Something i find even worse than paid online subscription: online passes.
Those have thankfully seemed to go away. But, in their place, we’re now getting “season passes.” See, with an online pass, you’re literally paying a fee to access the multiplayer, which is meant to be one of those “used games reselling” deterrents.
But that actually doesn’t work, because most of the games with online passes probably have dead or dying multiplayer communities at this point. If you’re buying a used game with an online pass, chances are you can’t play much of it online anyway.
A “Season Pass” basically plays in to the same pre-order culture that has become so ingrained in to the game industry anyway. It’s a matter of convenience for a lot of people. Instead of paying $3-$8 per DLC pack as they release, you buy one season pass for $15-$50 and get all future DLC on the day it releases.
Which admittedly is actually… fine? I guess? Maybe? I mean, if it’s worth it. I bought the season pass for Mario Kart 8 and I have no regrets about that. The price was extremely reasonable (I think it was $12?) for something like 40% more tracks to race on.
But Season Passes inherit a lot of the same problems that DLC in general does, and that’s putting the cart before the horse. It’s about designing a game and specifically having DLC as part of the design document, like a developer is specifically holding content back to sell separately later on. In the case of Mario Kart 8, there were hints at DLC possibly existing in the game code at launch, but it was months after release before Nintendo actually confirmed their DLC plans and revealed the season pass (presumably in that scenario, the DLC code on the retail disc was a “just in case” measure).
Then you have Evolve, which teased DLC and season pass content before showing any gameplay footage or even screenshots. Something similar just happened with Shadow of War – the box art and DLC plans leaked nearly 48 hours in advance of the trailer reveal, and even then, the trailer itself was all CG. For at least a week we knew a game was coming, we knew what DLC it was going to have, but we had no idea what the game itself actually looked or played like, outside of a vague assumption.
That’s bad. Really bad. That’s the very definition of “counting your chickens before they hatch.” It’s those kinds of practices that add on to the razors edge most AAA developers dance upon, where any tiny misstep can sink a multi-million dollar company. At that point they are literally putting themselves in front of a firing squad, hoping for the guns to jam.
