Theodore Bergquist, CEO of Gamers Gate has written an article at the Huffington Post on how DLC has come into it’s prime as a viable venture for both the makers of the content and the players of said content. After a rocky start a few years back with DLC ranging from things players didn’t really want or need (Horse Armor, buying more ammo/weapons) to the publishers making a few mistakes that they likely (or hopefully) learned from as an experience. One experiment from a few years ago I can recall was Namco charging for levels in their 360 Katamari game that were not only already on the disk, but the game’s achievements took those levels into account when awarding the “You beat all the levels/collected every bit of stuff!” achievements.

Most companies have learned from these early experiments as a result of those unlawful early days of the current gen. DLC now are usually regulated to have their achievements available as separate achievements for a game, rather than the game not letting you get to 100% because you didn’t pay for that DLC.

The article praises DLC as the next big thing that’s already here, and while I agree DLC can give old games (old being nary a few months to a year) new life, there’s no reason every game needs DLC. DLC is nice, it’s nice to revisit old worlds and see what’s changed thanks to whatever new thing the DLC installed and built into those worlds. Sometimes a piece of DLC might seem unneeded and more of an afterthought, but the ratio of well planned and executed DLC in comparison to those early days of Horse Armour and 384kb unlock keys for content already pressed onto the game disk. They still exist, and for any game with constantly changing features with a heavy online component (Little Big Planet for example) are in fact necessary whenever a new patch for the game rolls around and the next batch of content that you can hold with your system, but not see on your screen. – The Ben