THE GREAT DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT…WELL, NOT ‘WARS.’ ‘SQUABBLES,’ REALLY: Is it just a way for computer game developers to scam their clients, or do both sides benefit, Moe Lane asks in his latest PJM Media Lifestyle column:

From the players’ point of view, DLC often appears as a way to scam more and more money out of the fans. The most infamous iteration of this, according to some, is “Day One DLC”: that’s when a game company sells you the basic game for price X, and lets you know that there are additional adventure/character packs that you can instantly buy alongside of it for price Y (or else just buy the Deluxe Game for X+Z). Players naturally suspect that the DLC is not actually extra, but instead necessary for properly gameplay; and they also naturally suspect that they’re being ask to effectively pay more than the listed retail price for a game. But even the DLC that shows up later in a game’s sales-life cycle suffers from a mildly poor reputation: either the DLC is necessary for gameplay, in which case it should have been included; or it’s not necessary, in which case it’s just trying to squeeze more money out of a stone.

The game designers, on the other hand, have a slightly different opinion on the matter. First off, many of them do DLC seemingly fairly reluctantly, and apparently mostly because the fan base expects it. One thing to remember that while people may make games sometimes for the sake of the art, they typically sell them in order to make enough money to live on. A company that spends years on elaborate computer game worlds does it largely for that sales payoff at the end of the process; after which, they typically want to start on a new multi-year project, not spend six months making ever-more baroque versions of horse armor. There’s more money and buzz in new, rather than in old; and DLC is the epitome of “old.”

If computer games are your métier, read the whole thing.