How DLC started - Horse Armour
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
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DLC, or downloadable content, began many many years ago on mobile phones, but the first major video game to tap into the DLC market, was the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, by Bethesda.
This is the moment the DLC torrent began, we can all point at and blame horse armour for the situation we're in now.
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I pirated that Dlc.
I wouldn't even pirate it, it doesn't add any real protection for the horse so why even bother? :D
Respect ✊
God bless you 🙏
I pirated the whole game with dlc's, bless Serbia!
Pure hearts above
Sounds like Bethesda really opened The Gates of Oblivion :D
Looool
gamers with deep pockets did open the gates
Bazinga
And now DLC is called microtransactions and NFT's to come
@@instabile1984 Exactly. Bethesda made the gates. We, the gamers, opened them.
I remember when "DLC" was literally about Game expansion.
it always should be
$20 got you the whole bundle.
Back then expansions were essentially whole sequels.
You have to know that the "C" stands for costume
I remember expansion packs lol. Not sequels, but they'd transform the base game. DLC grew out of those. Publishers get a lot of milage out of how easy it is to get people to pay for dumb bullshit when it's not on a disk. Would you drive all the way to the store, pick up a box, and bring that box to a cashier to let them know you're dumb enough to spend $5 on a cool outfit for your character in a game you won't even be playing in a month or 30 minutes of content? Hell no lmao
Bethesda accidentally discovered gold and all the other developers followed them like blood-sucking prospectors.
And the players ate it up like a bunch of morons.
If it wasn't for horse armor, it would have been another developer or asset sold to start this trend.
@Sypha Flowen this is happening in all walks of life. every industry does what it can to juice its main squeeze for all it's worth.
Bethesda learned that if you sell single assets cheaper than a can of Red Bull, player will eat that shit up
@@boitahaki yeah but its shiney and gold! MUST HAVE!
My sincerest apologies to all my friends and fellow gamers. I was the asshole who thought 'lol horse armor, I'll buy that' not knowing what evil I was helping to bring into the world.
You don't have to apologize to anyone for anything. People need to mind their own business when it comes to other people's spending, and you don't have to apologize for buying something you [thought you] wanted and valued at that time. It is what it is, and frankly both the game makers AND us gamers play a large part in the continued practices of microtransactions and DLC. This video paints them both in a very negatively biased and predatory light, when the fact is they can be anywhere between good and bad, and they often do satisfy those who purchase them. The real culprit in all of this is modern day society's addiction to capitalism, consumerism and entertainment; that's what drives all of this and unless that changes you better get used to overpriced content being constantly marketed to you, cuz it's just gonna get worse.
@@CouchCit It's a joke bro
sounds like war crimes to me. someone confiscate this man's computer.
but why tho
It was you? I want my hobby back. You broke gaming forever 😡
I remember when that armor dropped. I thought paying real money for an in game item was a ludicrous idea...
Didnt take us long to mod the item into the game, for free.
it still is
I still believe digital item cannot exceed the value of 25 cents.
I remember too. It made me instantly hate Bethesda for the obvious cash-grab to satisfy billionaire investors and I haven't given them a single cent of my money since.
Billionaires are already too rich.
@@LikaLaruku now we have NFTs lol
"With the discovery of DLC, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created"
Bethesda managed to make one of the best and worst DLC's in history. Imagine if Shivering Isles was the standard of DLC.
They still do. Every single game they make has a shit tier dlc and a god tier one.
@@SpadesPlaysIt ehhh I feel like their better DLCs are still not as sizable anymore as they used to be.
We need more DLC like The Witcher 3 had
@@jusey1 Skyrim itself is the shit tier
@@Q-gf8vb meh, for me the witcher 3 dlcs were not that impressive.
I'm sitting here more affected by the fact Oblivion was released 15 years ago.
Why? It looks ancient. Skyrim released over 9 years ago, that is the greater shock.
@@nervsouly Holy shit. It's almost a decade and the game is technically still 'good' in term of its openness.
@@hadison6838 yeah and with enough mods it doesn't even look much worse than modern games. Just the combat is clunky and the combat mods tend to not work that well or break the game.
@@hadison6838 well is still better then most of newly released rpg :D
@@pelda6749 I agree. Skyrim ages like fine wine.
Gacha and microtransactions existed in MMOs and lobby based multiplayer games well before Oblivion. They were Korean games but many had global/English versions. For example, MapleStory came out in like 2003
I knew immediately when Bethesda did this that "free to play" was on its way to Western games.
