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The Merits of Free DLC

Written by Jay Margalus on Feb 13, 2012 | 0 Comments

A New Idea

At a time when the game industry is struggling to define itself within the context of free, freemium, and paid games, Lunar Giant decided to ask a separate question: Should it cost the customer money to extend the life of a game they purchased? From Call of Duty to Orcs Must Die, paying for downloadable content (DLC) has become de rigueur in the games industry. Most gamers have come to accept the fact that they aren’t done paying for a game after they’ve bought it. But does that make it right? And is it always more profitable for a game company to sell DLC?

The Experiment

Delve Deeper by Lunar Giant is a PC game on Steam that was released in September of 2010. Almost a year after release, Lunar Giant put out Delve Deeper’s first DLC pack entitled “Treasures and Tunnels” (TT). TT was priced at 0.99, and sold fairly well for a first release game. 6 months after TT, a second pack entitled “Gratis Grottos” (GG) was released. In contrast to Treasures and Tunnels, Gratis Grottos was a free, fan-made DLC pack.

From previous sales of TT, GG was expected to increase profits (if only slightly). The value of appearing on the Steam front page cannot be ignored; people notice a game when it’s receiving that much viewer traffic. What we didn’t expect, however, was to make more money off of Gratis Grottos than Treasures and Tunnels, yet that’s exactly what happened.

To be clear: In a comparable 7 day period, Lunar Giant made more money off of free, fan-made DLC (Gratis Grottos) than off of paid DLC released 6 months earlier (Treasures and Tunnels).

Some Numbers

Revenue generated off of the free-of-charge Gratis Grottos was 4.3% greater than with Treasures and Tunnels; more interestingly, sales of Delve Deeper units were 18% greater.

Primary units being the most objective indicator of success, the graph above shows a demonstrably higher success rate for GG over TT. Furthermore, preliminary statistics indicate a higher average increase in sales after the initial “release” bump has tailed off.

Finally, Gratis Grottos can be attributed to a 2,136% spike in revenue (when compared against 7 days previous of release), whereas Treasures and Tunnels can only boast a 651% increase.

Conclusions

This is by no means proof that free DLC will make more money than paid DLC all of the time. What it is proof of, however, is that free DLC is definitely worth considering for similarly situated games. More importantly, it’s proof of something that Lunar Giant has always believed: what’s good for the fans is also good for the company. Moreover, there’s no measurement for the kind of good-will and value that you add to your company/game by doing something decent.

Are there any disadvantages to running DLC this way? Doubtful. Giving fans who competed in the DLC competition a way to contribute to Delve Deeper was a really fun experience, and it’s something that more people should do with their games. And finally, giving all fans of our game a big “thank you” by releasing free content goes a long way to selling future sequels of a game (like Delve Deeper: The Deepening).