Downloadable Content and Physical Objects

The Future of DLC and Video Game Paratext

Nicholas L. Leal

Abstract As the downloadable content introduced in recent years continues to effect the development of video games and other entertainment, a continuing pressure from the end user for real value might push more and more publishers towards using a 'physical object with digital content' paradigm, which provides extra content to a user for purchasing a physical object. Through an understanding of what is being done with downloadable content in current times and how the consumers are reacting, it is possible to extrapolate how a growing use of augmented reality in games and non-game applications will change the practices of providing downloadable content.

1. A Brief History of Downloadable Content

Digital content is an inescapable facet of modern gaming - be it in the form of downloadable content ("DLC"), downloadable games, or download services such as Valve's Steam platform or Electronic Arts' similar Origin service. The advent of a download-heavy gaming environment has led to many issues, be they social, moral, or philosophical. The roots of the DLC phenomenon can be found in the PC Expansion Packs of old - large amounts of extra content for games like EverQuest, StarCraft, and WarCraft III. StarCraft and WarCraft III both received large expansion packs that continued the plot of the original games while adding new characters and graphics. EverQuest, along with being the juggernaut that is often cited as an early precursor and factor in the rising popularity Massively Multiplayer Online Games, had - and still has - regular updates and a rather impressive amount of official expansions: nineteen total as of November 2012. Expansion packs often sold at a discounted price compared to their original games, and most required the original

game to be installed for the content to be accessed. In these ways, Expansion Packs laid the foundation for the modern concept of DLC. The first downloadable content delivery system for use on a home gaming console arrived with the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast in 1998. It was a rudimentary system compared to its modern counterparts, but it did offer downloadable content for several major titles, including Skies of Arcadia, Jet Set Radio, and in certain countries Sonic Adventure. The digital content offerings on the Dreamcast were few and far between, and minimal in nature due to the relatively limited capacity of the internet at the time of its release - roughly 56Kbps in most homes that had internet access at all. However doomed the Dreamcast was, however, it gave rise to a new breed of console games - online enable games. With its seminal Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game Phantasy Star Online, Sega not only rebooted one of its old franchises, it also brought a genre of game usually reserved for PC into the living room. The Dreamcast's contemporaries had nothing similar to its online gaming capabilities. Following the relatively unsuccessful attempts at online content by Sega, Sony allowed online play of multiplayer games such as Star Wars: Battlefront on the PlayStation 2 through use of its add-on network adaptor, which would be included in later iterations of the console. However, the PlayStation 2 had no central system through which its network abilities were run, and its basic menu system and small memory card size did not allow for downloadable content outside of very small patches for games. Nintendo's GameCube system followed suit, with an add-on adaptor allowing for online play of some of its multiplayer titles, including Mario Kart: Double Dash and a remake of Phantasy Star Online, titled Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I and II. While the PlayStation 2 and GameCube lacked intrinsic and robust online capabilities, their small forays would later pave the way for their successors to have full online-integrated systems. Coming late to the sixth-generation of consoles was Microsoft's first foray into the console gaming market - the Xbox, in late 2001. The Xbox was without a doubt the most capable of the sixth-generation consoles, featuring better graphical and processing capabilities than the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, and a built-in network adapter that was originally used for Local Area Network games until the implementation of the console's Xbox LIVE service in November of 2002. Xbox LIVE featured a singular profile for online access across all of the system's LIVE-enabled games, and also allowed for the downloading of add-on packs and game patches. In December of 2004, Microsoft launched the Xbox LIVE Arcade service, which allowed users to download small, digital-distributiononly titles. Intent on staying competitive, Microsoft's Xbox 360 was the first seventh-generation console to release in November of 2005. Along with