I still remember when Horse Armor came out, and it was mocked so heavily, and with how little public attention things like sales got, we had no idea it was actually working. Those of us in the gaming community thought it was a big fucking joke and that nobody would buy it, especially when modders just put Horse Armor ingame,.
The same happened with the Creation Club for Fallout and Skyrim. Everyone mocked the idea of "paid mods" but then a million people went out and bought it.
@@nidungr3496 that was actually brilliant, because there was an entire community of people who did not use mods because of how annoying it was to actually get them to work right with the game.
@@pogtuber5146 The scariest part is - it never was annoying or hard to make them work with your legal copy of game. its just what some uneducated people truly believe.
@@pogtuber5146 also, as far as we know - paid mods are wastly inferior to the mods that actually do change things significantly for free.
"Paid mods" are not even a "mods", it is just a retexture in the most cases. Sometimes a retexture with higher stats.
Per usual, gamers are their own worst enemy.
The 4 Horse armors of the Gaming apocalypse.
"What if we sell this game at our store?"
"What if the game WAS the store, and you paid for entry?"
And then Google play store: What if we was the country housing all the stores of all the game developers.
I never bought that dlc. It made no sense to me and I could get better stuff through modding. To this day I'm amazed that people actually bought it.
Indeed. What's the point of buying a skin when you can make a mod that looks the same (and possibly even adds actual protection for the horse)?
Part of the reason why it was successful is that consoles (where this first dropped) didn't really have mods.
Looking at how The Sims 4 community is willing to spend literal *hundreds* of dollars on a game that is still releasing DLC, I'm at a lost as well.
@@cryandruboneout7133 Honestly they don't even sell the game itself at any stores near me... just a whole shelf of $20 dlc with $0.50 worth of content
Sims is such a disgrace
@@cryandruboneout7133 its basic human psychology. some people are easier to trigger than others
Still remember being called an alarmists when so many kept saying "it's only cosmetic". You know it used to be fun working,exploring, and challenging yourself to unlock those cosmetics. They were replaced with only exp grind in game for fucking currency. Seriously we as gamers gave them an inch and they took a mile.
Fighting games used to have unlockable characters you'd get after beating the campaigns or story mode.
FPS games had weapons and character and weapons skins you'd get only if you ranked up or hit a certain level.
RPG games had you work for these things through exploration or doing certain quests
Now all of these things are paywalled behind microtransactions in many games.
F*ck Oblivion horse armor.
I miss when DLC just meant "Hey we made a new game in the engine that you liked"
DLC never meant that.
@@ViddyOJames Maybe he meant expansion packs, but yeah, DLC was never this good.
Iceborne and Sunbreak lmao
I remember the horse armour. I remember thinking how ridiculous the concept was, and how I hoped it would flop so that Bethesda don't start getting the idea that they can sell this kind of thing, because I knew where it would lead. And I was right, that's exactly where it led.
I too remember talking about this. I was sure people would not buy into that. I did not realize how stupid humans are.
I remember checking out of the gaming world around that time (final exams and whatnot) and coming back to a world of 3rd rate moba FPSs geared towards toddlers with criminal monetization models after I finished my studies. It was heartbreaking
I was part of the internet trying to get gamers to hold the line and to absolutely not entertain the idea of purchasing something like this. We argued it was a slippery slope and would open the floodgate. We were right. 😢
I guess it all started here and never got better after that. Thanks for making this video. Keep up the good work.
I agree that this was the point where it started with the microtransactions. But an important point to look at is also where microtransactions (aka: small amounts of money paid) with already a very bad value ratio turned into MACROtransactions, aka spending the price of a full game or expansion for a digital asset.
To me that turning point is on Blizzard / Activision with their 25 dollar WoW pony mount which made an absolute killing. It's gone downhill from there and now some people would even defend insane prices for skins like in Valorant.
Don't look up Sims 4 dlc.
The full game is thousands of dollars.
And I say full game because they legitimately chopped the game into pieces to the point it's nearly unplayable without it because there's nothing to do.
65 dollar Diablo 4 mount. Still Blizzard leading the charge. Odd how 2 years changed nothing but the inflated price.
I understand where you're coming from, Josh. However FIFA Ultimate team was the real game changer for microtransactions
Android Wilson. If you haven't seen it, I recommend watching -shill- >cough< I mean Skill Up's video on Fifa Ultimate, quite eye opening. ruclips.net/video/PTLFNlu2N_M/видео.html
Korean MMOs were doing microtransactions long before Oblivion was made. SEGA Dreamcast had DLC in the 90s.
Ah, sports games. Or how to release virtually the same product a second time (or possibly a third or fourth time) every subsequent year.
