Starbreeze rolled out a new subscription service for Payday 2 DLC yesterday, which struck me as a pretty good deal: $5 per month for every piece of DLC currently available, and you can subscribe and cancel as you see fit. But the launch turned a less-than-flattering spotlight on another recent Payday 2 development: A significant increase in the price of the Infamous Collection, a bundle of all current Payday 2 DLC that players can buy outright.
A few weeks before the launch of the subscription service, the Infamous Collection jumped from $118 to $170, a steep increase that many players assumed was meant to funnel them toward the subscription service. Gustav Nisser, Starbreeze’s head of commercial, said there was no connection—that the timing was simply “unfortunate,” and the studio had “dropped the ball” on keeping fans in the loop.
You boycott a game because it has DLC? That’s silly. Especially for PD2 which developed over years and added many times the content of the base game. And if you want to play a DLC mission you don’t even need the DLC; only the host needs it.
IMO paydays DLC policy was and is generally good. Recent price changes non-included.
I do, because it broadly displays a bad approach. If a thing should be in the game, it should just be in the game. There is no reason the developer has to gate things behind a payment. Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew, and so many others, all managed to keep adding content without pretending that DLC was anything more than a way to pay out for shareholders. The invasion of microtransactions into gaming has been nothing but harmful, deceptive, and malignant, and I refuse to participate.