I can’t unfortunately provide you with screenshot, but previously, one DLC would cost 100 CZK, which would make it cheaper to buy them separately than all at once. Oops!
It’s funny how you can share in the same experience, but come away from it differently.
I’d like to think that many members and I have grown with the Hitman series in similar fashion.
I started with Hitman 2:SA, and have loved this franchise.
Part of my reasoning for purchasing the DLC (and I did), draws from all the times I wanted more in my Hitman games, but had to wait for the next game.
I don’t find it to be a ripoff, just an investment back into a game/series/developer who keeps meeting and exceeding my wishes.
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“True” implies objectivity. So let’s remove the word true. Then we can discuss our subjective value judgements. For instance, I believe a Bonus Mission has greater ‘entertainment value’ than an Escalation. I am sure the vast majority of fans would agree. That’s my subjective opinion, sure. Nonetheless, it’s an opinion I feel I can justify with evidence from observable reality.
This comparison with tangible goods seems to imply that the value video games provide to the consumer cannot be quantified. Certainly there is truth to this. Game length, in isolation, is often a poor metric for judging the richness of an experience. Open world RPGs which take 100+ hours to complete because you’re constantly doing the same copy/paste side-quests come to mind.
However, that does not mean the amount of content in a game is insignificant. Imagine if Hitman 3 had released with 4 levels instead of 6 for the same price (levels of equal size & quality). I am sure everyone would agree that this would represent less value for the consumer. Quantity is an important metric which feeds into our overall judgement of the entertainment value a game provides.
People do make ridiculous assumptions all the time on the internet, and love to pretend they are experts. Nonetheless, I believe we can make some reasonable assumptions regarding ‘Seven Deadly Sins’. It seems likely that this DLC will amount to 7 new premium Escalations or comparable “contracts” granting exclusive items (although it is possible that future packs may contain more substantial content).
Working on the assumption that ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ will essentially be another set of Deluxe Escalations, it is understandable that people are questioning the pricing. This DLC costs 50% of the price for the full game. Whilst I might not be an expert on game development, I am fairly sure the work required to produce this DLC does not amount to half of the total work necessary to create a full game.
Of course, there is some degree of creativity involved with making the Seven Deadly Sins DLC. However, in my view, this level of creativity is nowhere near comparable to the creativity which is required to produce a Bonus Mission. Thus I regard Escalations as less creative, lower-effort content.
Certainly, it is silly to view IO as “evil, greedy capitalists swimming in cash”. As you say, finances are complicated and there are all kinds of expenses to be considered. Yet I feel it is also naive to write off anti-consumer practices as being entirely necessary just to keep the company afloat. The cost of H3’s development was recouped within a week of release. Is it really “gibberish” to conclude that IO is likely to be in a stronger financial position that they were previously?
Conclusions
IO’s strategy has dramatically shifted across the trilogy. H3’s post-launch content is greatly slimmed down compared with the previous two games. It appears IO have realised they can get away with selling a fraction of the content at even higher prices. They are free to make that decision, I am free to criticise.
This is perhaps not surprising when the rest of the industry is doing the same. Just as I call out companies like Activision Blizzard for their terrible behaviour, I will criticise IO Interactive when it looks like they are heading down the same road. I feel it’s important to voice my displeasure, even if it might be futile.
The real tragedy is that the (potential) success of lower-effort DLC such as Seven Deadly Sins will directly serve as an obstacle to the production of richer content. After all, why would they bother?
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Agreed, yet i still bought the package as an investment for its potential, if it indeed does not deliver it’ll be the last of my money IO ever sees.
Absolutely agree with you that I feel a bit of indebtedness to Hitman, which I have had such a great time playing almost an hour a two a day for most days since 2016. I am glad that they had decided on a paid DLC, which I feel goes to help the developer.
By non-applicable comparison, this article says that if you were to buy the Sims 4 and all of it’s DLC, you’d have to spend nearly 700 dollars (probably more now as the article is almost a year old). That 700 dollars for a game that people are still complaining about missing “key” features. My wife plays that game as much or more as I play Hitman and I’ve not spent anywhere close to that much money for that play time.
Value is a very subjective thing but the games industry is absolutely trending towards this model. It’s not odd or out of the ordinary for a company like IOI to do the same thing. If you think that the 5 bucks is too much to ask though, I would suggest that instead, you can buy:
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From what I’ve read from people who have seen/played the Greed paid content so far, those all sound like great suggestions that might provide better value.
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The jerky is highly recommended. Teriyaki flavor!
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For 4.99 euros you can also buy Shadow Tactics on PS4 right now. It’s an excellent stealth game.
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See? Even more options! I don’t own any consoles but i’m sure there are other PC games that are sub-5.00 too.
Yes, Shadow Tactics is awesome. So is Desperados 3 by the same developer.
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Um, if it doesn’t deliver, then you only have yourself to blame for buying into something you don’t know all the specifics of.
