Actually there is DLC and stuff can be unlocked through the RE6 and www.residentevil.net account link. Basically, you rack up points by playing and you use those points to unlock stuff through the website interface by spending points. It's cheeky but it's technically free.
I know there are costumes for each character that can be unlocked (60,000 points each) but I'm not sure what the other stuff is.
Haha. Convoluted system aside, this is awesome. People getting all up in arms about on-disc DLC and then it turns out that at least some of it is just unlockable content. You know, like costume changes for beating a game.
That said, On-disc dlc is a pretty convoluted and complicated issue I guess. To be perfectly honest, I don't really care one way or the other - I can see arguments for both sides. Now, that's not a "I'm contributing to the downfall of the games industry" statement, it's just that I was actually kind of impressed and swayed by what Gerstmann said a while ago regarding it:
1.) It's misdirection. If the value is there for the original content and the value is there for the DLC, there shouldn't be a problem. If the value doesn't line up in either of those categories, sure. A lot of the times, it does though and by focusing on the on-disc issue it's focusing on the wrong part and doing so gives the publishers two options to silence the people complaining - either strip the content off of the disk and offer it as a download from the start (not a difficult thing to do), or make sure it's unquestionable whether the value is there. The former is a lot cheaper to do and the way things will go if the focus of the argument is simply what content is on the actual disk. By focusing on the actual value, they really only have the one choice.
2.) I can see technical reasons why DLC may make more sense to be on the actual disk. Gerstmann cited a Mortal Kombat game where extra fighters were not on the disk but offered as downloads. But, in order for anyone to use those fighters, everyone had to download a compatibility patch. I don't know why he was really bitching about it, apart from the few min. it would take, but I'm guessing there must have been some sort of shit storm for him to mention it. (This is a blind guess).
Taking that to the extreme, the rumored Morrowind DLC for Skyrim. It never panned out, but that's the kind of thing that would make perfect sense for the majority of the assets to be on-disk. Lets not kid ourselves, DLC is probably planned way in advance at this point. Might as well front end load the budget, get the large assets done quick enough to be thrown on the disk and not have to force players to download a GB down the road. Same shit at the end of the day.
3.) This is purely an assumption on my end and I should point out that I don't know a lot about the business end or financial end of games development, but I don't imagine it to be as simplistic as some think and rather that it operates on the same principles of any other large scale industry. I don't find it stretch to believe that, like any other business, there are a lot of logical resource management reasons to include asset resources on the original disk even though they act as a whole or part of a completely separate budget item. Just because Commander Sheppard's silly hat was completed in March and the game shipped in April doesn't mean that Mass Effect Silly Hat Pack was part of the original scope or scale of the project. It's just an indication that completing it and including it cut the fixed costs since the team was at the height of mobilization when it was made. Fuck, you may have even got an extra Doo-rag out of that because the mobilization money went into modeling instead. Still, two completely separate budget items and as such, two completely separate sets of resource allocations, they're just overlapping. What you pay for the original disk gets you what you were going to get on the original disk from the start, MAYBE more. The resource allocations are now just tiered, but you're still on that linear path of the simple, main project budget. The only real foothold you have to complain in a case like this is if you're paying by the amount of data on the disk, and really, you're not unless it pushes you past a threshold (And I don't even know if that holds true anymore with disk capacity these days).
Sure, this CAN and probably has been abused, but that goes back to the first point that Gerstmann made: focus on value. Abusing tiered resource allocation like the above follows the exact same principle as abusing a linear resource allocation method (this is actually a lie - linear is also tiered, but internal on the project) - it's just a lot more simple. Instead of shifting resources or increasing the original budget in order to create a new revenue stream, you just cut costs in order to inflate the old revenue stream. That '9'? It's now a '7' And the company now makes more money while the consumer just complains about low resolution, repetitive textures and figures hardware is getting old or something. Focusing on value (hopefully) pretty much cuts both of these out (although it's hard to define, for sure). Focusing on the specifics of whether or not the silly hat is on the disk cuts neither: they'll just hold it out until after the disk ships and they can upload it a week after the game has hit, even though the resource allocation was still attributed to whatever free manpower wasn't on the critical path during any given time during development...you just now might have to pay a little more in the final DLC price for bandwidth on their end....and maybe yours. Also, those textures? They may still be bland and repetitive.
So, honestly, I don't know if a universal hack going out would actually discourage any future cash grabs. They'll just find another way and hopefully it's not worse.
why lock it in the first place? If I pay for a full game then surely everything on the disc should be available to me from day one.
Don't get me wrong, I GET this mentality and I like it, but it's also flawed. Like, hopefully I just laid down a couple valid scenarios on why you could conceivably have good reason to lock content on a disc (you didn't actually pay for it really as it wasn't included in the scope and/or scale of the project you paid for. Also, maybe logistical technical reasons). What this dude is going for is a losing battle - "Surely, everything on the disc should be available to me from day one." Great, motherfucker, how do you not fucking know where this goes from here?
Focus on value. Make it so it's unimaginable that any company can actually profit off of a silly hat pack, and maybe, just maybe these fucking idiots will wind up with Super Silly Hat Packs instead. Super Silly Hat Packs as DLC downloads for games that actually don't suck because publishers and developers can't get away with shit because consumers are focused on how everything ties together rather then whatever stupid ass hot-button issue the video game blogger-verse thinks is an injustice at the moment.
