Games are actually different in so many ways other than this, that I can’t make a straight comparison, other than to say that before DLC, you just bought expansions on a disc, and before that, you had to buy an entirely new “Turbo” or “Super” edition of the game to get any updates.

Contrary to what you might think, games received updates far earlier than the introduction of DLC and Micro-transactions. Doom, for example, had many update patches post launch. Only, the game wouldn’t update automatically. You had to know that the patches existed, and where to find them to download them.

I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.

My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.

As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.

My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.

Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.

Most of us don’t notice microtransactions because we don’t give a flying fuck about cosmetics and skins. It’s a self-correcting problem: stop buying them and they go away.

I hear a lot of talk about micro transactions and shot, but I rarely see them in the game i play so I don’t really care about them at all. I played league of legends, but stopped 3 years ago. I never felt the need to buy anything in league, because it doesn’t affect gameplay. Now I mostly play single player games and at max there will be dlc that are almost always totally optional or sometimes there will be cosmetics you can buy that are also totally optional.

I would be very interested of hearing people who really hate micro transactions explain why they hate them so much. If it’s an online game were you paying gives you an advantage, that would be really shitty. But all micro transactions I see are just optional cosmetics that I can ignore.

The adjustment has been gradual but the signs were always there.
I remember the last time I bought a Civ game. Civ3. The physical CD launched on day one was just junk as it was buggy as heck with frequent crashes. Had to dL a 5 gig ‘patch’ (whole game on the disc was less than that). Then you had to buy multiplayer separately and the ability to mod needed another expansion. This was 2001.
Now my multiplayer is mostly free to play and my single player game purchases are considered with many updates and a lot of reviews before I buy.

Nothing has changed for me.

98% of the games I buy are on sale, most of the times they’re bundled with DLC and if they aren’t, I set a sale alarm for the DLC I’m interested on. Microtransactions are not an issue either. I’ve enjoyed COD, CSGO, LoL, Fortnite, and other F2P microtransaction-riddled games without spending a dime, or by just spending trivial amounts (less than $30 in a 5-year span).

Back then, we had expansions… Also, pre-internet days, micro transactions came in the form of secret stuff locked behind passcodes that were only published in magazines or super expensive official guides, which as a kid, you could only dream of having as a birthday present or so.

I don’t care for how games are now. I’d rather Kentucky windage bugs than half the dev team monetizing nonsense.

I held out on getting a steam account for ages, till 2005, and even then only used it for valve games. It wasn’t until 2012 that I got anything that wasn’t part of a half life collection.

At this point I’ve more or less made peace with the concept of digital only gaming, and generally prefer the convenience, even on consoles, but I also don’t bother owning consoles I can’t modify, and have no hangups about pirating things to try or to have a copy I can control. For instance I’ve had to pirate red dead 2 despite owning a copy because the Rockstar launcher refused to work offline at the time.

As far as changes to what I buy and play, that’s a whole other thing. I almost exclusively play single player titles. I keep one live service game at any point, just as a matter of having something to play communally when friends want to jump into something, used to be destiny, now it’s fortnite, but the overwhelming majority of my gaming is in stuff like 7d2d, raft, cyberpunk, fallout, skyrim, that sort of thing. There’s not exactly a wealth of microtransaction going on in those (barring fortnite).

And it’s not like we didn’t have “dlc” in the 90s, we just called em expansion packs. Starcraft had brood war, warcraft 3 had frozen throne, half life got blue shift and opfor. Are all games dlc that big? No, but most of the games I play do get sizable chunks of content. And we definitely got updates to all those.

Hell, even Pokémon games got patched back in the day via link cable, although with regard to console gaming by and large such things didn’t start happening till consoles started going online.

(I’m sure my answers would probably be a little different if I hadn’t grown up on pc gaming tbh)

I grew up with expansion packs being the norm.
There are very few memorable games from my childhood that didn’t have expansion packs, and I think for many games DLC is the modern version of an expansion pack. Although DLC varies quite a bit.

Obviously there are good pieces of DLC and bad ones, and it can be hard to tell what’s what. Day 1 DLC can be a big offender, but I do remember the days where games had content in them that wasn’t finished.
Baldur’s Gate 2 has a mod called Unfinished Business that modders finished up the content, and there is the famous Ascension mod that rewrites much of the ending of the expansion, the funny thing with this mod is that the creator was David Gaider of Bioware, one of the writers and directors of Baldur’s Gate 2, due to his feelings that the expansion was unfinished he released a mod to fix his problems with it.

I don’t see either thing happening in today’s gaming world, that unfinished content can be finished before the game is released and then sold as DLC, being unhappy with the game’s ending can be patched later on, or again sold as DLC.

My annoyances with DLC are typically pre-order bonuses, especially if they’re exclusive to stores. And if they’re selling very important story based content on Day 1.

I don’t mind additional story content coming later, because that seems so similar to the expansion packs of years ago.

A good comparison is Mass Effect. Lair of the Shadowbroker I think is a fine DLC, it’s not largely important to the plot of ME2, but it’s a good side quest that is important to the character and was released about 9 months after the launch of the game.
But From Ashes in ME3 I think was terrible, it was Day 1 DLC and featured an extremely important and lore significant character locked behind an additional paywall.

