A History of Downloadable Content

Boomtown has a two-part editorial on the history of DLCs (here and here), the second installment of which takes a look at the Oblivion Horse Armor incident.

After spending hours hacking your way through the (truly brilliant) game we all wanted more. Bethesda obliged, promising DLC for us to enjoy. Then it hit. The Horse Armour. It was released onto the Xbox Live Marketplace for 200 Microsoft points (£1.70 – a price it remains even today), as a way of judging what the right price point for DLC was. Ignoring my personal opinion that charging for ‘˜Themes’ and ‘˜Gamer Pictures’, essentially free publicity, for upcoming games seems ludicrous, the Horse Armour upset quite a few people.
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Arguably, a new ‘˜skin’ for the horses was not worth the points, and forums around the world exploded at the controversy over having to spend ‘˜so much money’ on ‘˜so little’. In fairness, it wasn’t a complaint at the price being large, but more like the value of the item being much less than was being charged. Later on, further expansions were released for Oblivion that hit a much nicer price point and gave much more content, finally ending with a 2400 Microsoft Point expansion called ‘˜Shivering Isles’ that claimed to provide 30 hours of new content. The trouble was that the disc based version of the expansion cost less than the DLC, and included another pack, ‘˜Knights of the Nine’, with it. Again a sense of price compared to value occurred and people wondered why they were paying more for something that required no shelf space, no shipping, no retail profit and gave them less overall.

Spotted on RPGDot.