Paying for more Content

[Magma]

Firaxis are better off focusing their resources elsewhere. Rather make a really good expansion and see it sell for years to come, instead of a half-arsed one while you also churn out crappy DLCs and only see that sell while the game is "in". And cIV as a game has never been "in", it is a niche, but an absolutely hardcore one.

Personally I have never bought DLC

 

[Perfxion]

I buy DLC for games that it makes sense: Rock Band, because then I am only adding songs I want when I want to play them.

Civ has DLC and its all over this site, its called mods. These mods are worth the price because they still have me playing a 5 year old game right now. There will not be and paid DLC for the Civ series as a long as there are mods made for free. Now, everyone over reacting to them allowing mods to be downloaded in the game needs to not worry. Paid DLC is NEVER coming to a game that allows free mod downloads.

 

[Shurdus]

I buy DLC for games that it makes sense: Rock Band, because then I am only adding songs I want when I want to play them.

Civ has DLC and its all over this site, its called mods. These mods are worth the price because they still have me playing a 5 year old game right now. There will not be and paid DLC for the Civ series as a long as there are mods made for free. Now, everyone over reacting to them allowing mods to be downloaded in the game needs to not worry. Paid DLC is NEVER coming to a game that allows free mod downloads.

Modders may not have enough resources to add another leader with spoken voice and everything. Even if they would make this, it would most likely be of substandard quality. In Civ IV you could add leaders because the diplomacy was not spoken. Now in 5 it is, so that adds another problem for modders.

All in all I would not go as far as saying DLC could not happen because of the modding capabilities, but in the end I would infinitely prefer any complete expansion over some DLC things or two.

 

[kivanc]

if a modder guy makes a dlc with less marketing concerns (assume firaxis let that), i might pay him if i like and get the dlc.
just consider this like a "independent film"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_film

but if firaxis does that, i won't pay them


very simple. it's because if firaxis starts doing that, they will not stop. and dlc will spread fastly in civ saga. they will do it with high marketing concerns, and that will dramatically decrease the quality of vanilla game. and everybody will be dissatisfied with the vanilla.

firaxis is not totally owned by SM, is it? it has to think of its shareholders and maximising profit.

if a modder guy becomes a professional and does everything he does with high marketing concerns and if i sense that, then my probability of paying him decreases accordingly.

 

[Duuk]

I buy DLC for games that it makes sense: Rock Band, because then I am only adding songs I want when I want to play them.

Civ has DLC and its all over this site, its called mods. These mods are worth the price because they still have me playing a 5 year old game right now. There will not be and paid DLC for the Civ series as a long as there are mods made for free. Now, everyone over reacting to them allowing mods to be downloaded in the game needs to not worry. Paid DLC is NEVER coming to a game that allows free mod downloads.

Really? Very few of the fan made mods are professional level (some are, which I'm not disputing). But if Firaxis offered an Official Poland-Hungary-Austria DLC pack for $5, you wouldn't buy it?

And the other point I made in the DLC thread:

Civ4 sold 3 million copies. There are less than 50,000 registered users on this site. That means that 2,950,000 Civ4 owners never registered here to download any mods. And this is the biggest Civ site ever. If on startup DLC packs were offered in a splash screen (similar to the Paradox loading screens), they'd sell.

If every single person on Civfanatics protested the DLC decision and refused to buy Civ5, sales would be affected insignificantly which would be more than made up for by the DLC sales to the non-Civfanatics people.

 

[phungus420]

Really? Very few of the fan made mods are professional level (some are, which I'm not disputing). But if Firaxis offered an Official Poland-Hungary-Austria DLC pack for $5, you wouldn't buy it?

Here are some professional quality modpacks for civ4:
Planetfall
History of the Three Kingdoms
Legends of Revolution
The BUG mod

Here is some art that is on par with, or excedes the art used in BtS:
Ekmek's Leaderhead Gallery
The Capo's Leaderhead Gallery
Ambrox's Classical Age Units
SabiotLeit's Femal Great People
And there are about a half dozen other graphics artists that consistently produce high quality work.

