It pushed me straight back to uncompromising piracy, and a total refusal to give money for any reason unless the game is fully offline and on physical media.

I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.

My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.

As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.

My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.

Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.

[Warning: Is 3 comments long]
[Tldr: I’m too experienced and jaded to be the industry’s target ez-prey dolla-dolla demographic, but trying to be hopeful]
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It was first expansions that you could buy. Like add-ons to the game that added content. You’d buy them in a store and have to install them separately over/in the original game.

Then they were served over the internet and would just install themselves.

Then there were patches and stuff.

Then… Those started to sort of blur together. Different companies would give them to you for free, others would charge you for it. Most pc titles only charged you for the big additions, and PlayStation stuff was also largely free services. But Microsoft on xbox was like lolno u gota pay. And everybody followed suit.

And now you pay for the game, the expansion, skins, save slots, storage space for items, quality of life fixes, new audio, etc.

And now it is the sole purpose of the “game” studios, the worst thing to happen:

“Games As A Service”

You pay for everything and the game is designed around selling stuff. It’s not fun, it’s bad quality, it’s expensive, and it’s just the way things are now for everything except small foreign indie studios.

Specifically those things together. Small AND Foreign AND indie. I was looking at what games I actually liked playing in the past ten or so years, and almost every single one was a small studio, in Scandinavia or croatia or Asia, and was an independent studio. I was SHOCKED.

I get that games in the 80s and 90s (I’m only 33 but I know my history, I started gaming in the late 90s) used to cost 60-70$ and have gone DOWN in price despite massive and constant inflation. But instead of accounting for the real need for now cash to still develop games with the same scale, features, depth, and quality by just increasing the price, they’ve chosen to itemize the price behind the lie of a free trial of an intentionally limited and frustrating “game” full of mechanisms to coerce you to constantly spend money.

I’ve worked in construction, and this is the same unethical behavior a lot of contractors do. They start out with a low price, and “find” problems that you’re basically forced to do change orders on. It’s super predatory and deeply unethical, and the same thing that the game industry is ALL moving towards.

I really wish studios would just come out and say “this is how much the game costs us to build if you want lv 1 quality, this for lv 2, and this for lv 3. This is how much we forecast it will cost you players for each level.” And just try to gague interest and make the best possible game possible within some forecasts, with maybe ranges of price with the final price being different at the end. I know that’s probably too much to ask, but GaaS is soooo, so frustrating.

I love gaming. I played, in their eras, a lot of the greatest games of all time. And NONE of them felt like you were ripped off. Not even for the mediocre titles. And it feels like the scopes of games now are just taking a decent minigame from some masterpiece game of the past, adding in some extra features, polishing it up a bit, selling it at full price, then selling extra bits piecemeal to try to make even more money. Like, bro, that was a MINIgame in ff8! You didn’t even have to play it, it was just there if you needed a break from the rest of the game!

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Games are actually different in so many ways other than this, that I can’t make a straight comparison, other than to say that before DLC, you just bought expansions on a disc, and before that, you had to buy an entirely new “Turbo” or “Super” edition of the game to get any updates.

The rough equivalent to large DLC existed way back before one downloaded content – one just got the sequel.

The line between that and the later expansion packs was kind of fuzzy, in that a sequel and an expansion pack could be pretty close in size.

Also, it used to be very common, on the PC, to put out a demo to try a game. Today, that’s less common. I suppose to some extent the free-to-play+microtransactions model is just a logical extension of that.

I don’t really think that the change has altered how I play much. I didn’t get small DLC then, and I haven’t played games where I would now, though I’ve no fundamental objection to them. Just haven’t run into a game I’ve played where what’s on offer is really what I want.

I’d be willing to buy more radio stations for Fallout 4 and similar games. Would like more music for Solaris too. When you play a game for a long period of time, the existing stuff gets a bit old, and both shipped with good soundtracks. But for whatever reason, game studios never seem to sell “audio expansion packs” and just leave that up to modders.

EDIT: I guess rhythm games probably sell audio expansion packs, but I’m not super-into the genre.