We all have the ability as informed buyers to judge whether something should be worth its price or not.
While, yes, it is IO’s decision and IO’s fault to price the 7 Sins collection at such a price, and it’s expected that they should “deliver” on that value, at the moment we only know of one escalation out of a possible 7, and we don’t even know whether they’re all escalations yet or not!
So, it’s a bit unfair to essentially say “I don’t have faith in this low-effort DLC, but I’m buying it anyway at this base price. If it doesn’t deliver, its IO’s fault for making me spend so much on it.”
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IO did it again, the absolute madman
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I don’t think this is IO-I’s fault, here in Norway the DLC costs 329,- while Hitman 3 Standard Edition costs 769,- .
Report in same thread as you did with the other expansion and maybe IO-I can look into it, by contacting Playstation Store or something, this must be an error.
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Even more than Deluxe edition on sale…
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This is putting horse before cart:
- Investors are generally risk adverse
- The more convinced they are people will like something, the more likely they are to support it
Marvel movies get massive budgets because they show they point to a lot of things people have been shown to reliably like, and have built up amazing brand power - hence why they bring in tons of money… They took risks, but they were calculated risks.
And a reason why as soon as PUBG showed proof of a concept, Epic Games completely pivoted Fortnite into PUBG with the serial numbers filed off and threw staggering amounts of money at it. It was shown to have a lot of things people liked, and the formula was easily decipherable.
Specificlaly people were looking forward to a new Bioware game. Anthem was something very different, a looter shooter with sci-fi elements. It didn’t have the classic Bioware formula (ie there is an ancient race coming back to take over the world), ti didn’t have the promise of deep feels and worst of all it proclaimed “no horny on main”
It was a game that was not focused on what audiences want but rather on what EA wanted: A “safe” game in a high profit genre that didn’t rely on gradual build up of audience loyalty. They told Bioware not to play to their strengths and the outcome was predictable and foreshadowed by an exodus of key creative staff.
You are going to have a hard time in this world if you go around trying to pretend that anyone who has different tastes to you is misguided or doesn’t count as people.
And just like that I am having flashbacks to when people were desperately scrambling for a formula that would “prove” that Absolution had “less content” than Blood Money despite having more maps, more targets, more special kills, etc.
In video game development the guiding philosophy is often “minimum viable product”. That is that the most important thing to make is a game people will enjoy and you build from there. How much building per game is always a mystery, because only the dev teams know for sure.
Hitman 3 minimum viable product was almost certainly the same map count, but with different maps. The maps are so labour intensive they had to be foundation.
Somewhere in IO Interactive are pitches and concepts for many areas on maps and encounters that would have been memorable but could not be included in the budget and time frame. We do not mourn the lack of these items because we never got to experience them.
Do a better question would be, could Dartmoor have been an amazing level without the hedge garden? Without the old church?
Probably.
This begging the question. People make an assumption it won’t be worth the asking price, so we must validate that because of their assumption is true then they are correct.
The WOA trilogy has showcased that they are capable of engineering amazing things into even default Escalations and that people find immense value in novelty items they earn in game.
The assumption that it can’t possibly be the case here is not only uncharitable it is, as mentioned, essentially a repeat of the claim that the bricks system cannot make significant changes to the maps.
We do not live in a socialist society so we do not, as consumers, value by the volume of work done but rather by how it beings value to us. Making equal or greater value for less work is the whole basis for industrial revolutions after all.
I also speculate that regardless of opinions on socialism, we can all agree that the 16 years of development did not make Dukem Forever deserving of a price tag eight times that of Hitman 2.
Furthermore this incorrectly supposed that the DLC is a separate product in isolation and not one that adds value to the initial purchase. We know from experience that people delight in taking items from one segment of content and using them in other places, the screenshot thread is full of such examples.
So right off the bat, there are serious flaws in your hypothesis that essentially amount to demanding special limitations on IO Interactive that no other creator is shackled with. That isn’t nice.
Before one asserts that they are right to act in a normally unacceptable way because they are correcting a wrong doing in society then one should first be sure the wrong doing is actually occurring and proportionate to the act they are to engage in.
This step has been skipped completely, instead we have only assumption that it’s all justified retroactively because people made a guess and don’t care to test their premise.
Not only is just outright rude but it is the opposite of improving conversation, it is a calm to devolve to mob chanting and demagoguery.
Because they are in the industry to make the kind of games they want to play and because the creation of such DLC requires a strong base game.
They are not, like Blizzard, a studio that has always focused on highest return for lowest investment, or EA, a publisher who have always had a core product base of safe, reliable iterations of mainstream games.
They’re making complex experimental games because that is what they want to do and they are good at it.
The real question is why did you want to make it harder for them by putting special limitations on them?
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did… did they find one?
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No they just leaned into a lot of “we can all agree it’s reasonable to say…” statements and threw tantrums when people pointed out that slicing up a pie doesn’t reduce the overall amount of pie.
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