Yeah, the decision to introduce a trading card game to a sports game, and to link the purchase of card packs to in game currency that you had to buy using real money was a game changer. What is even worse is that every year you essentially throw your entire collection in the bin when the next game comes out.
I remember clearly turning to my friend 15 years ago and saying "People better not actually support that by buying it."
Go into how Metallica ruined music in gaming and all other forms of media by being the first to DMCA that hard and how Twitch recently had to play music over one of their concerts being officially Streamed
I remember a decade ago playing Oblivion: High Seas edition on my crappy dual-core laptop and loving every minute of the 20fps experience. Then one day I saw that Oblivion and ALL of its DLC and expansions were on Steam sale for a combined total of $7.50. Waiting for a game to go on sale never felt so good.
I'm so stupid lmfao I googled "Oblivion: High Seas edition" and then immediately realized what you actually meant was that you pirated it haha
I'm sure you have been told this already, but if not, let me correct you: In Morrowind, you can become the head of both the Fighter's and Thieves guilds. It's because the former has two ways of doing this. You can work with the current, corrupt head who hates the TG, or work with the ex-head who works with the TG. The former is the reason for the Bittercup quest, since it bribes the head of the Balmora FG who is one of the current leader's main lackeys. I was able to become the head of both in my playthrough last year, so I have done it myself.
Then came the next slice of hell known as on disk dlc.
My first encounter with this practice was when I played Total War games. Empire Total War came in I guess about 2005 and was the first of the series on Steam. It came with some micro transactions that were clearly just ripped from the game. this kinda put me off buying more Total War games and I moved on to other things. Sadly a few years later I foolishly started playing mmorpgs and fell into a micro transaction hell that only got worse as most games turned into FREE2play whale farms. In this age when the top 10% avoid tax with the bottom 10 scrounge I can only see it getting much worse. Merry Christmas everyone;)
it came out in 2009, 2005 was still a safe haven from DLCs
Josh might have a stroke if he looks into it.
@@resee9856 Yeah was a bit later than I thought.
Ultimately, it created a market within a market.
It's more amazing to find that people actually end up buying those things... And yes, I'm still shocked that people go ahead and buy such low content nonsense.
And that's why it works - people actually want it.
So, why invest all your effort into making the best game, when you can just make the best optional content?
Instead of buying a useless horsearmor, you buy an extremely rare skin you can only find on a full blood moon when the skies rain fish and looks good (although no one will call it useless this time).
They ended up adding more imaginary value to useless content, and even expended on that.
And the market proved itself highly profitable... It's still an ongoing "success", and in some games, having specific skins meant a certain social status or financial status.
Kinda shocking how in multiplayer games this translate between people, especially the young.
But, I think the horse armor itself isn't really the problem here... After all., it is just a useless cosmetic.
The real concern is human psychology.
Nexon and NcSoft were selling micro transactions before Oblivion was in development
8:03
And Softnyx
You see how people say "Oh, but it's just cosmetics, lootboxes are not that bad"?
Show them this video and slap them, the slippery slope has gone on far too long.
@@10cody7 I agree with that, but problem is, once you accept something companies will always try to push for more, that's how we went from expansion packs to predatory microtransactions, we merely slowly accepted them.
Also there's people buying ships in Star Citizen for millions of dollars, so yeah, not really the devs fault if people are willing to throw money at them like that lol.
the other day i was talking about how businesses use "slippery slope" tactics where they slowly introduce concepts over time... someone told me"slippery slope is a fallacy".
i think that's the hardest i've facepalmed
@@10cody7 depends.. on multiplayer games cosmetics also devalue existing in game cosmetics.
@@AnDr3w066 how so?
@@10cody7 i will give WoW as an example. Why farm for mounts? When you can simply buy a better looking and better made mount. It takes away from the ingame achievement of getting those types of mounts because players would identify that and know where it is from.
When anyone and everyone can buy a cool looking mount then nobody stands out. No mount stands out.
Not only that but the resources for future ingame mounts will be less than the store mounts. Since more resources will be allocated to designing the store ones than the drop mounts.
Morrowind PC version had a few similar "official plugins" by Bethesda too, but they weren't paid content. Once distribution got easier, especially across consoles, I guess that just had to change.
It's because of consoles. Both DLCs and dumbification.
Horse armor was the point at which everyone started paying attention, but cheaply-made dlc was probably inevitable. That being said, there's plenty of games being released without cosmetic/convenience dlc, even some AAA games. Players as a whole aren't too enthusiastic about getting nickle and dimed, and game development doesn't have high barriers to entry, so I think complete experiences will continue to be sold for a base price for as long as there are people who demanded them. Vote with your wallets!
