This DLC policy is absurd and violates business ethics. (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Friday, December 12, 2014, 11:27 (3870 days ago) @ Vortech
edited by uberfoop, Friday, December 12, 2014, 11:34

Time. Time is a finite resource, even from a company with many people. Saying yes to one feature means saying no to other features. And some festures also introduce a ongoing maintenance cost. So the question is not why they did not do this but instead why they should do this instead of implementing some other feature. You can, of course, argue for your favorite feature, but this particular one is not only a feature that benefits only a sub-section of the players — and therefore must overwhelm the universal features by being that much better — but one that only benefits the people who do not pay for the ongoing maintenance of the game; one that the most supportive players literally would be unable to get any benefit from.

It's true that they'd have to spend a little time adjusting the interface and rewards systems to make room for something like this, but it's extremely unlikely that it would be very significant.

The bigger problem here is that you're casting support for a major feature that people bought as part of a $60 product, as a new feature. This is rubbish. If an update breaks a feature in a product that is still essentially new, repairing that damage is not "new feature development", it's a business obligation just like fixing new hardware that fails under normal usage.

I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. It would be a classy and very nice move. But selfishly, I don't want them to do that instead of making the game better on a way that I would ever be technically able to even notice. And since you brought up business motives, I don't expect the expansion to bring benefits to people who don't buy it (even though I would be wrong because it already has in a couple ways — namely armor and level upgrades).

I'm not arguing that the expansion should bring benefits to people who don't buy it.

You see it as a diminution of the game because before you had access to 100% of the game and now you don't. I get that, but that's the nature of expansions.

I didn't get the memo. The only times I've seen content cut off from non-expansion releases when an expansion has been released, it's had realistic design justifications, and would basically never cut off features released as park of a paid bulk release only 3 months previously.

I'm not without sympathy for the people who are enjoying the game less now, but I don't suffer the accusations of immorality. Anything sold for a cost — especially an upgrade to something —will leave some people behind. I see this as a hard fact of life in a capitalist system.

Yes, it will leave some people behind in the sense that it introduces a new product with different and perhaps better capabilities than the old. But when Toyota releases a new and better car, they don't also send out a technician to smash my windshield with a tire iron. There is a big difference between creating a new and better product, and actually damaging the old product.

I work on test equipment for circuit boards. If, when we released new and upgraded system cards, our software deliberately made it so that a number of features on our old system cards did not work, almost all (if not all) of our customers would fire us on the spot when they found out what had happened.