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No one is forced tp buy ANYTHING
No need to literally hold political speeches over DLC content
Theres no such thing as abusive prices
We dont live in communism where everything is supposed to be fair and square.
Dang it, you quoted the part where I made a grammar mistake.
This is how commerce works. How dare those greedy fascist farmer charge for a llife necessity, such as food!?
Valve subsists largely on commerce. Via in-game sales of items, pennies from the Market, sales of their own games, and via percentages from game sales on their digital retail store.
Let me clue you in on something. Employee costs are astronomical. Valve roughly employs 400-some employees. If you pay an average of $50k annually, that's roughly $20m. A more likely scale is $100k annually average; that's $40m, up to $200k average; that's $80m. Then there's $401ks; health, vision and dental care; employer insurance, rental fees or property taxes, various operational overhead, lawyers, etc. Just on employment, insurance is roughly 1/2 to full price of salary. That $40m to $80m in salary is ballooned to $$60m to $160m. Oh, and did I mention R&D costs? Because those are astronomical, too, especially trying to poach top-tier talent for emergent technological fields, like VR.
All in all, I wouldn't be surprised if Valve cost some $250m to $300m to run. Annually. Then you add in things like The Invitational... Valve has said that they lost $1m just dealing with the Skyrim mod fiasco, so think about that. That was a few days of turmoil for part of their business. And that was $1m.
Perhaps you should consider that when tabulating your morality equation.
A fairly infamous punk band once said, "systems aren't made of bricks, they're mostly made of people."
This isn't a revolution, Che. And, FYI, you do need to change CEOs. They're the ones who run companies. Well, they're a highly integral part of what runs companies. And it's not a dictatorship there. There's CFOs, COOs and investors, board managers, etc. A company is, literally, multiple individuals and/or parties that act as a single entity. When people say that (most) governments are corporations, they aren't kidding. They, literally, are corporations.
That aside, do you know anything about finance? Have you ever run a company that has to juggle, literally, millions of dollars? This isn't a "you can't criticize unless you've done their job!" argument, because I don't run a multi-million dollar company, but I at least have the rudimentary accounting experience to know that it's stressful and you generally need to hedge your bets when dealing with large sums. You seem to just want whatever you feel is best for you, as a consumer, and desire to wave about the "greedy mongers" stick of moral indignity to prove your point.
I used to overhear "why do you charge so much for a salad when I can buy a bag of lettuce for less at the store?" from customers complaining to waitresses. The answer: because someone is making a salad for you. If you want a cheap salad, make it yourself. Meanwhile, I have 100 pounds of chicken I need to cut and portion. Yes, people want what they want, but that doesn't mean that some people aren't just talking a bunch of stupid out of their ass.
Know of Jonathan Blow? Did Braid, The Witness. He initially priced The Witness at $800k. It wound up costing over $6m, which is a budget inflation of 7.5 times beyond initial estimate. He worked on the game for 7 years. Which, if you were to run Infinity Ward for 7 years, would have cost around $175m. If Modern Warfare 2 had budget inflation to that degree, it would have cost $375m. Blow loved talking about how the industry doesn't value creation and such. The problem is, Blow is just like Tim Schafer in that he needs someone to say, "stop wasting money!" Creativity is great. Sometimes, though, you just wind up wasting a lot of money. Look at 3D Realms for a prime example of what constantly trying to be the "next big thing" can do to a company. If you let someone like Peter Molyneux race down the rabbit hole, unrestricted, they'll likely never come back up.
To quote an amazing rock band that did the theme song for King of the Hill, "everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people..."
CEOs have a legally binding fiduciary duty. They are legally bound to serve the interest of the company. How that is executed can vary, but results always speak loudest.
Here is a CEO that bucked some investors, but made his company grow and grow.
It has entirely to do with market. You want to keep a productive workforce year-round, then you need to have a solid revenue stream. You obviously know nothing about how the game industry used to work. It used to be that teams would swell three to four times their normal size. A 100-man team would become 300 or 400 people. Then 280 to 380 would get laid off and 20 would stay to replace other staff that was leaving. Oh, did I mention the crunch times where people lived at their desks, sometimes to the extent where they brought their dogs in from home so they could actually take care of their pets?
Previous development methodology was crushing for many people, in many ways, and it made holding talent in the industry VERY difficult. AKA: people who did good modeling, animation, and texture work left game development for the 3D mills of Pixar and the like, instead of staying at game studios.
DLC helps to 1) keep down costs of the base game. This is done by adding fan-oriented content at a premium price. You can keep base prices lower if you have a predictive plan to recoup some additional funding from premium DLC.
2) Increases funding for development studios. Studios that have game that sells well can get additional funding by having DLC plans commissioned. DLC plans are often held at the whim of a publisher. If a game doesn't sell, little to no DLC will be made. If it sells well, then commissioning more DLC is a good business plan.