That said, I do have some annoyances with DLC:
An abundance of cosmetic DLC in single player games is whatever for me, but if the game doesn’t have a way to unlock other cosmetics in game, it feels like a cheap cash grab.
Pre-order DLC especially if it’s store-exclusive and ESPECIALLY if it’s not available for purchase later- I would like the ability to have a complete game.
Having to wait for all DLC to come out before I can feel like I’m playing a complete game. Although this isn’t always new, as things like the D2 Battle Chest, Neverwinter Nights Platinum Edition or Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete Edition existed when I was a kid as well, where we were buying individual expansion packs as they released or we waited for the special editions.

Unfathomably annoying, especially when it comes to modding games. The amount of times I’ve had mods or settings break because of some update that added useless content that I don’t want is honestly disgusting. For the most part, I’ve stopped buying games near their release date because I’d rather buy the game when it’s more feature-complete. The DLC scenario has become an issue in that it effectively translates to, “You will not get the game’s content in it’s entirety upon purchase”, which is unthinkable in other scenarios.

Imagine going to a restaurant and paying the price of a meal just to be seated. If you want appetizers like chips and salsa, it costs $9.99 per bowl. Drinks (including water) are $5.99. Both for the appetizers and for the meal, you pay the waiter first, sides are $2.50 extra. After purchase, they’ll give you an estimated wait time for your food, which may be delayed for any reason or cancelled altogether, even though you’ve already paid for it. The food comes out but it’s not what you ordered, the meat is undercooked, the portions are significantly smaller than advertised, or it’s actually a different dish altogether. You attempt to complain to the waiter, wanting to get the food you promised. The waiter tells you “Thanks for the feedback!” and leaves, never to be seen again. You hear grumblings from others around you that they’re having the same problems. What they ordered is not what they got, or something hasn’t been made properly. One guy waited all evening before they finally delivered enough food, piece-by-piece, to make up the meal he ordered. Eventually, after enough people have complained, the waiter comes back and gives everyone silverware. Nothing changes about anyone’s meals, but you now have silverware (even though you likely already had some before).
You leave the restaurant, annoyed, with less money, and still hungry. You later find a social media post from the restaurant’s cook complaining that their customers are self-entitled and are “expecting too much”.

TL;DR - Its like fast food, but without the “fast”.
… Or the “food”…

The rough equivalent to large DLC existed way back before one downloaded content – one just got the sequel.

The line between that and the later expansion packs was kind of fuzzy, in that a sequel and an expansion pack could be pretty close in size.

Also, it used to be very common, on the PC, to put out a demo to try a game. Today, that’s less common. I suppose to some extent the free-to-play+microtransactions model is just a logical extension of that.

I don’t really think that the change has altered how I play much. I didn’t get small DLC then, and I haven’t played games where I would now, though I’ve no fundamental objection to them. Just haven’t run into a game I’ve played where what’s on offer is really what I want.

I’d be willing to buy more radio stations for Fallout 4 and similar games. Would like more music for Solaris too. When you play a game for a long period of time, the existing stuff gets a bit old, and both shipped with good soundtracks. But for whatever reason, game studios never seem to sell “audio expansion packs” and just leave that up to modders.

EDIT: I guess rhythm games probably sell audio expansion packs, but I’m not super-into the genre.

EDIT2: I have picked up DLC that’s smaller than expansion packs necessarily were, on further reflection. Paradox makes a lot of games with DLC that wouldn’t constitute an expansion, for example. Rimworld’s DLC wouldn’t be an expansion.

But the extreme a la carte “buy an outfit” thing or “buy a character” or similar just never seemed to have anything that I liked.

I find it shapes how I choose games. I like to be a completionist. I choose not to play games that have tons of dlc that is part of the core game.

Examples: I skipped out on the new soul calibur. Unlocks are a huge part of the appeal of mastering tourney games.

I skipped out on Stellaris and don’t really play cities and skylines. It feels incomplete when you play it.

I do play some games and buy dlc because the xpacs feel like it’s renewing and changing the game: Xenoblade 2, sims 4 (actual xpacs), crusader kings, grim dawn

And some games I’m just lucky enough that the devs just keep giving me thousands of hours of work for free: terraria, Stardew, Starbound, Subnautica, monster sanctuary, anything by larian studios, etc

I love it when a game is well thought out and complete but I wholeheartedly understand the need for patches and dlc to extend sales of an IP for the stability of small gaming companies.

I’ve come around to it Expansion pack tier DLC like From put out are fine, we had those before the horse armour. Working in development now, I can see the crazy costs in any content creation. Well managed games can create ongoing funding streams that let the games reach their full potential that software as a discrete product can’t without the most permissive publisher backing. For me they need to take the approach of, “we’re trying to get people to pay out of a sense of gratitude rather than obligation” to make me want to spend though, I typically won’t even think about it unless I’ve gotten a couple of dozen hours of entertainment out of them already and want to see them continue. It’s a high risk model though as most people probably only have room for 1-3 live service style games in their life and no one really wants to be hanging around the also rans. I mostly play PoE, Genshin, and MTGA (lapsed) for context, and have spent several hundred at least on each of them. Feels very worth for the entertainment I’ve gotten out of each of them, but I could have in theory played any of them f2p.

It pushed me straight back to uncompromising piracy, and a total refusal to give money for any reason unless the game is fully offline and on physical media.