With more gaming publishers turning to the sale of downloadable content to battle sales of used games through third parties, a large portion of the gaming population is still hesitant to try DLC packs for games.
With a barrage of downloadable content in the form of new characters, weapon add-on packs and even entire mission packs being released for games on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, 49 percent of gamers in 2011 shunned this form of content according to a study conducted by EEDAR. The most common reason for leaving digital content untouched is directed at privacy concerns. Forty-seven percent of that group named privacy as the main roadblock in a purchase decision of downloadable content. While the PlayStation Network network breach of private consumer data wasn’t directly attributed to choosing privacy as a concern, the general consensus was that users weren’t comfortable with providing personal and credit card information over a gaming console or PC.
Other reasons for dismissing downloadable content included the lack of a return policy in case the quality of the content was poor and the amount of money required for DLC is generally too expensive. Twenty-four percent of the group pointed to the lack of more free downloadable content as well as the absence of a demo to try out the DLC. Over a fifth of the group needs reviews of the content to make a purchase decision and others attributed the lack of a purchase to poor descriptions of the DLC as well as a lack of gameplay included in the DLC. Other people in the survey usually turned down a DLC pack due to the lack of multiplayer or the lack of single player modes in the content.
Directing complaints to the various storefronts that sell the downloadable content, users blamed their frustrations with DLC on a complicated process to make a purchase and the amount of time required to download the content. The final complaints included a lack of quality in most DLC packs and poor timing on releasing the DLC.
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