[rant]I've noticed lately that DLC is getting pretty ridiculous. It started out as a fun little diversion; downloadable content's only purpose was to further your experience, and cost at most a couple of bucks, and were such things as new maps for shooters, or maybe an additional little (usually non-canon) sidequest. But developers in recent years are getting pretty cocky as to how much they can get away with. For instance, there are many games that already HAVE the DLC on the disc, such as Mass Effect 3, it's just partitioned away where you can't reach it unless you're either extremely skilled or extremely persistent and lucky at hacking. All that the DLC provides is a little strip of code that unlocks these partitions, and they're usually not cheap, either. Hell, the expansion for Oblivion still costs 25 bucks.

While I hate to pull the "Capcom is evil" card once again, as even I, a particularly butthurt Mega Man Legends 3 fan can admit it's getting quite old, they provide a rather jarring and blatant model of this sort of thing; in fact, a recent transgression of theirs is what inspired this thread. It was getting pretty bad around the time that MvC3 was charging upwards of 5 bucks for Jill and Shuma-Gorath EACH, it reached a head after I played Asura's Wrath:

I played the story mode, noticing along the way that there were quirky little bits of DLC that allow you to fight Ryu and Akuma. How neat, I thought. And then I noticed the "Lost Episode" packs; thinking they were little more than what I described above in this post, and noticing they were rather expensive for DLC, at 6.99, I paid them no mind, thinking they were much the same. That's when I "finished" Asura's Wrath: a crappy, barely-expository bit played, and it then told me I had to complete five missions with an "S" ranking to view the "real" ending. How sadistic, I then thought, that's really something you should just save for optional unlockable items. It took a week or so of practice, but I finally did it, and with much frustrated but relieved tension I played the "real" final level...and once again, a crappy, barely-expository scene played, and it then informed me that it -still- was not over, and to view the ""real"" ending, I'd have to download the ending. I realized with horror that the 6.99 "Lost Episodes" pack I saw was the actual, canon ending of the game, and that Capcom had literally hacked off the end of the game that I had worked hard for and sold it to me at a premium. Not only was this an incredibly frustrating, demoralizing, and just plain cheap business practice to foist on me, but it means one more thing: if you get into the story of Asura's Wrath, you had better pony up -now-, because once this generation goes out and the network goes down, you will never again be able to finish this game, because you won't be able to download the episode pack. [/rant]

And there you have it. While I'm not going to sit here and start a new schpiel about how gaming has lost its way once again, I'm afraid there will be a domino effect if people start giving into Asura's example, and this will start to become an industry standard. But I'll stop there, because I've made my point, this post is already way too long, and if I do the newly-fueled Capcom butthurt in me will start flaring up again. So I'll just leave it to you guys: agree? Disagree? Share my fears? Got any examples besides mine?

Edit: Oi. Now I've lost my catchy, alliterative, journalism-style title because of my butterfingers. Someone with more editing power than me please fix it because it is making my OCD go off.