Witcher Dev: "DLC Should Be Free"

[hellegennes]

@Blake:



Your analogy with the burger is misleading, to say the least. One burger costs 5$ because it's one. You can't excuse the price of a DLC costing 10$ because it took more time, people and effort to make than a burger, because they are not selling just one item, they're selling thousands of them. Let's say the cost of the DLC was 2,000 per person per month, for a total of 10 people. That's 20,000$. By selling 10,000 units, they earn 100,000$. Hence, if you subtract the cost, the DLC earns the company 80,000$, which is 79,995$ more than your burger. See? Despite greater costs, a company can make more money because they don't sell just one unit. There isn't a theoretical limit for how many units they can sell, while paying the same amount of money to get the job done.



Comparing actual physical things with copies (especially digital ones) just doesn't work.



So the only valid comparison that can be made is in terms of how much value is contained within the product, when compared to products of the same category. You can't say "10$ is very little". You wouldn't pay 10$ for a gum, regardless of how little is 10$ with regards to your paycheck. You wouldn't pay 1000$ for a burger but you would pay it for a bike. The money you pay must compare with the value of what you are getting, not with how much you earn.



Similarly, I paid 25$ for the full game, back in November. Paying 10$ for a DLC, no matter how little it may seem as a sum of money, just doesn't feel right with so little content. And if you want to include costs in the comparison, the base game certainly costed the company much much more when compared to its retail price. If you charge 10$ for a month's worth of work of 10 people, how much would you have to charge for 2 years of work of 100 people? Just about 2400 dollars. Content-wise, it would have to cost even more.



And I'm not even saying that they give it away for free but at a more reasonable price; say around 3-4$.

[Crayno]

I don't mind about paying for DLC/Add-ons but for a game that was released in beta?

They should provide it for free and even then they'd still owe an apology to all the people they scammed with this game.

[GreatEmerald]

>They're not going to get paid anymore if the game doesn't make any money, and the game's not going to make any money if they give stuff away for free lol.

Well, hellegennes put it nicely, but I wanted to add a bit more to it. They are going to get paid for releasing content for free - because that encourages people to buy the main game, without which you can't play the added content. I can assure you that if Epic Games hadn't released the Titan Pack for Unreal Tournament 3, the sales of the game would have been 60% of what it is now, if even that. That free content elevated the image of the game from "a bloody console port" to "a pretty decent game".

As a matter of fact, the developers are getting paid for doing nothing, too. They have to develop the game only once, while the purchases of the game is a constant money flow. Heck, some people still buy Doom II nowadays, and the money still goes to iD.