Nowadays, the video game market is extremely competitive and companies are desperately trying to make as much money off of one game, in the shortest amount of time. This has led to post-launch support for their products at small prices called Downloadable Content (DLC). The thing that this has lead to is companies like Rockstar Games (creators of Grand Theft Auto) ask their developers to plan out how long they will allow the content on the disk to ‘live’ and when they will release their first piece of DLC.
One of the ways they get people to buy this new content is by offering a fresh way to play the game and separating those who buy it from those who don’t; creating a constant pull for those who don’t buy it to join their friends
This same thing applies to the video game consoles on which we play these games. Companies like Sony and Microsoft plan out at what time their support for their current console would become less profitable than releasing a new console all together. They must also take into consideration when their competitors are planning to release their next generation of consoles so as to avoid being left behind. For example, many people believe that because of the PS3’s late release compares to the Xbox 360, it has had consistently less sales than the Xbox (and Wii).
The video game industry has been speeding up recently, with people on both sides of the spectrum; those who don’t buy games unless there is post-launch content (free or otherwise) and those who hate the direction in which games are going. This is because they feel that they are being denied access to content that they felt that was included on game discs before.
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