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Upcoming fighter Injustice 2 will be supported for a longer period with a greater amount of DLC than its predecessor.
"One of the things we’ve been doing, trying to do more and more with every game… is to support it for a longer period of time," NetherRealm creative director Ed Boon told IGN. "With DLC characters, we’ve had four with Mortal Kombat, six with Injustice, eight with Mortal Kombat X, and with Injustice 2 we plan on continuing that pattern.
"It will certainly be more aggressive than we’ve been in the past."
Boon also suggested that players will have the option of unlocking game content either by extensive playtime or by paying, noting that some users probably "won’t want to invest months and months of their time" to access it.
As always, DLC highlights the conflicting sides of the fandom. Some, as highlighted by the comments under IGN’s story, are generally hostile towards it. They see it as exploitative and robbing the full price launch game of value.
The flip side, however, is that DLC persists because it is popular. Fans of games are often keen to extend their experience and have a proven track record of being willing to pay for it. What is a publisher to do?
The real distinction, and one that is sometimes hard to determine, is the difference between DLC that is genuinely developed post-release and is an honest extension of a game’s content offer, and DLC that is planned in from the off and not included at launch as publishers and developers feel they can attract greater revenues by selling it separately at a premium.
And even then things are not always clear-cut, as development budgets will often be drawn up based on forecasts of DLC revenues.
