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DLC, or downloadable content, began many many years ago on mobile phones, but the first major video game to tap into the DLC market, was the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, by Bethesda.
This is the moment the DLC torrent began, we can all point at and blame horse armour for the situation we’re in now.
Many thanks to the Patrons and Twitch subs who support the channel!
MichiganJack
02.06.2023I just love the faint screams of battle going on in background.
Wickpheme
02.06.2023I warned everybody. I said exactly this would happen. They did not listen. Now I no longer warn people of the obvious, because they do not deserve it. Ya'll sacrificed the entire games industry to profit because you were too daft to know what you were doing. No skin off my nose, I'm a pirate.
AbstractM0use
02.06.2023You mean when video games went back to a production model to make continuous money. Arcade games were difficult yet fun enough to keep us pumping our quarters in them to play them. Imagine having to pay a small fee every time you wanted to play or continue playing a game.
Dr. Baz
02.06.2023I bought it
Simeon Wardle
02.06.2023Circa 2004 I was lost in my first mmorpg called Entropia and spent $10 a day just buying ammo! I was young (early 30s), foolish (drank too much) and had too much time to kill (in between jobs). Addictions…
ElaborateTiger
02.06.2023Fast forward to today where we're thankful a skin in a free to play game is "only" 7 bucks rather than the usual 12 bucks.
Wade Hampton
02.06.2023I got all the DLCs AND the Horse Armor on A Demo Disc for XBOX Magazine so yeah, never paid A dime! 😀
Adam Foster
02.06.2023You are unreasonable!! That is an amazing deal for whores armor. I didn't even know whores could equip armor!
jaqs smith
02.06.2023yeah, but the horse has armour now 🙂
Jason Ouellette
02.06.2023Diablo 2 did it first.
Paul Schaaf
01.06.2023To me, Horse Armor doesn't even qualify as a DLC. A DLC has to add many hours of gameplay. If it's just a single item or has no gameplay impact then it's just a cash grab, probably a microtransaction. A real DLC that extends the play time for a game I like by say 50% is actually worth it to me as long as it's a proportionally lower fraction of the original purchase price. A DLC that extends play time by 50% is actually worth 50% of the purchase price of the original game. Something like Horse Armor is just a single item. How many items are there in the game? Probably thousands. So whatever percentage of the total purchase price a single item is worth, that's the value of Horse Armor. So on the order of 1 penny or less for a game that costs $60.
Lilly
01.06.2023EA// The Sims been making DLC since 2000 wym?
Bob Roberts
01.06.2023Nah, the first add on content for a console game was… GTA:London.
Artyom Arty
01.06.2023to be fair, $2.50 is so little money… thats like a large french fries at mcdonalds
even $25 for DLC is pennies. $25 is how much you'd pay for popcorn and a drink at the movies…
ImJustAnA-Hole
01.06.2023I remember this day.
EvilGenius447
01.06.2023Honestly this is the fault of players more than anything. The horrendous trends we've seen in the gaming industry are the direct result of people buying into complete and utter garbage. The entire state of the gaming industry today lies at the feet of the gamers. If they don't buy it, developers won't keep making it. Instead we have people defending poorly made, underwhelming garbage like their lives depend on it, just justifying the devs not giving a shit about what they do.
Semi AUStral Ants
01.06.2023I am a DLC
ALX
01.06.2023I am 36, and up to this day I have never paid for an item in a game. Because the thought of it alone is stupid, and everyone who pays for loot boxes or items in games is stupid as well.
Princess Polly
01.06.2023well anytime a company set revenue records everybody copies them. Look how many games copied WoW and how many copied Fortnite's revenue model lol
Liam R
01.06.2023It just works….
J O
31.05.2023Demand and supply. Guess what happens when there is no demand? Companies stop making nonsense.
Rene Lariviere
31.05.2023i remember seeing that… i could not believe this was a thing. i started getting pirate versions and never paying again.
Vicente pRZ
31.05.2023Bethesda walked so others could run
Skn
31.05.20232:26 – None of that is true. Morrowind's original design and what was being worked on, was an even biggerbetter Daggerfall. More hand-crafted, and less procedural generation ( but about the same size as Daggerfall, just as many cities, etc ). What caused them to rescale back to what we got, wasn't an desire to do less is more, but from them legit going practically bankrupt in 1998-1999 ( which is why they founded Zenimax and bought out Bethesda Softworks, to help give a last-ditch effort to stay of bankrupcy, which worked ).
Also, majority of the talent behind Arena and Daggerfall, lost their jobs inbetween Daggerfall and Morrowind for this exact reason ( which is what let Todd Howard take the helm for Morrowind, and downscale it ).
3:35 – Expansions have always been VERY lose on what it is. The only thing that's unified, is that it expands on the game. For every Ultima 7: Serpent Isle ( new storyworld and mechanical changes ), there is an Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast ( a couple new dungeons, some mechanical changes to stealth, QoL features, and higher exp cap ).
5:59 – Also incorrect, completely. Morrowind had a set of free-"dlc ( official mods )" released with the creation-kit to give players an example of how to do things in it. They did ( or rather wanted to ) the same for Oblivion, and so you got a lot of different housing mods + horse armor, to showcase examples of how to do these things. However Microsoft and Sony said that Bethesda has to compensate for the downloads. So the choice left to Bethesda became: 1: Do not release it ( wasted development ), 2: Release it for free and take a potentional huge-loss ( why would they, they're a buisness ), or 3: Release it for a minor charge ( that SonyMs were happy with ). Bethesda went with option 3.
However, Knights of the Nine ( the quest, not the collection ) was an actual planned "DLC", and not planned for "free content".
