Take COD 4 for example, it sold over 10 million copies; thats somewhere around $500 million in revenue. Call of duty 4 has an estimated developing and marketing cost of $20 million. Huge return?
I'm sorry, but I don't agree with your argument. If a game is well thought out, well developed and well marketed (money well spent), it should be successful and therefore make a lot of $$$ (percentage wise).
How's about instead of taking an extremely fringe-example best case scenario, you look at the real-world average? There have been plenty of well thought out, well developed and well marketed games that haven't done well. Mirror's Edge had a lot of prerelease interest and advertising, but was an economic flop AFAIK. EA couldn't predict Mirror's Edge was going to flop. If they could, they wouldn't have made it. They created a game hoping there'd be a market, spending millions on it, only for it to fail. The only reason EA is still going is because with all these sorts of losses, there are the huge grossing titles that prop them up.
You cannot judge a game's value in isolation. You can't fairly say 'this game only cost $20 million to make, so earning more than $40 million from it is greedy and the publisher should charge less' because the real costs for the publisher include the investment into other failed titles. You have to look at a company's past works. In this case, 'Activision Blizzard spent $70 million on creating a dozen different games, which altogether netted them $100 million, thanks in considerable part to COD4's success.' Obviously these are all made up figures. But the games themselves are part of a company-wide 'team effort'.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of expensive DLC or money-grubbing. Some companies have plenty enough money and are just charging more because they can. But that's business, and though as a human being I hate it, that's free-market economics for you and the ubiquitous dream of all mortals to get filthy rich! If you want to understand the amount being charged for stuff, you need to look at the big picture, to see if a company really is money-grubbing or actually has a legitimate need to find more revenue. Those crying fowl aren't really understanding the costs. Once they do, if they still feel it's unfair, at least that's an educated opinion instead of a knee-jerk reaction!
TheD said:
If people would stop crying about how much it is costing the devs to make DLC, think about this...... how big is the RE5 VS DLC... 1.8mb aka not even close to worth it's priced based off the amount of data you played $60 USD for.
You're using this
one example as the basis to overturn all cost arguments for all DLC?? "DLC doesn't cost anything and should be given away free because RE5's VS DLC is only 1.8 MBs!!"
Not only that but how close to release this has come out makes people a bit upset and for good reason, it looks like it is nothing more than something that was cut from the game just before launch.
Or alternatively, it was added to the game, but the developers/publishers thought they'd get no extra sales by including it. That is, the number of people who'd buy RE5 without VS is the same as the amount who would buy RE5 with VS. So instead they make an executive decision to charge for VS only for those who care for it, covering the cost of creating that part of the game (and yes, making lots of profit they hope) which otherwise would have just been an additional cost with no gain. Just because it's on the disk, doesn't mean you're entitled to it! There's often lots of stuff left on the disc dropped from development. I remember one of the XCom games had several weapons on the CD that weren't available in game. You buy what they advertise. I have a set-top box that can receive Setanta broadcasts, and these broadcasts are beeming through the air and being received by my box. So how come I have to pay to view the content that is already being received by my TV aerial?! I already have the signal in my box, so why can't I view it?!
The distribution method doesn't constitute a legal, binding right to access all features on disc. And if you think about it, what does it matter anyway? If they removed the content from disc and had a 1.2 GB download (which woudln't work on XBLive! would it?), would that make you happy? You'd still have the same data, but because in one form you have to wait for a big download, and the other it's readily available, the latter, more efficient distribution method actually offends you because you feel you aren't getting your money's worth! It's the same amount of effort for the developers to create regardless of the distribution method used!
Instead, people have the choice to pay for a VS mode if they want, with the developers getting paid for creating that content. Distribution method is irrelevant. Yes, if we didn't have DLC as an option it'd have just been incorporated in the game from day one, but DLC gives the option of publisher making more money. We also wouldn't have whole DLC games, or Tekken for £15 instead of a £30 PSP disc. We wouldn't have VoD and we wouldn't have free upgrades that add to our existing games and make them better. The are upsides and downsides to DLC, and it's now an inevitable part of gaming. By all means complain when it's unfairly used, like $5 for horse armour, but understand the realities of costs first, give publishers and developers a fair-trial instead of a witch-hunt burning, and accept that the market will dictate the decisions of publishers even when you do complain!
