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Comment by bitshiffed | Hacker News Reader

"Zelda DLC"? Really? Even Zelda now? Ugh.

I don't think calling it DLC is fair. Back before the DLC craze, this would have simply been an "Expansion".

The core game is so good, so expansive, that it doesn't bother me in the slightest that there's upcoming "DLC". Don't get me wrong - I hate the trend in general, but in this case it's not a bad thing.

Edit: Ok, I realize that they even call it DLC on zelda.com, but my point still stands: these are expansions. The kind gamers used to get excited about.

We barely know anything about it at this point. Unless you've got an uncle at Nintendo, your assertion that it's an "expansion" is unfounded.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm very optimistic, and have already bought/pre-ordered it (it's a gray area which to call it, because it unlocks some things immediately, but the bulk of it isn't available for a few months), but my optimism is mainly based on the Mario Kart 8 DLC, not what they've announced about the BotW DLC itself.

Given how BotW is the most profitable thing for Nintendo since the Wii, I’m sure they’ve got every available developer and their mother working on the holiday DLC. Getting this one DLC right is a make-or-break situation for Nintendo, if they want the Switch to compete with the other consoles in the next few years.

BotW is probably the most critically acclaimed thing to come out of Nintendo in a while, but they've sold maybe 5m copies at this point, compared to over 100m over the lifetime of the Wii, hardly in the same ballpark. Zelda games also tend not to be huge sellers for Nintendo, despite their apparent popularity.

BotW has been a system seller up to this point, but only because the hardware's supplies are fairly limited at this point. I don't expect the DLC's release will be a significant factor in the Switch's continued sales, unless their other first party titles end up having disappointing sales.

> We barely know anything about it at this point. Unless you've got an uncle at Nintendo, your assertion that it's an "expansion" is unfounded.

True, we don't know the specifics, but my point was that the core game doesn't feel like it was intentionally broken just to make way for DLC like we see far too often with games these days. Any new content is an expansion on what is currently a masterpiece.

Sure, we don't know how expansive an expansion it is, but I'd still argue that even a small release is an expansion at this point. I'm also giving them the benefit of the doubt considering how excellent the core game is.

This is just semantics. The only reason the terminology ever changed is because you can now download what you used to have to buy on disks.

I don't think many modern DLCs are equivalent in scale to old-school expansions. They would generally nearly double the content of the original in a single expanded story. Some modern games collections of DLC (so collect all of the DLC of Skyrim or Witcher 3) would be roughly on-par with an expansion, but even then they tend to be multiple mostly independent pieces of content rather than a large cohesive addition.

In that sense, I think (from what we've heard), BotW's DLC is not really an expansion pack in the old sense.

I understand it's bad when people charge full game prices for something that's actually the first chapter in a series of paid DLC...

But why is DLC fundamentally bad? To me it seems to match the tick-tock-tock nature of engine development: build a game, spend years on an engine and content, price it at full price, then release a series of cheaper content-only products that use the same engine. Use that income to pay for next gen engine development.

The alternative is that developers can only release content if it's feature-length and using a next generation engine? That seems like a pointless demand.

But why is DLC fundamentally bad?

The same reason preorders are bad: it creates perverse incentives for developers and publishers.

The problem people have with DLC isn't that developers are being demanded to release feature-length content, it's that developers are incentivized to lock stuff that's already developed and in the game behind a paywall. Essentially selling you content that you already purchased.

I'm not too worried about Nintendo succumbing to this problem, but there are some other devs out there with no such scruples. EA and Activision come to mind..

I don't understand, you're saying you think a developer who sells a great product at a good price will typically make less revenue than if they broke off part of that product, sold it as DLC, and took the hit in the press?

Is that an empirical finding?

I'm saying developers exist who seem to think that's correct and gaming as a whole suffers for it.

After playing 100+ hours of Breath of the Wild, I still want more Breath of the Wild content. Bring on the DLC.

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