On October first SCEA launched the PSPgo and with it the damnable future of gaming. Upon first hearing about the PSPgo, on the big glowing box in my living room, I instantly dismissed it. DLC(downloadable content) only! "Come on, that will never work" grumbled the cantankerous old man of a gamer in my head.
Let me be blunt here, The Game Ronin loathes the Idea of exclusive DLC. I believe it takes away part of the experience of gaming. I love pouring over a game manual, and coming from a large family of gamers it was often my first interaction with a game. Reading the manual from cover to cover and examining the art on the box would really get my game juices flowing in anticipation of finally getting to play. Eventually I noticed that this had added to my overall gaming experience because where games usually only stimulated 2 or 3 senses(if you count touch) I was experiencing the stimulation of a fourth sense, smell. I love the smell of a new game manual, or am I just addicted to the chemicals and inks used in the process of creating one? How dare Sony take away an integral part of game experience, and not only that but also begin to pave the way for other companies to do the same.
Sacrilege or the merciful amputation of a dying limb?
DLC is not a new thing at all, and I have always opposed it, but with the arrival of the PSPgo something changed. While I was pondering how stupid the PSPgo is, and how much money Sony was going to loose(something I still believe), and how they were ripping gamers off, a small timid voice in my head spoke.
"But this is the future" it said. I dismissed that thought immediately, and went on viciously attacking the PSPgo on my mental battlefield, but the thought kept creeping back up. It was then I began to realize that I was just resisting the inevitable. As adaptive of a species as humans are, we tend to resist change. I realized that I was thinking like an old man stuck in his ways, but instead of resisting "rock and roll" it was DLC, and the cold hard truth began to sink in.
As much as I love game manuals and box art their time is waning. Manuals have been thin and dull for years now(as always there are exceptions), but this really has more to do with the way games are made now. You needed a good imagination to get into most of the games of the past and the manuals acted as tools providing back story and pictures which helped to tie everything together. Games today are much bigger and ambitious than they were at the pinnacle of manual and box art. Their stories and backstories are seamlessly integrated into the whole of the game, and they deliver a much deeper experience than a couple of paragraphs or pages could(Oblivion intro). When you factor in a companies bottom line and the ever growing concern about the environment DLC seems to be the natural next step in the evolution of the gaming industry.
There are a healthy amount of pros and cons for exclusive DLC, and I still have some concerns and reservations, but most can be chalked up to paranoia and prejudice. Sure my hard drive could crash and I could loose all of my downloaded games but at the same time my house could burn down or be flooded and I could loose all my physical games. Sure it sucks not having a full color one hundred page manual/hint book and map/poster, but it would be nice to not have to worry about wanton, destructive, gremlin, children gnawing on and clawing your game disks to iridescent, plastic ribbons.
In the end I don't think exclusive DLC will completely replace its store bought predecessor at least not in the next 20 years. It does however have the potential to save companies millions of dollars which could translate into direct savings for us, or more realistically into the survival of our favorite companies. The best part of DLC so far in my opinion has been the emergence of smaller independent developers who inject bold, fresh, new ideas into the mainstream. As for the PSPgo I predict it will fail, it is ahead of it's time and at $249.99(msrp) it is the second most expensive system on the market trailing only the PS3 by $50.00.
In the meantime I will keep all my manuals, maps, and boxes and when I get a whiff of a new game book I will let the flood of nostalgia engulf me, and once again I will be sitting on my living room floor on a cold winters night letting my imagination take control as I wait impatiently for my turn to save the princess and the world.
