Allan Schumacher wrote...
As I said to Gibb Shepard though, because of the DLC model you are right that development will start to see devs creating content alongside the main game. Now you as the gamer can feel that that is unfair, but that doesn't mean that the content in the DLC would have been in the game otherwise.
From what little I heard, From Ashes wasn't complete before lockdown, and I have no visibility on when it's work was started and when it was decided to become DLC. However, even if it was specifically created long before release to be DLC, the alternative to DLC doesn't guarantee "Javik for free." It would likely mean "No Javik."
No we won't, not for long.
Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot now with the whole DLC thing. It's increasing the cost of a game from $60 to $70 or $80, for a product the consumer has no option to try beforehand.
The normal path would be for the consumer to turn to the Gaming Press in order to determine if the game is worth that expense (Which is already a day's worth of work for many, not trivial). But the Gaming Press is firmly in the pocket of Publishers as we saw with ME3, and again in the past couple of weeks with the Eurogamer incident. So when it becomes clear to the consumer that the Gaming Press isn't trustworthy, what do they do?
They do what we've seen people increasingly stating they'll do. "I'll wait for the release with all of the DLC packed in". In order to meet their expectations of value, and to determine if the product is worth the expense by waiting for word of mouth, the consumers are deciding in increasing numbers to wait for titles that they didn't feel were "Must have".
This not only pushes their purchase out of the Publisher's "Critical" first 4 weeks of release window, it also means that those consumers do not pay for the DLC. The development cost of the DLC is not being paid for.
Worse, it allows time for that nasty word-of-mouth to cause the sale to be lost due to mediocre quality, or the consumer simply forgetting about the title.
Bioware's an extremely good canidate for this to happen now. Between DA2, ME3, and TOR, Bioware's titles are now moving into "Wait" land, especially with EA's insistance on obscene amounts of DLC decreasing the perceived value of buying on Day 1.
Which ultimately is catastropic for the Publisher. Especially EA since they appear to be more interested in revenue initiatives than making a great game. Shareholders won't understand they now have a long tail for sales, since Publishers have taught them that the first 4 weeks are all that matters, and there'll be massive investor backlash.
Especially if the movement turns towards a decidedly large portion of the buyers waiting until the DLC is "Free" in a "Deluxe edition (GOTY edition, etc)", which will result in increasing losses. Since we already know 60% of the people who bought ME3 didn't buy the DLC, we can get a rough idea of how bad this would be. Imagine if more than half of the sales of a title didn't occur for 6-12 months. 2 to 4 quarterlies later just to see the full revenues from a title is going to look really ugly in reports.
As far as Javik goes, as I said earlier. He has extensive banter with the party that could only occur if it'd been recorded at the same time as the rest. It's clear he was intended from early in development, and clear he was intentionally cut because of all the companions he was the only one that they could cut that would generate sales. They could not cut Tali or Garrus, they'd have literally tanked sales. James wouldn't sell DLC, and he was far more useless and disinteresting than Javik.
He was chosen not because he was expendable, but because he would sell DLC. So even if it was a "We have to cut something" decision, it was only clearly motivated to cut the character most likely to sell DLC, because rationally, it makes no sense to cut Javik and leave James unless you're trying to sell it.
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