Downloadable bliss

For a long time, expansion packs have been a been popular among all kinds of games. It was an easy way to make more money without having to make an entire new game, plus gamers loved them since they got more content without having to wait the years that it takes to make a whole new game. However, these still had the problem of a high cost and long development time for limited content. Until now.

Introducing Downloadable content! One of the wonders of the internet is downloading things and games are all about that now. Instead of having to wait for a complete expansion to finish, a developer can simply release the individual parts as separate add-ons. For games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, this is key, since they’re constantly adding new songs to their playlist. Now instead of having to wait for the next game to come out, you can just download the individual songs you like. Don’t want any Metallica? Then don’t download it! But maybe you’re missing that new CD that was released after the game was out. Fortunately, they’ve added that as downloadable content!

Now, you may be thinking “but hasn’t the internet been around forever? We’ve been downloading things for years!” Well, no and no. The internet has existed in an extremely limited capacity since the 60s, but it was the 90s that really started to connect the world. As for the second point, while downloading has been around for decades, it’s never been done to this capacity and there are several reasons for it.

First: The download speed. Early internet ran on dial-up, using the phone lines. This would get a max speed of about 48 kilobytes per second (kbps). That’s slow. Like, really slow. Think the classroom clock on the last day of school slow. However, now we have cable, DSL, and other broadband connections, which can theoretically get up to 30 Megabytes per second (mbps), though you usually won’t get more than about 4-6. At 1024 kilobytes per megabyte, That means it’s going at about 128x faster than dail-up. That’s as fast as you’re going when the bell finally rings.

Second: disk space. In the 90s, a typical hard drive might have about a gigabyte, or 1024 megabytes, with a game maybe taking up 150 megabytes, a ratio of 1:7, with the disk holding more information. Now, the computer I’m typing on has 581 gigabytes of space. My flash drive in my pocket has 8. My phone has enough to hold an average game at that time. An average game might be a total of 10 gigabytes, including the disk. This makes a ratio of 1:58. Because of this enormous change in available space, it’s no issue to store an entire game and all the extra content on one hard drive. If the 90’s hard drives are a 10 year old eating a cheeseburger, modern drives are a sumo wrestler eating a triple Whopper. The input might be more, but there’s so much space no one cares.

Some developers have really used this advancement to their advantage. Valve is so dedicated to it, that not only do they release free content for their games to be downloaded automatically, they even have the Steam platform on computers that exclusively deals in downloading complete games rather than buying a disk. Bioware has also used this quite a bit. Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 have long lists of additional missions, characters, armor, and weapons that can be purchased (though some are free) and downloaded to enhance your game. These are sometimes simple add-ons, but they can also be awarded for pre-ordering the game, winning a contest, or any number of other qualifications.

With information being so easily transferred over the net, this is a fantastic turn for games. It adds replayability, lengthens the experience, allows developers to fix and improve their game whenever a problem arises, and makes it so fan feedback can actually implement real change in a game. And of course, my favorite outcome is it’s put PC gaming back on the map, but that’s a post for another time.