Yeah I agree with you. It would happen eventually. Much like every commodity, somebody is gonna want to make it cheap.
People vote with their wallets alright... just no in the way you think they do LMAO
The way I always understood horse armor was that it was meant to be a test. Xbox Live used to have file size restrictions on the content developers could put up there, so that combined with DLC being something "new", Bethesda didn't want to put too much effort into something that wouldn't wind up selling.
I swear I have heard the story told like that in the past, but maybe I've just combined a mish mash of information together and made my own story up.
The myth of the horse armour.
We may never know what was going on inside the heads of the people around the meeting where horse armour was aporoved.
RANDOM, i know, but:
RUclips really has a Nudity Problem.
Mind to search it up real quick
and do some flagging?
Every bit helps; literally.
@@slevinchannel7589 frankly i dont care or see why it matters and it isn't worth my time. sorry.
@@slevinchannel7589 nudity problem? Never noticed it
@@YourLocalGamerFan It hides behind Clothes; lol.
Ok, ok, jokes aside though: Yes, its kinda a problem. We have literal P0rn on RUclips, but the Report-Option exists, soooo... Why not act?
i always warn my friends that gambling is a gateway to microtransactions
I loved Oblivion when it came out and played it alot. I think it was even one of the last AAA games that I bought instead of "obtaining it without paying for it". But when they released the Horse Armour DLC I thought "What the fuck is this and why shall I pay money for something that I could make in a mod in an hour." and till today I am very proud of that thought.
The problem is that everyone knows that this stuff is crap that leads to more crap and most people knew it even 15 years ago but the same people knowing the problem, knowing the solution ignore the solution and sometimes this really makes me mad.
Everyone who buys cosmetics, who buys booster, who buys lootboxes, who buys ingame currency: Stop fucking complain about it. You loose EVERY right to complain about such stuff when you actively support it. Grow yourself some balls and act according to the things you want to see happening in the future.
And that is why I dont buy any AAA titles for years now. There are Indie Developer out there that I support that are not this fuckin greedy. That release finished games. That dont have ingame stores and they deserve that you pay money for their game not some company where you get the game for free but to actually play it pay thousends of dollars.
Damn even Riot Games where everyone says that they are the shining example for a freemium game company because you can play the game competitive without the risk of being overrun by some whale. But if you add up what the whole experience of the game with all the champions even without all of their skins cost you end up with a few thousand bucks. It is insane that people think this is great. So far have these companies already come with brainwashing consumers.
This is why i respect the guys who made god of war 2018 so much. They believe in give you a finished product, never to add dlc
There was a plan for DLC to God of War (2018) but it was scrapped because the scope off it was too big (size of a full game)
Ah yes the game that heralded the greatest DLC of all time, then produced the worst.
Ahh the prototype for today's greed based mediocrity, where corporate profits consume the need for timeless content.
Fast forward to today where we're thankful a skin in a free to play game is "only" 7 bucks rather than the usual 12 bucks.
I think every hardcore TES fan scoffed at 100 hours of content in Oblivion
Without mods it's about 100 hours.
@@Kynareth6 maybe if you power through it lol
I didn’t even beat the game and I spent well over 100 hours
@@CrimsonTear1996 It totally depends on how you play it. Focusing on the main story took maybe four days of 5-9 hour sessions to beat it.
@@kyleoates6367 well yeah but he’s talking about all of the content not just the main story and faction quests. Doing literally everything in the game is gonna take more than 100 hours.
@@CrimsonTear1996 He said a casual playthrough, not an OCD completionist playthrough
Horse armor being the intro to dlc is actually a common misconception. The first common one was actually maps in Halo 2
Those would be considered expansions as they added new gameplay.
Horse armor did nothing. Didnt even look good.
@@ryanberman5314 maps do not add gameplay and they are not an expansion. That be like saying dlc that added a town and a couple of quests in an rpg is equivalent to an expansion. It's not. Maps in an fps are dlc
Maps do add gameplay when the entire game is small maps.
Idk if you know this, but that's all halo 2 multiplayer was. Small maps.
@@ryanberman5314 maps aren't gameplay. Maps are maps. Gameplay is the shooting, movement etc two totally different things. Also misses the point maps are still relatively small pieces of content that you pay for. Otherwise known as dlc
Halo 2 is also a misconception.
The first game to have DLC was Total Annihilation from 1997.
Old School Runescape, sells monthly subscriptions for membership.
