Top Games Developer Admits That On-Disc DLC is an ‘Ugly Truth’

After Capcom’s recent insult to customers who complained about on-disc ‘DLC’, we now have a top game developer justifying this practice, calling it an ‘ugly truth’.

According to Gears of War design director Cliff Bleszinski, putting DLC in a locked form on the original installation disc is an unfortunate reality of the business, “When you’re making a game, and you’re getting into a ship cycle, there’s often three or four months where the game is basically done. And you have an idle team that needs to be working on things,” he said. “And often for compatibility issues, [on] day one, some of that content does need to be on-disc. It’s an ugly truth of the gaming industry. I’m not the biggest fan of having to do it, but it is one of the unfortunate realities.”

Apparently the fix is to have fully downloadable games, “If we can get to fully downloadable games, then you can just buy a $30 horror game and just have it, and that stuff will thankfully go away.” I don’t buy that however, since there’s nothing stopping the company from publishing the necessary patches for the original disc version to make it work with new content. Also, we already have “fully downloadable” games – they’ve been available for years on Steam and more recently, Origin. In fact, these distribution platforms aren’t even needed, as gog.com has shown with its fully downloadable, DRM-free games. No, this sounds like the games industry just trying to justify a sharp practice. Nice try.