Post-release releases

If that title doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry. It will by the end.

Hopefully.

Over the past ten years in video games, a new idea for how games are developed and distributed has not only surfaced, but become highly prevalent. This concept is DLC, or downloadable content. If you don't know what that means, in short, developers of games can release more content for the game after it has already been released to the public. DLC can either be free or released at a price - usually small, though it depends on the content.

Many people, including myself, find much of DLC to not only be frustrating, but reprehensible. The vast majority of DLC is over priced, and is content that in the past would have been packaged in with the original release but hidden behind play walls rather than pay walls. Just by playing the game, additional costumes, modes, and stages would have been unlocked, where as with DLC as it is, even just a simple cosmetic change can cost you up to two dollars. And perhaps that doesn't sound like much, but consider that you've already paid up to sixty dollars for the game itself, and in some games there can be upwards of one hundred pieces of DLC costumes and stages, meaning that if you wanted access to the entire content of the game that has been released, it would cost you upwards of two hundred dollars more.

But DLC isn't always bad. At times, it can add hours of content that expand the world in the game and help explain reasons behind character's actions that previously made little to no sense, for five dollars or less. Sometimes even for free. It's hard to argue against cases like these. Such content isn't easy to get out, and especially not on strict time limits that most games are on, and having the extra time after the main game is out can mean that it will be fine tuned beyond even that of the main game.

Similar concepts have existed in home DVDs for much longer. Special edition releases that add extra content, like behind the scene footage or cut dialogue and scenes. In a way there's not much difference, other than the fact that a base DVD is about fifty dollars less than a base video game.

And recently, I wondered if this could apply to books as well. If an author could release a prologue or side story attachment to a novel they had already released. Not a full sequel or prequel - just a little something extra. Some series have things like this - Harry Potter has a couple of small books that give compact details on the creatures that exist in its magical world. But that's not quite the same as an additional, say, ten pages that give a little more idea about the world and lives of the characters after the story is already over.

Would this only be possible for digital releases? Or could it be something that is available as its own download on an author's website? Should it be free or paid for? Does it depend on how long the extra release is?

I suppose in a way most of these decisions are up to the developers and publishers, as is the case with video game developers and publishers. And I'm not sure that it is a thing that would ever work. But it's interesting to think about.