Articles
DLC WTF
high end of pricing. It costs a
company plenty to get a single
multiplayer map created, but
there’s no reason to charge
£34.99 for a four map pack
Call of Duty: Ghosts Season
Pass. That’s £2.91 per map,
less if you include the skins, etc
also in the season pass. Call of
Duty: Ghosts has literally made
Activision over a billion dollars
across four consoles - and the
majority of gamers will play
online and feel they have to
buy the map packs to compete
properly. So if each of those
billion dollars was spent on a
copy of the Gold Edition (the
expensive, most recent edition),
that would be 20,004,000
copies. That’s £58,211,640
Activision is making per map.
Issue 60 • October 2014
Infinity Ward subsists of under
250 employees, meaning that
is plenty to pay each one for
the hours they put into each
map, plus another arse-load
of money to pay Activision’s
7,000 employees. For a single
map from a single game.
Almost sixty million pounds.
Going to Grand Theft Auto
V - Rockstar has released six
bouts of DLC, introducing new
weapons, clothing and vehicles
each time. In total they have
cost exactly £0 so far, with
more DLC coming for the
exact same price. Rockstar has
under 1,000 employees and
with Take-Two Interactive as
publishers they have just over
3,000 people pulling a paycheck
related to GTA. And yet their
earnings are up, whereas
Activision’s are down. The
two companies don’t pull the
same annual figures, but that
isn’t the point to this article.
I couldn’t find any earnings
figures or employee numbers
for Deep Silver, so I can’t guess
at how its DLC is doing, but
the multiplayer isn’t important
for Saints Row IV, which is a
single city and no maps like
GTA Online. However, one
studio releases a few DLC to
higher earnings, the other
releases a ton to lower. There
may not be a direct correlation
to the overall finances, but
it’s certainly interesting.
12 • GameOn Magazine