However free 2 play has a ton of content. I played it all through elementary and highschool, until I got a credit card and could buy membership.
Wish I could say RS3, didn't have MTX. I don't play it for that reason and many others.
Do try it out as ironman then
your summary of an "expansion" is spot on, my dude.
I'm ashamed to admit I actually bought this. I was like 15 at the time and used my mom's credit card. Literally all the memes are true. I do remember as well the download and install process was super unintuitive, at least at the time, to me.
8:41 As a Pokemon fan in the modern era, this sentence hit too close to home. I'm glad I didn't buy sw/sh or pokemon home. Absolute scams right there.
If only players just withheld their wallets and didn't buy it at all.
that's the part i don't understand, pay 60$ for a game they expect you to realistically play for couple of hours a week for a week and then spend at least that much on hats/boots/skins/guns what have you. and then do that at least each and every week so uncle Bobby can get his fat bonus
It gets even crazier. For April 1st that year, they doubled the price of the horse armour... and sales shot up even more for that day. A fool and their money, etc...
(source: Pete Hines told the story at a keynote at PAX Aus several years ago: ruclips.net/video/MCYICHizwao/видео.html )
And this is why I’ll never praise Bethesda and have zero faith in players. “I know it’s dumb, and useless but imma buy it! What could go wrong?” 🤨😒🤦🏿♂️nice job players you literally got us kicked out of the gaming garden of Eden because of your foolishness and greed and now our childrens children will forever suffer. Bravo. 😑
This was an MS\Sony move, not an Bethesda move. Bethesda originally had all intents to release horse-armor for free ( same they did with Morrowind, it was an example for the construction kit ), but were denied by MS\Sony and told they had to charge for it, or not release it. Essentially.
Wanna blame someone, blame MS\Sony. The price was also set by MS\Sony, not Bethesda ( they tried to counter-offer with lower prices, but they wouldn't budge, it had to be no less than $2.5 ).
2:26 - None of that is true. Morrowind's original design and what was being worked on, was an even bigger\better Daggerfall. More hand-crafted, and less procedural generation ( but about the same size as Daggerfall, just as many cities, etc ). What caused them to rescale back to what we got, wasn't an desire to do less is more, but from them legit going practically bankrupt in 1998-1999 ( which is why they founded Zenimax and bought out Bethesda Softworks, to help give a last-ditch effort to stay of bankrupcy, which worked ).
Also, majority of the talent behind Arena and Daggerfall, lost their jobs inbetween Daggerfall and Morrowind for this exact reason ( which is what let Todd Howard take the helm for Morrowind, and downscale it ).
3:35 - Expansions have always been VERY lose on what it is. The only thing that's unified, is that it expands on the game. For every Ultima 7: Serpent Isle ( new story\world and mechanical changes ), there is an Baldurs Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast ( a couple new dungeons, some mechanical changes to stealth, QoL features, and higher exp cap ).
5:59 - Also incorrect, completely. Morrowind had a set of free-"dlc ( official mods )" released with the creation-kit to give players an example of how to do things in it. They did ( or rather wanted to ) the same for Oblivion, and so you got a lot of different housing mods + horse armor, to showcase examples of how to do these things. However Microsoft and Sony said that Bethesda has to compensate for the downloads. So the choice left to Bethesda became: 1: Do not release it ( wasted development ), 2: Release it for free and take a potentional huge-loss ( why would they, they're a buisness ), or 3: Release it for a minor charge ( that Sony\Ms were happy with ). Bethesda went with option 3.
However, Knights of the Nine ( the quest, not the collection ) was an actual planned "DLC", and not planned for "free content".
Also you say it did nothing, this is actually incorrect, the horse armor gave a minor health-buff ( which is useless and not how armor works, but yeah ).
7:00 - This is the true reason for DLC increase no question. However do note that Bethesda learned not to do it again because of the bad press. All other DLCs have been the size of Knights of the Nine, or bigger. As it recieved very little backlash ( since we had all the other shit to complain about ).
7:18 - Knights of the Nine was NOT an expansion sized content. It was a single quest-chain. In term of amount of content, it's about the size of a single faction. That's not "Expansion\game" size, that's DLC size. Dawnguard for Oblivion has more content, than Knigths of the Nine did. Unless we count the Knights of the Nine collection ( not the quest DLC ), in which case, horse-armor is included in that, which is what pushes it up a bit ( 4 or 5 houses + 1 faction quest + horse armor, is basically the collection iirc ).
if Bethesda hadnt done it someone else would.
It was just the first that got out of hand. It was inevitable that dlc went into this direction.
