Goat Simulator might be the zaniest concept for a video game yet, and people have been enjoying the hell out of it. But what's great is that any future DLC coming to the game will be easy to grab, because developer Coffee Statin Studios have abandoned the paid model, and all DLC content will be free.
That's what was revealed by the studio's Armin Ibrisagic in a blog post on Gamasutra, outlining the reasons thusly:
* It's nice - "You might argue that companies aren’t charities, and that everything that costs has to be recouped, but having a good relationship with players is the best long-term investment you can make. Since we don’t have a huge marketing budget, we have to rely on word of mouth to spread our games, and dedicated fans are far better at spreading awareness about your game than any paid ads. Finally, if you sold so few units that you can’t afford to invest money in free updates, then you probably shouldn’t do DLC either since you won’t have that many potential buyers."
* You could still do better financially than if you sell DLCs - "If you release a free content update as a patch and alert people towards your new update, you’re targeting both your current user base, and also everyone else that doesn’t own the game to the fact that you’re actively updating your game for free. This is especially true if you’re lucky enough to be featured on the Steam main capsule - if your DLC is featured, your main target is your current user base, but if your free content update is featured on the main capsule, your target group is the entire Steam user base of 70 million users that haven’t bought your game yet."
*The age of retail is gone - "Or more accurately, there never was an age of retail for us indie developers. On Steam, you don’t release the game, make all your revenue, then go working on something else. You normally make the majority of your revenue after release during summer and winter sales, midweek madness, weekend deals, etc, so it would be crazy to stop working on a game merely because it’s released. People might not buy your game full price right after release, but if you keep adding content and supporting the game with free updates they might pick it up on a sale."
* It's less hassle - "Releasing a new DLC involves some overhead...Getting in touch with Valve to get a Steam ID, setting up four different capsule images along with a store text and taking five new screenshots takes valuable time that you could spend on something else, such as making free updates."
* It's nice - "The last few years there has been a growing distaste for DLCs and countless discussions about how it’s affected industry practices. I’m not going to comment or discuss that because that isn’t the topic of this blogpost, but I’m objectively stating that providing free updates can be the reason why someone on the fence ends up buying your game to support this type of game development. Having a ton of DLCs on the other hand, might prevent people from buying it on mere principle."
Obviously, Coffee Stain knows how to make a entertaining game, and with this announcement, they obviously know how to make people happy.
Anyone from EA reading this?