continuing the Xbox LIVE and Xbox LIVE Arcade services (which even used the LIVE profile's original name and email data), the Xbox 360 also featured an expanded menu system, called the Dashboard, that made downloadable content and downloadable titles easy to access and manage. With the advent of this newand-improved Xbox LIVE service, Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Point - a type of digital currency used to handle transactions through the LIVE service. Each Microsoft Point is worth a fraction of a U.S. cent, with 80 points being equal to $1 USD. While the system has drawn some ire for its methods of point acquisition (in blocks of 400, 700, 800, 1200, 1400, 1500, 1600, 2000, 2100, 2800, 3000, 3500, 4000, 4200, 4500, and 6000) , it has proven to be an effective system for content delivery and allows users to purchase points on cards without providing Microsoft with their credit information. This was, for all intents and purposes, the birth of modern downloadable content on consoles. Sony and Nintendo would soon follow suit with the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Network, and the Wii's Shopping Channel and Virtual Console. Like Microsoft, Nintendo offers a points system for the Wii, DS, and 3DS systems, with $1 being equal to 100 points. Unlike Microsoft Points, which also work for a user's Windows LIVE account, Wii and DS points are not interchangeable. Sony uses real-world values for its digital transactions over PlayStation Network, though like their competitors they also offer prepaid cards to use as digital currency.
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2. Philosophic, Moral, and Economic Issues Involving DLC

With the widespread use of digital content downloads, new problems became apparent - several issues with the content delivery and payment methods arose, with many customers becoming concerned about where the digital content they had purchased was stored. Larger expansion packs, such as the Epilogue to Ubisoft's 2008 reboot Prince of Persia, were stored on the hard-drive of the console they were downloaded to, unlike smaller files such as 'downloadable' characters in Capcom's 2012 title Street Fighter X Tekken, which are stored on the disc and unlocked by paying for the content online. While there are many ideas about what defines on-disc DLC, gaming website and wiki Giant Bomb defines it as the following:
Content that is included in the original game release, but is locked until players download 'content keys' (which may have a noticeably tiny file size, 128 kilobytes for Xbox 360 content). While free On-Disc DLC (such as the costume keys in Dead Rising) rarely receives negative attention, paid On-Disc DLC (such as the characters for Street Fighter X Tekken) is seldom well-received. Some games, like Burnout Paradise, include Microsoft (2012) Microsoft Points. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/microsoftpoints. Accessed 7 Dec 2012 (note: must sign in to Xbox LIVE to see point denominations)
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4 the locked content in a game's patch. This form of DLC is often used in multiplayer games so other players can see a user's paid content. 2

This 'Disc-Locked Content' is often considered to be a bad practice for a publisher to use in offering downloadable content to consumers, as it is easily perceived as content that should be part of the original release. From a philosophical standpoint, the idea of DLC brings the idea of worth to the forefront - what is a non-physical, intangible digital object truly worth? Intrinsically, these digital content packs have no true value - you can neither eat it nor spend it as currency. The question then becomes 'Why is this digital object worth the price assigned to it?', which is a difficult question to answer. To begin with, the Expansion Packs of old were full of content and were often nearly full games themselves - as mentioned earlier EverQuest had many large expansion packs, which added extra experiences to the game for a fair price . However, the evolution of the concept of DLC has led to both smaller packages and smaller prices - and in some cases, prices that make no sense when compared to the content offered. For instance, the "Character Color Pack 1" for Capcom's Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition costs 240 Microsoft Points - or $3.00 U.S. - and is only a 2.20 Megabyte file . The "Character Color Pack 1" allows players to change the color of a character's costume, and if the player's opponent has not also purchased the pack, they cannot even view the custom color set. Considering that the base game costs around $15, charging the player extra for a color change feature can easily seem questionable.
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The idea of digital worth as applied to intangible objects is most apparent in gaming when faced with the idea of Microtransactions - a concept currently still very new to gaming and the world itself. A perfect example of the microtransaction model can be found in Riot Games' League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game where players can either choose from a rotating roster of characters available for free during matches, or permanently purchase characters through either real-money purchases or in-game currency. The characters themselves exist purely within the game, and therefore lack material value. It follows then that without material value, the only value these purchasable characters truly have is the value assigned to them by Riot Games essentially, the company can charge whatever value it sees fit because the item in question has no physical form. The grand assumption made by the consumers in this situation is that the companies offering content in this manner are putting fair prices on their work based upon how valuable the user will find said digital object.
Giantbomb.com (2012) Dowloadable Content. http://www.giantbomb.com/downloadablecontent/92-329/. Accessed 17 Oct 2012 3 Microsoft (2012) Character Color Pack 1. http://marketplace.xbox.com/enUS/Product/Character-Color-Pack-1/3086ea1d-d279-4992-8c1b-de372259e99f. Accessed 10 Dec 2012
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However, a system based on blind acceptance like this could very easily be abused, as Capcom allegedy abused the concept of DLC with Street Fighter X Tekken's large amount of 'disc-locked content' characters, who were included on the shipped disk but locked behind paid DLC, for what the company later alleged were 'compatibility issues' .
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There is a different view to be considered, however, where DLC is concerned. From the perspective of a developer, DLC presents several great opportunities: the chance to expand a game's life, the ability to make extra money, and the opportunity to include content that was incomplete at the time the game shipped. Despite all the issues surrounding DLC markets and consumer perceptions, DLC continues to be a highly profitable endeavour for both developers and publishers, and if these companies are well funded, they can continue to create new experiences for the public. This piece of the DLC issue lies more within the idea of games as a product and not a work of art, however.

