Rebellion says there’s “no justification” for paying for DLC already on game discs

By Stephany Nunneley

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Rebellion’s David Brickley has weighed-in on the controversial method some companies use when releasing DLC for games already included in the game disc.

Like most gamers, Brickley agrees that there’s “no justification” for it.

“It’s quite simple to explain, but I do think players are entirely right – if the content is on the disc already there’s absolutely no justification for studios to offer DLC which is essentially an unlock key or something,” the tAvP game director told Spong.

“But I guess what doesn’t come across to some people is that when a game hits the shelves, it’s probably been wrapped up for four or five months in any true sense.

“The time between finishing the game and retail is usually spent on debugging – you can spend months and months just fixing errors and glitches to ensure the product is finished and ready for release. Then when you factor in the console approval and the manufacturing process, you’re talking about a substantial part of the game’s overall development time.

“While all of that stuff is going on, it tends to free up resources at the studio, so they can make items that can be added on as DLC afterward.

“I think people outside of that process assume that the development of a game and its DLC are executed in parallel, and that’s really not the case.”

One particular instance of this happened back in March when Capcom was accused of hiding the Versus DLC on the Resident Evil 5 disc, and then charging players $5 to unlock it.

This was denied by Capcom, and called “bullshit” by Christian Svensson who went on to state that customers did not pay for the content twice.

Aliens vs Predator is slated for release next month on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

Thanks, GoNintendo.

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