My first experience with a dlc started when I downloaded Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's dlc about horse armor. I liked it so much that I downloaded every kind of DLC I encountered for my RPG games. It was became an addiction to me to buy and play these DLCs. For me DLCs like a mods which were created by the developers instead of community. After I made some research and read some news about DLCs, I realized that DLC become an important part of the games. Especially for the RPG Games.
The first DLCs were only consists of some items like the horse armor, which I was talking about earlier. However when developers and producers realized that DLCs were getting more popular in the game industry, they invested more resources to create larger and deep DLCs which contains items and missions for the RPG Games like last DLC of the Dragon Age: Origin's Witch Hunt. This change can be observed just comparing the size of the DLCs. For example, the first DLCs like horse armor's size were around 10-30 MB but today most of the DLCs were around 1 GB.
Popularity of the DLCs comes from their low price and giving a chance to players for extending the life span of their favorite games. Most of the DLCs in the market are around 4-8 US dollars. Even though the cost seems low, because of the popularity of the DLCs the developers gain more money than the expansions. For example, Bioware announced that the company gain 1 million US dollars after they launch the original game a week ago. However, regardless of the cost some gamers seek to play DLCs whenever they launched. This was more likely that they wanted to experience their favorite games more. With the larger resources developers created more quality DLCs which contains items, missions, companions and even romance(last DLC of the Mass Effect 2). Thus, gave more opportunity to expand the new features of the RPG games.
"At this month's GDC Europe in Cologne, the game industry service Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) presented new information about the continued growth of digital downloads. Despite worldwide game sales now exceeding US$50 billion annually, EEDAR found that most consumers purchase only two to three games per year, a significant drop from the previous average of six to eight titles per year. However, in the DLC field, EEDAR found that 2009 was the biggest year on record in the industry for downloadable content sales, a trend that is expected to continue to rise through to 2011 and beyond as longer development cycle games come to market. EEDAR also revealed that regardless of cost, 28 percent of gamers do not check for the availability of DLC, while 22.5 percent actively seek it out before launch."
According to Laura Parker who is the author of the article called "The Future of Gaming: DLC".
In the conclusion, today DLC are very important because of these two features both for the RPG genres and the game industry. And there is no doubt that we will see more quality DLCs for the RPG games in the future because of their popularity. Which have been already released two promising DLCs by the Bioware for both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins for this week.
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