Last week,Zeldaproducer Eiji Aonuma revealed thatTears of the Kingdomwon’t be getting any DLC. This is slightly disappointing on its own, but also points to a larger trend: the era of games being supported with substantial DLC seems to be coming to an end.
That may seem dramatic, but let’s look at some of the evidence. By looking at how developers have handled expansions in the past, and how they’re currently handling them, I think we can draw some conclusions about where the industry is trending.
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The previous Zelda game,Breath of the Wild, got two expansion packs. This month’sCyberpunk 2077: Phantom Libertyis the first and only expansion that CD Projekt Red’s 2020 RPG is set to receive, as it moves on to making the sequel in a new engine. For comparison, CDPR’s previous open-world RPG,The Witcher 3, got two expansion packs.
If we want to understand why the industry’s approach to DLC has changed, these two games are a good case study. The Witcher 3 launched in May of 2015 and by the end of May 2016, both of its expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, had launched. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020 and its first expansion is hitting digital store shelves in September 2023, nearly three years later. That game had a troubled development and launch, but the lengthening of dev cycles is affecting the industry across the board.
The Last of Us Part 2, similarly, received no DLC, a change from its predecessor which was supplemented with the short, but great, Left Behind expansion. Naughty Dog instead opted to spin-off the multiplayer mode originally planned to release with the game into its own standalone release. Three years on from TLOU2’s release, that multiplayer game is nowhere to be seen. Naughty Dog has shownconcept art, but not a frame of gameplay. Some reports indicate thatthe game’s future may even be in question.
Cyberpunk and The Last of Us point to part of the problem that DLC has run into in gaming’s current era: games take forever to make now. While Naughty Dog followedUncharted 4up with Uncharted: The Lost Legacy the following year, the same kind of turnaround would likely take significantly longer now. It was much discussed when theAssassin’s Creedseries took two years off between Syndicate (2015) and Origins (2017), but the series has been on an even longer hiatus between Valhalla (2020) and Mirage (2023) without much fanfare (and that’s for a game that’s being marketed for how much shorter it is than previous entries).
We just expect this now. There are studios that still put out a game every year or two likeInsomniacandFromSoftware, but most take three to five years. Given that protracted cycle, it seems the time it takes to make a piece of DLC isn’t worth investing when single-player expansions typically don’t sell all that well. Players often quickly move onto the next thing, and unlike multiplayer games that receive frequent updates, the players aren’t already checking in every day.
It’s a bummer, because developers often say that they don’t really know how to make a game until they’re almost done making it. DLC has, historically, been a chance to flex the muscles they built while struggling to finish the base game. If DLC dies, those muscles will atrophy along with it.
