Pay-Per-DemoLast week Nick Earl, general manager of EA-owned Dead Space studio Visceral Games, revealed a new strategy that may involve selling "premium downloadable content" before a packaged game's release. According to analyst Michael Pachter, "The PDLC would be sold for $10 or $15 through Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, and would essentially be a very long game demo, along the lines of 2009’s Battlefield 1943." Essentially what this does is "limit the risk of completing and marketing the full packaged version, and serves as a low-cost marketing tool," (His words, not mine). Insert slippery slope here. This worries me a gamer because of the implications this could mean. According to David Jaffe, creator of the God of War series, gamers would rather have bite-sized portions they can play for 3-4 hours at a time and see the fruits of their efforts, rather than sit down for a 20, 30, or 40 hour experience (paraphrased). The problem with this line of thinking is that it allows game developers and publishers to cut back on production and instead of giving more to the gamer, the gamer gives more to them. DLC in my opinion is already a bane on the video game industry, as it justifies the developers to hold back or cut parts of a game that were intended to be included in the final packaging, and instead deal them out arbitrarily to garner more money out of the consumer. With this new strategy that EA-company Visceral Games has in mind, the free demos that pushed titles such as Bioshock, Portal, and the recent release of Just Cause 2 (which hit 2 million downloads) could potentially hurt the company and gamers alike. Instead of building word-of-mouth about your game, the companies will push away consumers and box sales will suffer because of it.