3) Retains employment. Most development is done in staggered steps. The idea-guys come up with stuff and talk with engineers about game systems and art people do concept art. The engineers do the main engine work such as setting the basic game scripts, the various functions, etc, and the level builders will start building basic geometry, the 3D modelers will take concept art and facilitate the asset pipeline. Then it's a lot of refining, building, refining, building, refining, building, etc. Sometime you have to start things all over again, which sucks. Later comes textures, sound, music, etc.
The point of this being that while a lot of early work is being done, people like texture artists and 3D modelers aren't doing much. DLC can often help provide people with more tasks to do while the studio is gearing up pre-production phase for a new game. This is called job security. Because there's a job for them to do, they don't need to be laid off for the 3 to 6 months that pre-production might take.
============
Here's the thing: you don't have to like DLC, but you know only one side: the one that likes to play games and wants them for cheap.
But you don't seem to have any understanding of your opposition's side: the companies that employ millions of individuals to work long, arduous hours developing the games that you play. Meanwhile the employee counts and general development costs continue to rise. Inflation alone, Super Mario Bros. 3 at $49.99 in 1988 would be $100.63 today, even though games today (easily) have roughly 2 to 3 times the employee count.
Do the math. It isn't pretty. THQ went under without so much as a murmur and THQ was no slouch. They had some hits, some soft landings, and some failures, but they weren't able to stay afloat in the long run. And if you think every video game CEO out there doesn't still think about THQ from time to time, you're kidding yourself.
People can joke about Konami's pachinko machine business all they want, but what does it say when that's a more solid revenue stream than releasing AAA video games?
Again, be angry about DLC all you want. Shake your tiny fist at the sun and curse its blinding light. Yell at the ocean's incessant roar. But if you want to actually effect any sort of change on the gaming industry, you can't wage a one-side blind war where you pout and moan.
You can check on the net what a DLC is about, and if there's negative stories about it, the solution is simple, do not buy it.
Why rage about this
You're barking up the wrong tree, mate.
I have not much love for Steam but it's not their fault that gamers are generally the most stupid, gullible and spineless customers possible.
Whilst I note and don't disagree with most of what you say I do think you are missing the key issue of the OP's point.
No-one so far has argued that games in general are overpriced or that DLC should not exist.
But an equable deal requires both parties to be equally well informed about what they were getting.
A couple of examples.
After buying Team Fortress 2 as part of the Orange Box and putting hundreds of hours into it I was well enough disposed to the game to shell out a few extra pounds - in fact far more than the original game cost me - for the Mann Vs Mann missions and to get a Botkiller weapon. The deal seemed quite straightforward. You paid the money for the missions - and at a couple of quid for less than 2 hours gaming they weren't budget priced - and at the end after you'd done the missions you got to pick one of your weapons to be a Botkiller weapon. A little extravagant but after all the Hallloween freebies I felt well disposed to Valve. Except, bluntly, I and I guess many others got scammed. At the end the Botkiller was limited to some obscure Engie weapon that was only available from some now defunct game. This was sharp dealing indeed. Remember all a Botkiller does is remember and display your kills. There isn't even a graphic effect. So £6.00 spent and months later I'm still p... upset about it.
Civ V. From the play figures this might be a minority report but I was disappointed as hell with this game. The videos for building Wonders had gone, no trading and caravans, no religions. Most of that had, I found out later, been withheld as DLC. The game was left dull and mechanical.
So consumers are no longer in the situation of paying their money and getting the game but paying their money and getting part of the game. This might not have crippled Civ V but it turned Evolve - which could and should have been a great game - into a toxic mess.
This practice is really upsetting A LOT of gamers and the entire industry is getting a bad name because of it.
The problem with gaming is that development costs can be huge (although I suspect that Candy Crush Saga didn't have a million dollar plus budget) but that production costs on electronic downloads are minimal. So games can be sold at highly variable prices.
So to the developers with their huge budgets I would say - enthral us, amaze us, delight us, surprise us, entertain us. But for deity's sake stop trying to scam us.
S.x.
1.) It is not a scam. It may seem shady and like it's trying to fleece customers for every dime a game can get out of them, but it is not a scam.
2.) Valve does not release DLC. None of their games have DLC. At least, not yet. Instead they fleece their customers with a different tactic and litter their latest games (like TF2) with a pile of tradable skins, which if DLC is a scam it is also a scam by that loose definition.
3.) Valve/Steam does not decide what games other companies are going to sell on Steam or how they will break them up. The perspective companies do. Borderland's DLC is the fault of Gearbox and 2k, Arkham's DLC is the fault of Warner Bros, FarCry 4 DLC is the fault of Ubisoft, etc. Valve has no say in the matter.
4.) Valve is not going to shoot any form of profit in the foot and the more money a game company can fleece out of you, the more money Steam makes when it's sold through Steam's storefront, and Steam is not about being fair or nice to gamers. Everything about Steam and their shady, dodgy history makes clear they only care about how much money they make, and DLC is goof for that.
So... That is why Steam allows DLC.
welcome to capitalism, where companies arent there for rainbows and sparkles