KDD-0063 wrote...
Now, here are basically two kinds of defense for this day 1 DLC practice (that I've seen in this thread):
First is "it's made after the game is finished."
Nope. This is a pathetic excuse. Game was unfinished; signs of game being rushed are everywhere. Development time before the game launches should be invested into polishing the $60 game we get, not give players a half-product, and think about new content that can be used to charge the players for more money.
This excuse could only work if the game is well polished (even after that it is still questionable), but ME3 isn't.
I think that the developers themselves should determine how to prioritize their time. And I doubt you'd find a single developer who wouldn't tell you that they would love to have had more time to work on the game. Deadlines are, unfortunately, a way of life in most any industry. But being "rushed" seems to be a criticism only of the videogame industry. In all the criticism of the Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever film that I'd ever read, not once did I read "it was rushed" as a reason given for why the film was bad. Even given more time, a developer may not be working on what
you, specifically, want them to work on. More time does not necessarily mean the game will be more to your liking, and some other person might still cry "rushed!" It is ultimately a non-helpful critique, since the amount of time needed to make the game "good" will be entirely subjective.
Second is game devs deserve more money because of living cost/dev cost whatever is increasing, or in order to hold share holder's attention. Without changing the number on the price tag.
What does that mean?
I think you're conflating several different defenses here. Let's take the shareholders out of the equation. Most people only have a rudimentary understanding of corporate structure, and much of that knowledge is based on portrayals of corporate board rooms in media. Generally speaking, shareholders aren't following a company's day-to-day operations and have no direct control over it. EA shareholders, for example, have no direct say in how BioWare develops a game or what content to put in it, no direct say in schedules, retail pricing, or even how much money a developer makes at the company. So no, using the shareholders as an excuse or blaming them for any game content is ridiculous.
No one actually cares how much money an individual developer makes. It's none of anyone else's business, and his salary is largely unaffected by the retail price of a game, the amount of content it contains, or how well it sells. The only time his salary might be affected is if he is entitled to performances based on the game's sales, the studio's performance as compared to estimates, or the company's performance as compared to estimates. When I worked in retail management, for example, we got bonuses based on how much our sales numbers exceeded our assigned quota numbers. So an individual developer's salaray is irrelevant to this discussion.
Thirdly, I haven't heard of anyone using "devs
deserve more money" as a reason for purchasing DLC. People buy DLC because they love the base game and want more content for it, in order to continue playing in the world they love, with the characters they love, or playing the gameplay they love. Some are completionists who want to have
all the things. DLC is priced in such a way as to entice game-lovers to buy this content. Lots of folks seem to really like the old "game + big expansion much later on" model. DLC and microtransactions are essentially "game + smaller expansions really fast" models, delivering the content they want faster and with more selection.
And finally, when publishers sell a game, they have sales projections that detail how many copies of the game they want to sell. This numbers takes into account the price of the game, its target market, and will include how many copies the game is likely to sell in different markets. In this regard, videogames are like movies, which have a fixed admission price regardless of the length or quality of the film.
First this 'defense' admits that the content is ripped from the game (or basically says ripping content from the game is acceptable).
You have not even tried to link your argument to this conclusion with evidence or a chain of logic.
Secondly, in order to achieve the above, either
a) the number of people who buy the game needs to be more than the number of people who's going to enjoy the game
or 
people need to pay more money than on the price tag of a game.
No, and no. The first is a statement of fact. The number of people who enjoy the game will always be less than the total number of copies sold, since not everyone is going to like the game. And the second situation has already been taken into account when the people at the publisher with the calculators make their sales projections. I'm not surprised you aren't familiar with that side of the business, since those numbers are rarely made public.
In a word, players deserve to get less value than what they pay for.
And this defense basically says, people should accept and put up with this kind of practice.
And someone says, if you don't want to accept, you need to shut up.
Yeah...right.
No, you are always free to choose to not buy the game. That is the best way to "protest" a game. Well, that and providing constructive feedback tot he developer. Misinformation, disinformation, sensationalist hyperbole, and demonstrating you don't actually know how the system works is, in my opinion, a terrible way to convince someone to agree with your viewpoint.
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