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Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski and Rod Fergusson have defended the studio’s need to create post-launch Gears of War 3 DLC whilst the game was still being finished, stating it’s just part of the modern-day development process.
“What people need to understand is that extra content is something that you have to plan,” Fergusson told Game Informer magazine.
Bleszinski added: “You don’t just lift up a rock and say, ‘oh s***, there’s new levels!'”
Fergusson continued: “There are people who think that the first day of DLC development is the day after you launched. That’s not the way it works.
“A lot of it is that you have to prepare and plan and manage your resources and your people and everything to allow for that.”
He concluded: “It’s less about shipping what’s left over. It’s not about, ‘Oh, we had this map left over’… it’s keeping the disc in the tray. In a used game culture that you have to actively fight against, I think DLC is one of the ways that you do that.”
However necessary it is for studios to work on DLC content before the game’s launch, gamers will continue to believe that any content created before the disc hits stores should be included on that disc. The reality is that studios almost certainly allocate extra budget for this DLC development and therefore must recoup this investment by charging for post-launch DLC.
Via CVG