Simply human nature
15 years ago we were outraged that microtransactions were cosmetic only, my how times have changed.
I'm still outraged by cosmetic ones, but I am 30 now, which is official old enough for me to complain about the latest generation not knowing what gaming without Microtransactions was like.
The origins of MTX.
On a side note, Morrowind's graphics remind me of RuneScape; I love it.
The moment we tolerate the behavior of buying skin is acceptable, that's where we went wrong, maybe we deserve what we tolerated
I miss expansion packs...
Yeah, 2000s era expansions were awesome.
I miss early and mid 00s...
I'm seriously not blaming the company for that, I'm blaming the people who buy them.
Same goes with everything in life... I don't blame people who is making money from Only Fan, I'm blaming people who waste their money and basically completely screw the economy.
I love Oblivion (especially with the OOO mod) but I never touched the horse armour and I regret the day they made it...
While Bethesda might have sped up the process a bit, I think DLC like horse armour was kind of inevitable. The only thing that stopped companies from releasing these minor expansions was the distribution efforts, but even then some companies had come quite close to horse armour in the past, and sold it in retail stores. I'm thinking of things like the Mech packs for MechWarrior or the Speech Packs for games like Ultima 8. The leap from that to horse armour is not far.
DLC (as well as video games today) is a good case of "caveat emptor" (buyer beware). No one forces you to buy such things; you have to be careful with what you buy and not to buy things impulsively. Companies simply realized they can churn crap out and people will buy it anyway; all companies have to do is rely on a brand and follow trends.
Let me tell of the first time I encountered paid DLC, even though it wasn't know as such then. A year or so before horse armor, towards the end of the developer-supported life for Neverwinter Nights ca 2003-2004, the publisher introduced the concept of "Premium modules" to a game which previously had free user created adventures. It essentially allowed mod creators to become fledgling developers through a publishing contract but met a lot of backlash because not everyone had a credit card to buy the modules with. The modules were downloadable only, and you had to login to an authentication server to play them. Only 6 modules ever ended up being published, with most others being cancelled. Publishing deals had gone out to two of the major mod developments (modern equivalents would be something like Skywind) at the time, City of Doors (remake of Planescape Torment) and DragonLance (DLAdventures) so fans who had been waiting for these modules and expected them to be free, like all the other user created stuff, got really pissed. Fans also got angry that publishing deals were extended to module creators that had already released two episodes in a trilogy and that the finale would cost them money. The same problem would rear its head over 12 years later in Skyrim with the paid mods debacle. I remember a debate within the module reviewer's guild whether or not premium modules should be held to a greater standard than normal. I think the premium module store died fairly quickly, it didn't make enough money, and Obsidian's Neverwinter nights 2 was quickly approaching, with the publisher wanting to focus on that. Bioware essentially abandoned the dungeons and dragons setting afterwards, creating Kotor, Jade Empire and eventually Mass Effect.
@N Fels I used to muck around with the toolset back then and the time it took to create quality modules was quite significant. Module developers back then had to make do without Patreon, which would have been the best solution for the problem. Darkness over Daggerford was supposed to be a premium module but was eventually released free due to the collapse of the program. It was expansion-sized, fantastic and absolutely worth paying for.
the guy who was not a fan of bathesda at that time i got in when skyrim came after that i played every elder scrolls title after seeing that horse i said glad i played gothic at that time
I remember this, at the time I knew it was the future but could never guess how bad it would become.
I remember the days of Halo 2 online - the DLC map packs we're a *limited time* purchase, meaning you could pay money to access them early, but they'd be free for everyone a few months after they released. And they advertised this too.
Morrowind had a few small free dlcs. They were called plugins
Huh, never heard of them even from some superfans of Morrowind.
@@JohnSmith-ox3gy they didn't have much promotion. And some of them were smaller than the horse armor dlc. You can look for official Morrowind plugins. The master propylon is especially useful for vampires.
If not horse-armor at that moment, it would have been something else at another moment. Horse-armor deserves no credit and no blame, but rather is merely the demonstration of the inevitable. The blame falls on how consumers are willing to spend their money.
There may be a hole in the market for a game which is willing to sacrifice DLC-profits in exchange for the market-share that can be won by striving to produce the very best content without leveraging DLC. It won't be easy to compete without leveraging DLC, but it will dodge direct competition in a way that can establish an advantage which can then be leveraged.
Does such a hole actually exist in the market? That is up to consumers. The blame falls on the consumers, and on them alone.
