, I mean don’t force the players to actually own the disc to play DLC. Infamous did this with the Festival of Blood DLC and it was a blast to play. I know I would love to play the upcoming Dishonored DLC, but I already traded that game in. I don’t know if it is cost-prohibitive to do such a thing, but you could even charge more if the disc is not detected. Say $9.99 if you have the game and $12.99 if you don’t. That seems fair and not entirely evil, right?

So that’s my question to you, Sushians: would you prefer if DLC were standalone? Would that make you more likely to buy it? Would you try games that you normally wouldn’t if you could have a taste for a lower cost? Let’s hear it!

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Age: 34 PSN ID: Starkiller81. I've played games since before I can remember, starting with my dad's Atari and I haven't stopped yet. Keep them coming and I will keep playing them.

6 thoughts on “GamerSushi Asks: Standalone DLC?”

  1. I prefer already owning the game then buying the dlc with the need of it for the idea of cost. If you can do it that way and only pay a dollar its nice.

  2. @ Anthony
    This is quite a novel idea to me. How the game could be feature Standalone DLC.
    I enjoyed the game LA Noire quite a lot, and if they managed to make all the DLC
    stand alone I might have enjoyed more of the cases being able to download cases
    that are of an interest to me.

    In fact, I think games featuring only Single Player(LA Noire) could get a revival if this Standalone DLC works. I can’t justify keeping the game disc of a single player game I already had my fill with. I would rather trade it in instead.
    Also the DLC could entice those who enjoy the DLC to purchase said game. Its most definitely an interesting take for the Game Industry to do.
    Now if they would just fix the pricing of DLC, I might download games more often.

  3. That’s not a bad idea at all. I was unsure about how this would be appealing until I saw that you could charge more for no disk. That’s not a bad idea. It essentially makes the disk a season pass discouraging trade-ins, so hopefully companies would stop charging for season passes.

  4. You do get a new sale out of a game if somebody wants to hang onto their CD because somebody else has to go get the game new instead of getting it second hand. Having stand alone DLC sounds pretty cool and all (considering that we’ve already had that for a long time in the form of expansion pack CDs that run the game without the original disc) but it doesn’t do anything to help the producers make more money than binding the player down with DLC that requires the original disc.

    In short: the suggestion is pretty awesome for consumers, but is an old idea that publishers have gotten away from for business reasons. No method that makes a company less money overall on their main product is a good method.

  5. That would be very hard to do due to the size limits on DLC and the fact that you would have to include many of the assets of the game that are normally kept on the disc for the standalone version. That being said, if there was a way around this, it would be an interesting experiment.

    The main reason they do this (besides extra money for cheaper production) is because of the trade in scare though, something as a GameStop employee I saw all too often. 8 hour story games get traded in instantly, and about 1 out of 10 of those games sold the week after release are used. A month after release, and its almost 10 out of 10 that are being sold used. Take a look at Alan Wake. That game sold fairly poorly, even though it eventually had DLC. It’s because the early adopter didn’t feel like waiting 2-3 months for the extra episode, so they traded it. A sad truth,

  6. Yeah I agree with Drell Thinking about it from the PC side of things, you would have to download the guts and core of the game to run the DLC anyway, which means longer install times and more bandwidth usage from a service like Steam. It’s a cool idea, but it would take very specific types of games.

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