Speaking With Kotaku last week, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata stated that they don’t want consumers to feel “cheated or deceived” with the company’s first downloadable content for New Super Mario Bros. 2, and promised that it won’t consists of anything that was held back from the main game.
“I think, when the player has exhausted what’s in an existing piece of software, when there are no more challenges and there is nothing more they can do, if we then introduce a new level or a new character—something new for them—we just increased their motivation to want to go back; we’ve also increased the amount of time they’re going to enjoy that software,”
“And one thing Nintendo has determined as a company policy, what we are not going to do is create a full game and then say, ‘let’s hold this back for DLC.’ That’s not our plan. We’re definitely not doing that. It’s an extreme example, but I think there are examples of games where you get that initial purchase—the very core part of the game—and everything else around it is all DLC. However, if you do that I believe customers will have no motivation to go out and buy the retail package to begin with.”
“So our goal is to create DLC in such a way that consumers do not feel that they have been cheated or deceived. Now I believe there are people out there, readers, who have are worried about that, and we just want to ensure them that we have that in mind and want them to know that that’s not what we are planning on doing.”
Nintendo is very late to the DLC party, but I’m glad to hear that this is the approach they are taking with their first offering. This is how DLC used to be, but anymore it often ends up feeling more like it completes the full game experience, rather than adding something extra to it.
Hopefully Nintendo will continue to take this approach with DLC after New Super Mario Bros. 2, but we won’t know for sure until it happens. At the very least, it appears that they are heading into this with the right idea.
Source: VG247
