Stellaris, Battlefront, and Ethics in Pricing

There was a time in video game history when purchasing the game meant just that: you paid some amount of money and received in return a complete video game with all of its content on your new CD.

As any avid gamer knows, now is not that time.

For large titles, it is still common to pay a set sum of money (these days, mostly $60) and receive a game in return. Unfortunately, while what you receive is generally a game, it is becoming rarer and rarer to receive a complete game as a result of this transaction. It is almost impossible to find a game made by a major development studio without some kind of downloadable content, expansion, or cosmetic addition available for purchase.

I would like to make it clear that I don't believe that such practices are inherently bad. For example, my favorite childhood game, Rise of Nations, had an expansion available that added new nations and campaigns to the game. Nonetheless, it remained a complete and fun game without any additional purchases (and is as a result a good example for other games to follow).

Easily the most famous example of bad practices in additional content is Battlefront II, a game whose downloadable content and lootbox functions led to the most disliked comment of all time on the website Reddit, with 671,000 more downvotes than upvotes (i.e., dislikes than likes). As someone who does not play that game, and as someone who doesn't want to beat too many dead horses, I'll talk instead about the DLC policy of two of my personal favorite games: Europa Universalis IV and Stellaris.

Europa Universalis IV is a strategy game set in the early modern era. The player takes on the role of the government of any nation that existed during that time period (from the great powers of Europe to single-province princedoms in India and Native American tribes) and attempts to lead that nation to glory. In order to realistically simulate the complexities of governance, the game has a number of complicated and interlocking mechanics, and more are added by the developers of the game over time.

Unfortunately, these additional features are oftentimes locked behind expansion purchases, which usually go for about $20. This is reasonable for individual expansions, but there are now so many expansions released that purchasing the game at its full price is now almost impossible for consumers. Moreover, purchasing without the expansions is hardly an option, since the AI nations gain access to the features of the expansion and therefore have an advantage over the player. This effectively forces players to buy the expansion, which is good for profits but hurts the player base long term.

An incomplete list of Europa Universalis IV DLC

Stellaris is also a strategy game  made by the same company as Europa Universalis IV but released about 3 years later. It is very similar to Europa Universalis IV in general gameplay and style, with the primary difference being its setting. However, it has adopted a very different approach when it comes to additional content. Instead of adding new features, most of the expansions released for Stellaris add more options for the player to choose instead of existing ones.

For example, an expansion has been released adding robot empires and another was marketed as a "story pack" that allowed added monstrous space creatures into the game. While some of their expansions do unlock features, these tend to be less critical to gameplay than those of Europa Universalis IV. As a result of this, Stellaris has received little of the harsh criticism that Europa Universalis IV underwent as a result of its predatory DLC policies. This should serve as a lesson to game designers and publishers alike of how to create additional content and market it correctly.