It's disturbingly easy to fall into rigid patterns of thinking, especially in low-information, ambiguous or uncertain contexts.

I have a strong belief that if the following conditions are met then game developers should work on DLC:

• The base game reaches a sizeable audience, such that 10% - 20% revenue uplift would be significant

• The game is in a genre which suits high-quality additional content

• The team is capable of producing that content at a plausible budget in a reasonable timescale

• Players will love it and give it good reviews

I've personally been involved with successful DLC for four games and have seen the impact it can make but I'm not just riding my anecdotes into the sunset here: Simon Carless has dived into the data around DLC in several posts.

Binary Opposition

DLC has come in for a vast amount of flak from a cohort I'll call Loud Wrong Gamers, who have always been anxious to cast it as anti-consumer. Bound up with excessive pre-order bonuses, "overpriced" cosmetics and pernicious pay-to-win shenanigans, it's characterised as snake-oil sold by Evil Publishers to prey on the hapless gaming public. This type of cartoonish opinion was fuelled by some elements of early 2010's YouTube gaming criticism but has proved surprisingly resilient over time.

Obviously, there are countless examples of low-quality, unpopular or mispriced DLC and I’m not here to defend the spectacular array of braindead corporate decisions in this arena over the years. But for every Tiny Tina's Wonderlands there's a Witcher 3: Blood and Wine: this product category doesn't suit the sort of hasty generalisation that garners Reddit upvotes or outrage clicks. Even Horse Armour, the bête noire of gaming’s consumer warriors, turned out to be massively popular.

So what we have here is a potent combination of…

• Reinforced personal experience

• Objective data

• A demonstrably unreasonable opposing viewpoint

..the perfect conditions for dogma!

Boring Company

When I saw Swen Vincke's comments about Larian eschewing DLC for Baldur's Gate 3 because it was "the boring option", I felt the one-two punch of a gentle eyeroll and a strong wave of deja vu - I have been having these conversations with devs for decades.

If you can listen to the team's concerns and considerately reframe the development of DLC as a set of positive creative constraints as opposed to a cynical slog, then things tend to take on a very different tone: it can be a space to experiment with tools you already know, free of the wild uncertainty of a new game project. It definitely shouldn't be boring - if it is, something will have gone wrong somewhere and the audience likely won't respond well. I personally do not feel that objections to DLC should could from a creative direction: if you don’t like making DLC then you don’t like making games.

Once that shift takes place and everyone is reassured that you have the audience's best interests at heart, you can get on with making cool stuff.

This isn't a comment on Larian's decision specifically. It's impossible to know all of the factors which go into a company's strategic moves - particularly when external IP is involved - although they do seem keen to stress publicly that this is entirely about the preferences of the development team. Presumably there are also reasons why an external team couldn't work on this project - while there are plenty of examples of great additional content (and…yes…also garbage content!) being produced by external teams throughout gaming history, the integration burden and management overhead can be immense.

Doubt

The challenge here is to accept that everything about game development needs to be situation-specific. When you repeatedly find yourself on one side of the argument and you've seen the benefits of holding firm in that belief, it can be difficult to admit nuance.

But if a team truly can't bring itself to work on something, or the opportunity cost is too great, or some other external factor is in play then it is time to back down. Games as a medium is heavily populated by outliers and anomalies - if your thinking is too rigid it can become brittle.

I said this just now…

if you don’t like making DLC then you don’t like making games

…and that feels like ridiculous hyperbole as I read it back. Of course there are plenty of developers for whom the entire motivation around making games is creating something new and working through the structure of a new ruleset - people (and teams) are inviduated and they often need to make their own rules.

Commercial folk in games need to be highly sensitive to this - you might have put together the perfect proposal for a team but it just doesn’t speak to them. Yes, it’s then your duty to sell it - to find a frame that works for everyone - but if that doesn’t truly exist then you must not push it. We are a creative industry and you cannot financially engineer creativity.

Proof

The best path out of this situation for everyone is to have a defined thesis.

Let's say you want to work on a game in a traditionally unpopular Steam genre - you would need to have a concrete belief that some specifically delineated audience is underserved and then base your entire approach around building a community yourself. You might be wrong, but at least you'll know that you're wrong by the end of the process - that's never boring.

If you can clearly state your reasons and confirm your objectives, then challenge those as you move forward then you will end up in a better place by default. Knowing when to hold on to a principle and when to relax your grip might be the most important judgement call in games.