Compiled Thoughts on Why the Drip-Feed Doesn't Work In MEA

I wanted to make a thread collecting thoughts on the drip-feeding model vs the pack model for releasing content. It's probably too late to change anything for MEA, but hopefully we can have an orderly discussion and collect the pros and cons in a focused thread rather than having it come up as a side issue in random threads.

As an initial matter, the primary argument for drip-fed content I've seen is that DLC packs fragment the playerbase because not everyone downloads them. The answer to that problem is pretty clean: issue a compatibility patch and require its download before going online. That solves the problem completely (no idea why they didn't do that for ME3 - maybe someone has some insight on that).

Below are the mai reasons in my view why drip-feeding didn't work in MEA:


*It fails to incentivize people to buy packs. Starting right off the bat with the elephant in the room. It's no secret that the reason BW releases MP content (for free) is to keep people playing and buying packs. That worked exceptionally well in ME3 because when they released DLC packs, they would contain enough content that a little cash had a high likelihood of unlocking something new. That got me spending cash regularly each time a new pack dropped. By contrast, releasing one kit at a time makes it unlikely the player will unlock the new content when it drops with cash, making it unlikely they will ever take plunge or start playing again - especially when that new content is UR.

It's well settled at this point that the certainty of a result had a larger effect on behavior than it should. For example, the perceived likelihood of getting caught and punished has a larger effect on criminal deterrence than it should compared to the magnitude of the punishment. For example, if you convince a would-be criminal is he is five times more likely to be caught and punished for shanking someone, he's less likely to do it than he would if you simply increasing the penalty from five years to twenty five in prison, all else equal. The drip-feed model works the opposite of this effect (incentivizing people to buy packs) even if it were mathematically equivalent.

*Drip feeding forces players to focus on content they might not like instead of selecting content they like from a pool. Games offer choices because people have preferences that don't always align. Seems uncontroversial. When you release content in a pack, it allows the player to pick out the stuff he likes and ignore the stuff he doesn't like for a good long while. The result is the player is more likely to view the content as good. In a drip-fed model though, the content releases cause the player to focus on individual pieces of content at a time, which the player may not like, which increases the likelihood that the player deems the content releases to be unsatisfactory. Again, this is true even if the content releases are mathematically equivalent over the entire period because of the way human attention works.

*Drip-feeding causes concern if the content releases aren't outpacing an earlier entry in the series. Again, even if the content releases are equivalent over the period, releasing them slowly over time instead of in packs as in a previous entry in the series suggests to the player, whether rightly or not, that the content provider is trying to avoid a direct comparison to the previous entry. This is especially problematic because players generally expect sequels to outpace previous entries.