Civ4 sold 3 million copies. There are less than 50,000 registered users on this site. That means that 2,950,000 Civ4 owners never registered here to download any mods. And this is the biggest Civ site ever. If on startup DLC packs were offered in a splash screen (similar to the Paradox loading screens), they'd sell.

If every single person on Civfanatics protested the DLC decision and refused to buy Civ5, sales would be affected insignificantly which would be more than made up for by the DLC sales to the non-Civfanatics people.

You can download without registering, and most large mods are hosted off site, as CivFanatics has a 10MB file size limit. As an example Fall From Heaven 2 itself has around half a million downloads. That's not statistically insignificant, and that's only a single mod. Further the amount of users that are going to use mods is going to drastically increase, due to the announced in game mod download system. If Firaxis were to produce DLC their new mod download system would be in direct competition with it. It's unlikely they would invest resources in developing this tool, if they intended to directly compete with it.

 

[Perfxion]

You are also forgetting that people who play multi player need both groups with the same files for it to work correctly. DLC that gets loaded into the main file will fragment the online pools further. At least with mods, they are not on the root file, thus everyone still can play the root game. DLC for civ packs would make the expansions packs useless, and make buying everything even more. Plus, what is the point in Firaxis releasing Poland for 5 bucks when you can get just about the same thing for free INSIDE THE SAME GAME?

IE: In Rock Band, if only one of four people do not have lets say "Smells like Teen Spirit", then the song can not be played by all. Or for seeing what fragmented online looks like, try playing Guitar hero, where you need 6 different discs to get the chance to play with the entire online community.

 

[ori]

There are less than 50,000 registered users on this site.

179,905 registered users as of this post
though only 47525 users have 3 or more posts in subforums that count posts and thus show up in the member search.

 

[Voltage]

So its happening... DLC for Civlizations, more leaders and civilizations are inevitable

 

[Dale]

As an example Fall From Heaven 2 itself has around half a million downloads. That's not statistically insignificant, and that's only a single mod.

A high percentage of that count is repeat downloads to update to latest version though.

I'm not discounting that FFH2 had a massive user download count, but a percentage of users would have to download it 2, 3, 8 times to keep up to date.

 

[sgrig]

When saying that official paid-for DLC will compete with free user-made content, people are assuming that Civ5 will be just as moddable as Civ4. That's what we've been promised so far. However until the game is actually released we have no way of knowing just how moddable it really is. For example, as people have mentioned already, 3-D animated leaders pacing up and down their palaces and speaking in their native languages isn't something that is easily moddable.

I'm just worried that if the game's publishers decide that they'll make more money from paid-for DLC rather than from the fan base in the mod community, I'm sure they will go down that route, all the time claiming that it's for our own comfort and benefit.

If 1 million people buy just one $10 DLC, that more than covers the lost profits if 50000 mod community fans don't buy the $50 game at all.

Sorry for being so sceptical. I sure hope they won't dare to screw over this community, but the whole Steam/DLC thing and the $10 price tag for Babylonia is making me very worried.

 

[plasmacannon]

No.
Buy the game, make it 1 full complete game, without requiring downloads.
I don't download mods, just patches when the game designers screw up.
Make it work before you ship it.
There are plenty of places, like this, where they can get feedback on what we want in their game.

 

[pi4t]

You're assuming that people who haven't come across CFC would buy the dlc (that does mean downloadable content, doesn't it?). Since nearly everyone who's posted on here says they wouldn't, other people with similar characters (eg like playing civ) would be unlikely to either?

 

[Ahriman]

Since nearly everyone who's posted on here says they wouldn't, other people with similar characters (eg like playing civ) would be unlikely to either?

People who hang out on a Civ message board and post angry messages about steam and DRM are representative of Civ purchasers in general no? Hell no.