EDIT2: I have picked up DLC that’s smaller than expansion packs necessarily were, on further reflection. Paradox makes a lot of games with DLC that wouldn’t constitute an expansion, for example. Rimworld’s DLC wouldn’t be an expansion.

But the extreme a la carte “buy an outfit” thing or “buy a character” or similar just never seemed to have anything that I liked.

I have never purchased a single microtransaction. I don’t see the appeal of having a green shirt, or paying to win (buying in-game currency that I can use to level up, etc.). The second one in particular just defeats the purpose of why I play games (to learn to get good at them and exercise my skill). Any game that prevents me from winning using skill alone is not even a “game” as I would define it.

DLC is different. These days I rarely buy games on release. I wait for the dust to settle with frothy g4mers complaining about review scores and woke characters, and for all the inevitable QoL patches etc. to roll through, and pick up the game later on at a steep discount. For a number of reasons, I only play single player games, so missing out on the initial influx of players doesn’t bother me, and I have a mammoth backlog anyway. If the base game was cheap and I enjoyed it, then I’ll think about getting DLC. My favourite game is Nioh 2, and the three expansions for that game are all very substantial. I paid $15 or something for the base game and then like $20 for the season pass later on.

I’ve observed what I believe to be a fundamental shift over the design approach to games. Now this may just be my different views of the world as I grew up, but maybe there’s at least a kernel of truth.
DLC was originally a good thing because it added additional content to your favorite games, giving you more of what you love. Prior to DLC, we had something called Expansions which kind of served the same purpose (in a mostly offline capacity). Then, someone got the bright idea of changing things from a content-focused approach to a monetize-focused approach. Suddenly you started seeing content stripped from the game to be sold back to you at additional cost. This is where I see the industry start shifting to avoid risk and homogonizing their titles while stripping as much as is viable to monetize. Now you have microtransactions (MTX) instead of cheat codes, DLC restoring cut content instead of providing new content, special editions to give you back your physical goods, early access instead of demos, preorder bonuses to get you to buy before you try.
Now don’t get me wrong, there was always a desire driven by making money present in the industry. Most arcades were designed around brutal difficulty and unavoidable game overs to drain more quarters from you. Console games saw this take shape in the form of short-devepment licensed titles (or shovelware as it’s coloquially known). The brutal difficulty of early console games was more of a leftover from that arcade game design philosophy, but didn’t serve the same purpose here. However, there was a gradual shift from making money from making games to making games to make money as the industry grew.
I feel like the soul of video games development has been lost from all but the small indie developers who still do things for the love of it. The largest “triple A” publishers don’t give a damn about video games, video games development, gamers, or their own product so far as it provides a return on investment. People like Kotick would eagerly and uncaringly destroy the entire video game industry if it meant a way to profit. There’s no soul there.

As for post-launch updates, it’s a complicated answer. Prior to updates, what you got was what you got, unless the publisher/developer designed to release an updated version. Since this was costly to do, it rarely happened, but it did happen on occasion; usually with games that had severe game-breaking bugs. Being able to patch a game after it released was, like DLC, both a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that it addressed bugs and made for a better overall product. Bad in that it allowed downgrading of a product, such as when a music licensed expired (See GTA). Additionally, I think that publishers/developers have become far too reliant on this function to push out bad products with the intent to fix it after launch. This is, in my opinion, fraud as they are selling consumers a known-defective product with the promise that they may fix it later. But, that’s not for me to decide legally speaking.

So to address the original intent of the question, I tend to stick with what I know and avoid big name publisher titles unless they aren’t riddled with soulless monetization. I also tend to wait for reviews rather than preorder so that I know I’m not buying defective trash. That’s how I cope.

It’s made me appreciate my library more.

These days I hardly buy new since games are so expensive. And I only buy DLC if the game itself has earned the money I’m going to spend. I keep that mentality with any games that have additional costs. I spent a ton of time playing Genshin Impact, so when I put money in the game it felt like it had already earned that much based on the enjoyment I got. I try to stick to that as much as I can.

Contrary to what you might think, games received updates far earlier than the introduction of DLC and Micro-transactions. Doom, for example, had many update patches post launch. Only, the game wouldn’t update automatically. You had to know that the patches existed, and where to find them to download them.

No adjustment. I don’t play those games.