1. Xbox Live Marketplace: The Downloadable Content Era

    By Stephen Selnick

    If you own an Xbox 360 and subscribe to Xbox Live, then the Live Marketplace is a place of familiarity for you. For those of you who don’t partake in the online sector of Xbox gaming (or have lives that require you to go outside) allow an explanation: The Live Marketplace is a place for you to purchase extra content for your video games via “Microsoft Points”. For $20, 1600 of these magical points can be yours. But what can you buy with your points? Depending on the game, you can find small items such as avatar items, exclusive videos, and wallpapers. But the real focus is on the bigger ticket items: extra content to the games that you’ve already dedicated hours of your time to complete.

    Video gaming has progressed into a stage where the Downloadable Content (DLC) for a game can add hours of replay value to a title that you have already spent days on. The most obvious (and successful) example of taking advantage of DLC is the Call of Duty franchise. Infinity Ward’s most recent release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, shattered sales records for any form of electronic entertainment. It is most popular for its online multiplayer mode, and this is where the DLC comes in. In order to keep the players from getting bored, Call of Duty releases new multiplayer maps, giving players the opportunity to pay for a new place to conquer their foes. The map packs are usually$10, and are downloaded by roughly 2.5 million players per pack. You can do the math.

    But what if your game is strictly story driven? Well for quality games like Mass Effect 2, this DLC comes in the form of extra missions your character can participate in. ME2 is the second game in a space sci-fi epic, where almost every decision that you make will effect the outcome of future events. So in order to make the DLC deal sweeter for the players, Bioware has made these extra missions also effect the outcome of future games instead of just making you pay $10 for a couple extra hours of play time. So for the players looking to get every last drop out of a story driven game like Mass Effect (which is highly recommended), they’re going to be squeezing the dollars out of their wallets.

    The lesson here is simple: if you create extra content for something that has already done well in the past, people are more inclined to purchase what you are creating now. If Call of Duty didn’t have such addicting multiplayer, or Mass Effect such an engrossing story, their DLC options wouldn’t make nearly enough money. But because the original content is good, the players are willing to use Microsoft’s online store to continue to spend. This trend is not limited to these two games, you can always see people buying expansions and DLC for that increased level cap or extra maps and characters simply because a game has impressed them that much. And that makes Microsoft very happy. 

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