Also you say it did nothing, this is actually incorrect, the horse armor gave a minor health-buff ( which is useless and not how armor works, but yeah ).
7:00 – This is the true reason for DLC increase no question. However do note that Bethesda learned not to do it again because of the bad press. All other DLCs have been the size of Knights of the Nine, or bigger. As it recieved very little backlash ( since we had all the other shit to complain about ).
7:18 – Knights of the Nine was NOT an expansion sized content. It was a single quest-chain. In term of amount of content, it's about the size of a single faction. That's not "Expansiongame" size, that's DLC size. Dawnguard for Oblivion has more content, than Knigths of the Nine did. Unless we count the Knights of the Nine collection ( not the quest DLC ), in which case, horse-armor is included in that, which is what pushes it up a bit ( 4 or 5 houses + 1 faction quest + horse armor, is basically the collection iirc ).
jens markgraf
31.05.2023I like cosmetics.
Aren´t there enough games published ? I mean: to simply avoid publishers who have fallen to the dark side… ?
Rlf
31.05.2023DLCs =/= Microtransactions
The Socrates of Athens
31.05.2023DLC (as well as video games today) is a good case of "caveat emptor" (buyer beware). No one forces you to buy such things; you have to be careful with what you buy and not to buy things impulsively. Companies simply realized they can churn crap out and people will buy it anyway; all companies have to do is rely on a brand and follow trends.
Fynnicus
31.05.2023Came with the GOTY and I was late to the RPG style of game so when I got to see about getting this horse armor, I bought a horse, got the armor, fell off a small cliff and the horse died.
PoppinsBobo
31.05.2023Kind of hard to take your horse armor points seriously with all this anti-Bethesda rhetoric you spew throughout the video. You just sound whiney and entitled to me. You're gonna buy and play both Elder Scrolls 6 and Starfield so spare me the hate pls. I don't think a 100 hour long RPG out of the box is ever going to be considered 'less' in the eyes of any rational gamer.
Wilen
31.05.2023Damn. Now I want to play Daggerfall
Spartacus Ascent
28.05.2023I honestly didn't think much of it. I played Oblivion and loved it so much, but same year (2006) it came out ……. Fiesta Online came out under its original publisher. It too had….. MTX and very very shitty ones at that. But being a stupid young kid I bought em. So when I saw horse armor for $2.5 my thought was "Oh this is a steal". Again i was a kid and didn't know anything. I can't imagine what we'll have in another 15 years….
Pixel Trash
28.05.2023I remember the days of Halo 2 online – the DLC map packs we're a limited time purchase, meaning you could pay money to access them early, but they'd be free for everyone a few months after they released. And they advertised this too.
ToastyFruitcake
28.05.2023I certainly agree that horse armour is as important to the degradation of the quality of real money transactions in games and starting the DLC trend as you say, I believe that EA releasing sims content was another huge eye opener for investors. Sims 3 had a few people questioning why they were paying for expansions with content that should have been there from the start but sims 4 was blatantly released with barebones functionality due to them knowing people EXPECT to pay for expansions by that point. It was no longer extra content, it was customers waiting years for the updated version of their favourite content from the previous game to be added, only to be disappointed by the lack of depth (not to mention all the varying new sizes and prices of downloadable content besides the actual expansions they kept coming up with).
Martin Marchev
28.05.2023Expansion : Hey, we made a new game with the engine you like – this hit too close to heart …. 🙁
GordonLaddo
28.05.2023WAS GETTING THAT DAMN HORSE ARMOR WORTH IT GUYS?!
woodeok yoon
28.05.2023Horse armor is proof that the average consumers is a straight up idiot.
battle rap truth breaker psychic and gaming
28.05.2023Lol making a big deal out this
Cristian Manquilef
28.05.2023And thanks to these greedy ass practices, I prefer to pirate videogames and buy just those games that gives you a complete game like Elden Ring.
I'm not going to pay for incomplete games that the content is divided on dlcs.
jermaine rucker
28.05.2023I didn’t play oblivion when it came out. I wasn’t into rpgs and fantasy games back then
…..oh wait I think I did buy it but hated it after like 5 minutes
But I mean DLC was gonna happen eventually
Rock Shady
28.05.2023It still pains me that my favourite game of all time was also the founder of micro transactions
Brian Henry
27.05.2023the birth of microtransactions
Nuss
27.05.2023"… Neigh the Myth" This man is a Pun-Genius
P Guerra
27.05.2023Skyrim is a prime example of the intro
Odrik Ronnin-GAMER
27.05.2023This is criminally underviewed
Viola
27.05.2023Ngl the spell book DLC is way worst lol
Felipe Marujo
27.05.2023Josh, (hello!), I love your work, but I think I have a good suggestion: could you always put the game cover poster (and maybe even info text, like release year and company) everytime you cite a game?
Sometimes you do it (at least with the cover poster), but more often you don't, and I thjnk this would be so cool and instructive of you to do so as a rule of thumb. Also for screencaps and posts tagging you and companies in social media. Hope this was insightful and, again, thanks for your amazing work ❤
MuffinKatze9562
27.05.2023I love oblivion and if morrowinds landscape and quests wouldn’t be so bland I’d love it
I really missed levitation and Speers but I just like the quests and lord of the rings atmosphere more
Likaru
27.05.2023Whoever bought this dlc should be charged with war crimes.
Liznak Leonhardt
27.05.2023Um actually, it was two graphical assets. There was elvish AND steel horse armor in the DLC. You're also putting a LOT of weight to this one DLC's influence.
Blistlelo
27.05.2023Why do it feels like Oblivion had better general visuals than Skyrim, especially first releases of Skyrim? Is it the filter and more colorful landscape than Skyrim's cold nordic-based setting?