Downloading the Future

Today, however, developers can sit down at the end of a project and decide whether that content deserves an airing - and if so, they can spend the time required to bring it up to scratch and release it as DLC, justifying the additional development effort with the added DLC revenue. Contrary to what some consumers seem to believe, this isn't content which is held back deliberately to milk them of their cash; rather, it is content which simply wouldn't have been created without DLC, extra labour and time which isn't justified in the budget for the retail game.

This remains controversial, however - witness the outpouring of rather childish anger from a vocal minority over Ubisoft's recent Assassin's Creed II DLC, for example. Business attitudes to DLC, it seems, are developing a bit faster than the consumers they serve, which is a trend companies will need to watch carefully or risk losing valuable goodwill from their customers.

EA's "Project Ten Dollar" also seems like a risky gamble on that front - yet on closer examination the reality is that most consumers will probably actually embrace the idea, as long as EA is careful not to poison its own well with questionable behaviour.

What Project Ten Dollar effectively does is to treat DLC not as an additional revenue stream, per se, but as a way to increase standard retail revenues by discouraging the second-hand market. New buyers of the game actually end up feeling like valued customers because they get premium DLC for "free" with their game, while second-hand consumers aren't locked out of any content, as they always have the option of paying (unlike the ludicrous and ill-conceived "exclusive pre-order bonus" culture which other publishers have cultivated, which does little other than annoy consumers and directly encourage content piracy).

The danger, of course, is that EA veers too close to actions which could be considered to constitute cutting content out of the retail game in order to turn it into Project Ten Dollar DLC, at which point this policy will lose consumer support. DLC still needs to be add-on content; the core game experience needs to exist on the disc. Even the most reasoned of consumers have been adamant on this point since the outset of DLC, and this line in the sand is unlikely to change.

If EA's strategy is carefully managed, however, it will represent the first major positive thing that an industry which does plenty of moaning about the second-hand market has actually done to protect its sales, and should be applauded. Crucially, it doesn't attempt to remove right of first sale from consumers, or to actually shut down used game sales - and it's worth noting that what it will actually impact is not the $5, $10 or $15 sales of years-old games in second-hand bins or on eBay.

Rather, this is a policy targeted directly at the retail chains who massively boost their earnings by filling second-hand bins with games only a few weeks old, for only a few dollars cheaper than the brand new copies on the shelves next to them. This is a retailer policy which, frankly, gouges consumers as much as it does the industry itself, and few tears will be shed if EA manages to strike a blow against it.

This is not, however, the end-point of the debate over the DLC business model. Other firms have competing views of how DLC can improve their business, and the influence of consumer opinion should not be underestimated. If last year was the year in which GTAIV's episodes saw DLC's potential come of age, this year, it seems, will be the year in which the creative and commercial ramifications of that potential are finally understood.