100%. Horse armor was charged for, because MS pushed for it to be charged for. MS was aggressivly going all-in on it's new DLC market, and was not going to let up. If not Bethesda ( MS had invested in Oblivion and was a publisher for it, iirc, if not publisher, then a joint-publishing deal ), then any of the numerous others would've been first.
You are incorrect in that it did nothing, it doubled the HP of most horses up to a maximum of 750hp.
I was thinking about this the other day - amazing to think how design changed following it. It was so jarring because incredible quality free mods were being made for years (decades now) in Morrowind. This was such a great video to remember that weird peroid of time - thank you! :D
Consoles have pretty much always been more accessible than PCs that can run games well. Consoles don't have mods, have limited "sanctioned" mods, or require much more work to get mods working properly. Something the console playerbase is unlikely to be looking to do. That's why DLC like this was successful. Mods weren't even part of the equation for tons of players.
I certainly agree that horse armour is as important to the degradation of the quality of real money transactions in games and starting the DLC trend as you say, I believe that EA releasing sims content was another huge eye opener for investors. Sims 3 had a few people questioning why they were paying for expansions with content that should have been there from the start but sims 4 was blatantly released with barebones functionality due to them knowing people EXPECT to pay for expansions by that point. It was no longer extra content, it was customers waiting years for the updated version of their favourite content from the previous game to be added, only to be disappointed by the lack of depth (not to mention all the varying new sizes and prices of downloadable content besides the actual expansions they kept coming up with).
Funny thing is that oblivion already had a massive modding community that included all kind of stuff/assets in the game for free...
Funny thing is Oblivion also released on console
If you had a PC. Alot of us had consoles growing up and couldn't get a PC until we had a job of our own.
@@ryanberman5314 I was in luck because my father needed a desktop PC, so I was able to sneak in some games. Only console I ever had was an Atari 800 and later SNES
The real funny thing is: Bethesda designed and planned the DLCs for free. It was never going to be charged for. But MS\Sony put pressure on them to release it for money ( either they didn't release, or they charged for it, no in-between ).
Originally, horse armor etc were examples for use by modders to see how to make mods in the creation-kit. Same thing they did for Morrowind.
In The near future you have to buy worth 100€ of food for your character every month or he dies and you have to start over. After that you buy horsearmor.
I am young enough to remember buying expansion packs that were actual additions to the game, but also young enough to see the gradual shift towards the dlc model. Even today, in my 20’s i really dislike the dlc model, as a result I only buy them when they are heavily on sale or in a reasonable bundle reminiscent of the old expansions. I never truly understood why people bought horse armor, and I’m not sure I ever will. I’ve literally never even used horses in oblivion or skyrim, the benefit was not worth it to me, so to hear that enough people bought it that it changed the gaming world is insane.
I wait to buy the complete editions when they're on sale. Hell, I even bough skyrim SE and fallout 4 GOTY with argentinian currency during the time steam didn't addressed users changing the region of the store with VPNs, it cost me like 3 bucks each iirc during a steam sale.
And I'm not buying the AE upgrade, unless mods start to require it, which I hope it never happens.
Wikipediasays DLC started on the SEGA Dreamcast in the 90s, & Korean MMOs used microtrasactions in the early 2000s before Oblivion came out.
""if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror."
Though I've never spent money on cosmetic items including horse armor (unless u count game of the year) cause I knew I could get it better with mods...
Bethesda didn't ruin the landscape of gaming because they still offered full, good albeit buggy games with little stuff to make a ton of money off people. It is people that abuse this model by actually selling you half a game for 60 dollars then selling you the other half for 100+ dollars. It made sense that horse armor sold...it was cheap and kids had it on xbox. I know I had horse armor. It was a why not purchase. I would say much more so MMOs like Mabinogi is the first example I remember of a semi mainstream gacha style mechanic. It is this random you might get something amazing and it only costs a dollar kind of model that became popular with mobile games but really stems more from gambling/vending machines that can ruin games.
Companies aren't black and white. They can make good games and still have shitty monetization tactics. It is not an argument for why they didn't ruin the landscape of gaming.
I'm selling bags of air, why not buy it?
Some say its one of the 4 horses of the gaming apocalypse...
That sums really well how we end up.
Oblivion feels like a half finished Skyrim, if it released today it wouldn't really impress anyone, but at the time it was one of the first titles on the Xbox 360 and the graphics were groundbreaking, especially the grass. Coming from games like morrowind and Guild Wars 1 the realization of a huge fully 3D first person game world in Oblivion was awesome.