3. Paratext
Paratext is a literary concept that is beginning to be applied to other forms of media such as film and video gaming as the industries develop. In literary works, paratext is conceptualized as anything surrounding the text that is not the text itself. This could be book covers, reviews, artwork associated with the book, or even the descriptive text on the back of the book. For video games, the concept of paratext can be applied easily: games have covers, promotional materials, and merchandise that are not the games themselves. For example, Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series has spawned numerous game guides, posters, comics, figures, and even an animated television show. These various bits of merchandise act as supporting devices to the games themselves, and thusly as paratextual entities. This concept extends also to books and movies based on video games, such as the Gears of War and Halo novels or the Disney film based on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. In some ways, a game's DLC offerings could be seen as paratext to the game itself. For instance, Ninja Theory's Enslaved - Odyssey to the West has a DLC expansion named 'Pigsy's Perfect 10', which presents new gameplay and a new story to the players, but requires the original game. As a piece of the game's story, it is unnecessary and exists outside the original game's narrative, but it
Capcom (2012). Street Fighter X Tekken: 12 new characters coming to consoles, PC this fall. http://www.capcomunty.com/brelston/blog/2012/03/05/street_fighter_x_tekken:_12_new_charac ters_coming_to_consoles,_pc_this_fall. Accessed 10 Dec 2012
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provides more depth to the game's world and one of its major characters. In this way, 'Pigsy's Perfect 10' serves as paratextual content that helps the user to better understand the 'text' of Enslaved while also providing the player with a new experience in a familiar environment.

4. Augmented Reality
In ' Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code', Mark Graham defines Augmented Reality as:
"indeterminate, unstable, context dependent and multiple realities brought into being through the subjective coming-togethers in time and space of material and virtual experience ... In other words: augmented reality is the material virtual nexus mediated through technology, information and code, and enacted in specific and individualised space time configurations". (Graham et al. 2012) 5

In recent years, the concept of Augmented Reality (or AR) has naturally extended into gaming. For example, the Nintendo 3DS makes use of its built-in cameras to run AR games such as Face Raiders, which requires the player to move the 3DS around and view the real world with the digital content of the game overlaid onto it. This trend is also evident in the motion controls of Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation Move controller, which use real physical actions undertaken by the player to control the actions of characters in games. Microsoft's Kinect device, which is built for the Xbox 360, provides players with a new AR experience that requires no controller - the player's body is used as the main input device as the Kinect uses its infrared cameras to detect the movements the player makes, similar to the way the older PlayStation Eye Toy for PlayStation 2 did. What AR gaming offers to consumers is the opportunity to overlay a new set of ideas and parameters onto the world in which they live, mediated through their gaming devices. In this way, it becomes a source of new experiences for developers to deliver to the public.

