It wasn’t long ago when DLC wasn’t much more than a gimmick, and there were plenty of people who wouldn’t know the abbreviation off-hand. However in the last few years it has exploded in popularity, and DLC has transcended from gimmick to almost expected.

This has greatly influenced the development process as well, with Epic Games’ director of production Rod Fergusson saying that plans for DLC are formed early on in a game’s development.

“What people need to understand is that extra content is something that you have to plan,” said Fergusson to Game Informer. “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.”

Fergusson cites DLC as a good weapon against the growing 2nd-hand games market problem, seeing it as an alternative to systems such as EA’s Online Pass. “I think that as the industry has matured we’ve gotten more into that,” he says.

“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.”

What’s interesting to note is that, for gamers, the 2nd-hand market is not an issue to them. When Fergusson talks about using DLC as a weapon against it, is it unreasonable to assume that DLC is being used more to profit developers rather than enrich gaming for consumers?

Source: Industrygamers