Titanfall 2, For Honor and Uncharted 4 – three games that have very little in common outside their shiny exterior fueled by a AAA budget – all share one very important attribute: an emphasis on supporting the game and, subsequently, its consumers with free post-launch content.
Titanfall 2 has long-since announced a plan release their future maps and weapons free of charge, a far-cry from the first game in the series that took the Call-of-Duty "three maps for $9.99" route.
Ubisoft has made the same pledge with their upcoming game For Honor, promising all maps and game modes won't cost the consumer an extra dime.
And, last month, Uncharted 4 released its huge new Survival update, which added a bevy of new features, two game modes and weapon skins, all for free – something studios had become too comfortable charging a cool $25-$30 for.
Well, we can add another game to that list with Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was just announced to have no season pass. When asked about a season pass on Twitter, BioWare GM Aaryn Flynn simply said "Nope." When asked to expand upon the DLC model, he said "we;ll talk more about tha later."
We all remember how Mass Effect 3 had almost $1,000 in DLC right? Because I sure do. While Flynn's language was ambiguous enough that they could simply charge a ton for DLC and not allow a season-pass to purchase it all at once, if Mass Effect: Andromeda's lack of a season pass indicates that they will be doing DLC in a more consumer-friendly manner, count me in.
What all this really amounts to is a massive, pro-consumer trend happening at all levels of development (except, of course, the special level dedicated to and reserved solely for the Call of Duty series), undoubtedly ushered in by the wave of DLC-related controversy in the last few years.
Of course, this all started with the infamous and now-defunct Evolve. After that, even DLC packages that were the standard were being torn apart – like the Kombat Packs for Mortal Kombat X. They were the exact same model as for Mortal Kombat (2011), but people were simply fed up.
It's a great tale of the power of gamers who voice their concerns about these practices that game studios are eager to avoid that controversy at least and genuinely interested in pro-consumer marketing at best. We'll know more
