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"Premium content - your opinion"

I just wondered what you all felt about it. Is £3 for some new cars and tracks worth it? What about £3 for just two new maps? Should all downloads be free?

My thoughts...
I don't think we'll see the end of free downloads, developers know that it offers an incentive to keep playing their games and if games remain popular then they stand to make more money from more sales and possible premium content.

As a real life city, I love Paris. Being able to race around it is great. I really don't object to the £3 for the Paris booster pack. It added near enough another 10% of content to the game, for only 1/13th of the purchase price. When you think about it like that you realise that it works out pretty well. I'm sure they'll add another few free cars at some point to keep PGR2 popular, especially with RalliSport Challenge 2 out now.

Eventually I'm convinved we'll get the McLaren F1 that we all want...

Premium content gives another revenue stream for the developers and MS. Do you grudge Bizarre Creations the share of the £3 that they got? Because they would certainly have made an awful lot more money not bothering with the Xbox as PGR2 would have sold way more on the PS2.

Someone on another forum in a discussion about premium content mentioned the cost of games still being too high. I sort of agree. But at the same time I'd like to point out how they have fallen by as much as a third when you compare some of the later N64 games like Conker's Bad Fur Day which was £60 in Britain (at current exchange rates that is approx $108) and that was several years back. Conker Live And Uncut will be £40. Or less even if you shop around. SR will probably sell it at £30 or so.

Now premium content does push the total price of a game up. So PGR2 now cost £43 with the inclusion of premium content. But of course the amount of content in the game grew proportionally to the cost. Literally it does. We got approx 7.7% more content for 7.5% increase in total cost. Could they have put it in originally? Yes of course they could have. Could they have put every city in the world in originally? Of course they could, the only constraint being space on the disc.

Content downloads however are about extending the game, going beyond its original scope to offer something new. So should all content be free? No. Because if that was a condition of content being released then there simply would never be any. It costs time and money to develop new content, and if it was simply to be given away for free then the developers simply wouldn't bother with it, prefering to just move on and develop the sequel.

Instead we should be glad that we got so much for free for games like Rainbow Six 3 and Ghost Recon: Island Thunder. We got a lot of free stuff and yet you complain that you aren't getting enough free stuff? That borders on selfish. We didn't need to get it, but we did.

Premium content breathes new life into games, keeps them popular and makes money for the developers and MS who we have to bear in mind have provided a great console at cost to them so far.

For the record, I feel that the TVR shouldn't have been part of the booster pack as it does take away from the achievement of unlocking it. But seeing as I was never going to manage that, part of me is happy. Besides, lots of people just got it by using Action Replay.

Also I've been talking about content downloads. New cars or tracks or maps or guns. Not bug fixes. They should remain free. MS release updates for Windows for free because of bugs in their software. Some people argue that the bugs shouldn't be there in the first place, but that is the human factor of software development, no matter what platform it is. If a game has a bug, then the developer should fix that bug. For free.

So folks, any other thoughts?

3 quid? Fair enough.

Not happy with it? Get a paper round. :P

hmm, i only just discovered another premium dlc pack for pgr2. so I'm off to test out my 7 new cars on the new long beach tracks.

I think ubisoft released the RS3 maps for free because they are featured on the PC version of the game and missed out in the xbox version. Therefore the designs were there and all they had to do was convert them. I don't know why they didn't release the maps when the game came out. Maybe it was because they wanted to release the game earlier or that it was done to promote download content.

ßulle†† wrote:
> Cyclone wrote:
> And yet they quite happily buy PS2s instead...
>
> Some people.
>
> lol :D


Touché :^)

It's a definite money-maker, but as an individual, I don't mind parting with my 'hard-earned' £3.

I could very easily go out and find that much on the streets - hell, even busk for an hour! :D

But the money doesn't all go to MS. The broadband goes wherever, Live goes to MS - premium content goes to the game developer. Anyway, I buy £20 games off Amazon mostly.

Thinking though - say 250,000 people buy the SC content. That's £750,000 for Ubi Soft.

Cyclone wrote:
> And yet they quite happily buy PS2s instead...
>
> Some people.

lol :D

My two penneth?

As it stands, it's great. Developers need to be careful what they decide to place a charge on. If they start charging for something which is just 'OK', it's not going to help their image and will put people off paying for future PDLC from the company.

Ubisoft have been fantastic though. They could have easily grouped a load of the RS3 maps together and put them in a PDLC pack, but decided to give them out for free. This is one company I trust to deliver worthy content.

I haven't gone for the PGR2 content, and have heard both good and bad things about it. It doesn't bother me though, as I hardly ever play that game now anyway.

The current situation has my full support. As long as companies don't abuse it and get greedy, all should be good.

I hate Premium Content and this is why :

Broadband - £20 per month.

Xbox Live - £30 per year or £5 per month.

The game - £30

The content - £3

The total - £83

The content isn't alot but companies that do premium content are just taking the mick.

And yet they quite happily buy PS2s instead...

Some people.