CD Projekt Red's Marcin Iwinski says free DLC helps boost sales
Unpaid DLC has been a major help in boosting sales of the Witcher franchise, says CD Projekt Red's Marcin Iwinski.
As paid DLC becomes the norm, the CEO and co-founder of the studio behind the hit RPG series believes that the industry is missing a big opportunity in favor of milking revenues.
"When we put it out for free, we saw a boost in the sales with the Enhanced Edition because it just created good will, and it refreshes the product," he told Gamasutra.
"You can always do it from two angles, and sadly I see the industry trending toward over-exploiting the gamer, and I think this will come back to the publishers that are doing that, and eventually, people will stop buying their stuff. That's just not the way things work."
Publishers were reluctant to embrace the idea, but Iwinski believes his studio has been justified in the risk by the recent news that the Witcher series had sold over four million copies.
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"When we had that publishing deal, we went to the publisher, and said, 'So we have this idea where we make all this stuff, all this new content, and you don't pay anything for it, we give it away for free. How about that?' The publisher went all big-eyed and said, 'Whoa! Let's charge 10 dollars! 10 Euro!' But we believed that we would sell more units if we put it out for free."
This is a fairly good explanation of one of the primary reasons why I'm pretty much done with console gaming. This goes for the rest of the ever-increasing over-monetization being piled on consumers; account paywalls for online play, restricted access to free and paid-elsewhere services behind said paywalls, day-one DLC, on-disc "DLC", online passes, one-time content codes, etc.
Microsoft started this trend with early on with on-disc DLC for titles they published, and paid online access with XBL Gold, and it's been getting exponentially worse (i.e. more expensive) for consumers ever since, as platform holders and publishers all piled-on.
Most of my entertainment dollars now go to indies and studios/devs who actually still value their consumers. While the "big three" and their ilk may not care about my diminishing "contributions" to their bottom lines, there will eventually come a breaking point when a significant number of consumers will also say "enough".
