Ben-DutkaI've been saying this the entire generation, but I always thought I was just in the crazy old-fashioned aging minority.
Well, maybe I still am. But Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios does agree; studio boss Christofer Sundberg told Eurogamer that downloadable content and forced multiplayer are getting a little tired.
Sundberg said game makers "run around as headless chickens" attempting to make more money from DLC, and he says this really isn't necessary if the game is good:
"DLC is not needed to keep players engaged if the game is well executed. We create a game allowing players to properly explore and have fun and not focusing so much on the actual end goal of the game. As most publishers and developers have run around as headless chickens the last three years looking for a way to make money DLC was definitively a tool to try to keep players engaged, but how many games have been truly successful with DLC? Not that many."
He admitted that the DLC his team released for Just Cause 2 was "standard stuff" and didn't really keep players players. Only the game itself kept gamers hooked for the long haul, and they didn't need multiplayer, either. Added Sundberg:
" The big thing now is to force multiplayer into games that are really single-player games just to combat second hand sales and that makes absolutely no sense as it just consumes budget and does not add any value except on the back of the box. "
Returning to DLC for a moment, he goes a step further and says that thus far, he's just "paid for the crap that developers decided to cut because they didn't have the time to get it into the game." As for Just Cause 2 , the game remains pretty popular; in March 2012 (two years after the game's launch), the title saw 100,000 new unique players each week, clocking a grand total of over 200 hours of game time.
So yeah, extra content and multiplayer aren't the be-all, end-all. I knew it all along, damnit.
Related Game(s): Just Cause 2