"And players bought it." This. Whenever someone tells me "gamers don't want DLC, season passes, loot boxes, etc" I always point back to this. If gamers didn't want it, they wouldn't be buying it. And we know they're buying it, because they sell like crazy. If gamers truly want to stop these kinds of practices, they need to vote with their wallets, but gamers consistently have been the worst at doing this. FOMO is strong with this community.
People are too wealthy.
And it's why I don't buy AAA games anymore. Gone are the days of developers making passion projects, now it's just investors milking players.
I won't lie, I bought horse armor. My Oblivion horse looked dope as fuck. #noregrets
Wynncraft is a thing you should try.
I had Oblivion on my Xbox 360 a bit after release. Played hundreds of hours of it + expansions. I remember everyone trashing on the horse armour. I thought then (and still think now) that as a standalone incident, it wasn't a big deal. Why would you care if a single player game offered you some cosmetic only items (for your horse) for $2.50?
Yes, people like to attribute it to the start of awful paid MTX. But again (in my opinion) it wasn't even that bad, even then. Korean MMOs had already started worse MTX. Also, if it matters to you, no, I never bought the horse armour.
Nobody ever did, but somehow everybody did. Not sure. Maybe a conspiracy? Maybe they said people bought tons of it to normalize mtx?
I remember thinking microtransactions would actually be *micro*. Imagine my surprise when games are selling reskinned characters for $15 a pop AND PEOPLE ARE BUYING THIS SHIT.
Bring back expansions, fuck "microtransactions" (or make them actually micro?)
Technically horse armour increases your horse’s health. Still worse than just using Shadowmere though.
"They bought it in droves. It went on to become the 9th best selling Oblivion DLC."
But there's only 10 DLCs for Oblivion. That makes it the 2nd worst...
I was watching this and a thought crawled into my mind
You're a much less polarizing TotalBiscuit
I then realized that I've subconciously remembered TB's video slamming horse armor and he had always used more "controversial" words
"Was it ?!" Yes, but if it hadn't been horse armor, it would've been gun skins, or armor skins or whatever else before too long. As you pointed out, the mobile market was already selling tiny bits of content for hundreds of times what they were worth. PC games and console games were going to follow suit, it was just a matter of time.
7:10 - Fucking hell, I literally remember my buddy buying it. I was like "Dude, do not support shit like this." and him "So what? I like it, I have the money. I'm not harming any of you." Look at the gaming industry now...
Now people complain about Starfield having 1000 planets as too much. You cannot please gamers. If I was Todd Howard I would ignore the communities opinions.
I remember when the horse armor DLC was released and it was universally ridiculed. But I guess it was cheap enough that people bought it for the novelty. Bethesda used to be the best gaming company in the world (along with Blizzard) and were universally beloved by the community. Now they, along with all major studios, are hated. Of course gaming companies don't care. Good games don't make the most money, exploitative games do.
7:10 This may sound impressive, but it really means that, if we're counting Shivering Isles as a DLC, only one DLC sold even worse than it did.
And that's when games started down hill into the crappiness of today. Sigh.
I desperately want a fantasy MMO that is NOT DLC based.
Actually the first downloadable content on Xbox was the Halo 2 map pack but not too many of us are old enough to remember that except for the few of us that remain.
I have no idea if this video was pop-culture clickbait or whatever but at least on the Wikipedia page you Googled for this video it didn't enunciate the Halo 2 map pack which came out like a good six years before the Oblivion DLC
I warned everybody. I said exactly this would happen. They did not listen. Now I no longer warn people of the obvious, because they do not deserve it. Ya'll sacrificed the entire games industry to profit because you were too daft to know what you were doing. No skin off my nose, I'm a pirate.
That's why i always say companies can be blamed for shitting out DLC and micro-transactions all day but the buying players are responsible for that development
Horse armour ruined games but at the same time if it wasn't horse armour it would of happened eventually in a different way. Cough cough Korean free to play MMOS.
Yep, That definitely lead the industry down a dark path. :(
That's why practices like this should be absurdly regulated, or even illegal, worldwide.
I'm very late to comment on this, but I genuinely loathe how nowadays video games are expected to be released unfinished and DLC are always expected and more of the game is based on the DLC :/
I never got the horse armor, and I hated the DLC-idea from the get go. Morrowind got free update stuff, but that ended with Oblivion. And now... well, now we are where we are. 😞
You mean when video games went _back_ to a production model to make continuous money. Arcade games were difficult yet fun enough to keep us pumping our quarters in them to play them. Imagine having to pay a small fee every time you wanted to play or continue playing a game.
It would've been found by someone else eventually anyway. It's too simple of an idea not to try anyway.
The only way to fix this would be for people to stop bying it.