Graham, Mark, Matthew Zook, and Andrew Boulton (2012) Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00539.x/. Accessed 19 Oct 2012
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5. Skylanders - Inverse Augmented Reality and Disc-Locked Content

While the concept of AR gaming is still in its infancy, several titles in recent years have taken advantage of a type of inverted augmented reality - where real objects are tied to digital content in a game. The greatest example of the this is Activision's hit title Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure. In Skylanders, players take on the role of the Portal Master, a hero who can summon great warriors into the realm of Skylands in order to combat evil. Within the narrative of the game, it is explained that the titular Skylanders - the great heroes and playable characters of the game - were imprisoned by the game's villain and sent to Earth - to the real world - as statues. The main mechanic of the game is the use of Skylanders figures - purchased from retail outlets worldwide - to unlock playable characters within the game. The Skylanders games ship with a USB device known as the 'Portal of Power', a RFID reader that communicates with RFID chips in the plastic figures to both make the character the figure depicts appear in the game and track the statistics of the playable characters themselves. What Skylanders creates is a sort of inverse augmented reality - that is, the real plastic figures are used to alter the digital world of the game through the mediation of the Portal of Power. While this has been a very profitable concept for Activision (the basic game of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure sold over 3 million copies worldwide), it also draws some interesting questions about its DLC: the entire game, all characters and levels included, ships on the disc. However, only three of the characters (out of a total 36) come with the game and Portal of Power, and because the Skylanders are divided up by 'Elements' - and at least one Skylander of each Element is required to truly complete the game - a player is drawn to buy more figures in order to access the complete content of the game. In many ways, Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure is the ultimate disc-locked content con. To counter a negative reaction to a large collection of paid DLC characters already being on the game disc, Activision smartly prices the figures, and offers them in many varieties. In turn, this bold strategy has paid off handsomely for the publisher, as over 30 million Skylanders figures sold between the game's launch and late March, 2012 ( a period of about six months). Added to the 3.88 million sales of the game itself, the profits from the game/toy hybird are staggering. In comparison, LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars , which has a similar gameplay structure and target audience, sold 4.51 million copies , and had no DLC components or residual gains from figure sales like Skylanders, and it was backed by a multimedia juggernaut of franchise, which Skylanders' Spyro couldn't even
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Sales figures for Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure and LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars found at: Vgchartz.com (2012) Game Comparison. http://www.vgchartz.com/tools/game_comparison.php Accessed 19 Oct 2012
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begin to compete with even during the height of his popularity on the Sony PlayStation. Looking past its interesting Inverse AR mechanic and smart business strategy, Skylanders also raises questions of the worth of digital objects and the true meaning of DLC. While all the characters are technically on the Skylanders game disc, the figures that are required to play the game have material worth. It follows then that the customer is receiving something of some value when purchasing a Skylanders-brand figure. While the full implications of this style of marketing and gaming have yet to be realized, it is an interesting new direction for the industry.

6. Looking Forward
The future is an endlessly shifting, evolving entity that is unpredictable at best. However, given the progress that has been made in the past ten years in the video game industry, and even within the last five (at the time of this writing, circa December 2012), it may be possible to theorize on the future of the downloadable content phenomenon's effect on the gaming industry as a whole. Alongside the release of Lionhead Studios' Fable III, the creators of the fantasy franchise released a novel titled Fable: The Balverine Order, which took place in the same universe. While not an uncommon move for a video game series - as displayed by such franchises as Halo, Gears of War, Mass Effect, and StarCraft, to name but a few - The Balverine Order brought with it a much more significant development: attached, exclusive DLC for Fable III. A small ribbon ad across the cover of the book reads "Includes code to unlock unique weapon in Fable III", announcing that those players who purchased the book would also received a code which they could redeem for a DLC weapon over Xbox LIVE. This achieved something new in the industry that resonates well with the Skylanders franchise which would launch not long after - an economic fusion of a physical product with a digital one. While the Skylanders figures would take this concept further by making the digital and physical content roughly analogous to one another, the inclusion of DLC with any other piece of paratextual content was an interesting new development that would continue to be popular, with DLC content appearing with art books for Mass Effect and other franchise novels and toys. The trend of Inverse AR has already taken hold with new titles. For instance, the Kinect pack-in title, minigame collection Kinect Adventures, achieves the same kind of AR as Skylanders and its sequel by having the onscreen Avatars directly mimic the physical movements of the player in games that

are highly motion-based. Perhaps the most effective example of this part of the Kinect experience is the game's 'River Rush' minigame, where the player leans and jumps to control a raft speeding through a rapid-filled river while collecting medallions with their arms. More in line with the specific use of figures in Skylanders are protyped figurines for the WiiU launch title Rayman Legends, from Ubisoft. Using the WiiU GamePad's near-field communications (NFC) functions, plastic figures placed on the pad can pop up in-game if they are designed to. For instance, a heart-shaped figure dropped a health powerup into the game when placed on the pad, or a 'Rabbid' character figure that opened a new level featuring the lovable characters. Unfortunately, the NFC functionality for Rayman Legends was not ready in time for the game's release, though it may yet see the light of day through an update patch. Extrapolating forward from these ideas, many possibilities come to light. One possibility that seems highly likely based on current trends is a growing tide of gaming paratext - as the industry continues to produce more and more successful franchises of its own (independent of film, television, and literature juggernauts), more movies, novels, comics, toys, and books will continue to release, expanding the experience of the games beyond the interactive platforms they were born on. Paired with this expanding gaming paratext market, it is also highly possible that NFC technology like that used by Skylanders and the unreleased prototype figures for Rayman Legends will become more commonplace as the technology they employ becomes more widely available to the public. In example, it would be quite easy for a franchise such as Marvel's Avengers to make use of a NFC figure-based game. With a wide array of characters and an established universe to make use of, the possibility is massive. This is also quite true for the highly successful LEGO franchise, which takes beloved media juggernaut intellectual properties and pares down their concepts into cute, family-friendly co-operative games with high replayability and massive amounts of playable characters (the most recent entry, LEGO The Lord of the Rings, featured in excess of 80 playable characters drawn from the Peter Jackson film trilogy and the original books). Though their signature 'minifigs' are small, they could easily fit an RFID tag within the torso piece, and thusly allow players to unlock characters they own as figures (as opposed to finding them within the game, which should remain a normal option) for play in the games. This sort of cross-media playability would be greatly beneficial to both LEGO company's building sets and video game franchises. As AR gaming advances, Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's PlayStation Move devices have the opportunity to become centerpieces in new experiences, both in games themselves and in the DLC market. For instance, Nintendo's 3DS title Kid Icarus: Uprising makes use of the system's AR abilities to read special

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AR cards, which through a complex image-reading algorithm unlock collectible 'Idols' for viewing within the game, and this concept could expand to involve scanning everyday objects into games through the Kinect or PlayStation Eye Toy, which is in fact a feature originally teased for the Kinect by Microsoft in its early promotional videos for the device. The video shows a child scanning the artwork from his real skateboard into a skateboarding game through the Kinect's cameras, and then using that skateboard with motion controls. While scanning objects could indeed be a new avenue for DLC, it would be a difficult task for the current technology. However, the risks might well be worth the rewards if digital value could be assigned to objects that previously had only physical value. While the concepts of AR and Inverse AR gaming may or may not continue, it is almost assured that DLC itself will be a permanent factor in the gaming market in the years to come. While exclusive DLC like the extra weapon packaged with Fable: The Balverine Order may or may not stick, the ability to cross-promote games and their paratextual content is an inviting opportunity for publishers, developers, and players alike. Long established franchises like Halo and Super Mario Bros. could begin to offer special DLC deals with apparel, books, and toys, and franchises without such large amounts of paratext, like Nintendo's other major franchise, The Legend of Zelda, could create new paratextual content and pair interesting new DLC with the material. An interesting extrapolation would be DLC related to tie-in books, such as characters previously exclusive to the text of a novel being brought into their related game through DLC included with the book. While the ethics, economics, and development of DLC continue to change and grow with the industry, the appearance of new technology and content-delivery systems will fundamentally alter the way that players experience games, cross-media franchises, and the paratextual content of said media. Though the futures of AR gaming and the unique Physical/Digital content of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure might be uncertain, there is one truth that is inevitable and unavoidable: download distribution and DLC are here to stay, for better or worse.