Yes, that Batman season pass IS bullshit

A pet peeve of mine with a certain sub-group of gamers and a small number of my friends and acquaintances is their long-standing habit of railing against some industry practice or another for years on end, only to turn around and have no problem with it the moment it gets employed by a developer or franchise they're a fan of. The latest instance of this has been the coverage of Arkham Knight's $40 season pass, as I watch people typically quick to anger over Day 1 DLC and "overpriced" add-on content have no comment other than how excited they are for the DLC, or conspiracy claims that WB Games only got ripped a new one in the press because they forgot their payoffs this time. All these fans are quick to claim hypocrisy on the part of any press outlet that dare besmirch the good name of WB Games, oddly ignorant of their own newly minted hypocrite status. And frankly, it's a silly thing to get so defensive about, gamers, because the Arkham Knight season pass is in fact 100% bullshit.

I want to mention that there are two friends of mine that I know are on the opposite side of this argument from me. I know you'll know I mean you, and I don't intend to throw out your names and start some dumb Internet fight. This isn't a longer version of a subtweet, just that I didn't get this done until after you'd said your piece. Probably a weird disclaimer, but this is my blog, not a real publication, so I can do that. Anyway. After the jump, I'll talk about season passes in general, and then more specifically the Batman issue. I'm sorry this is so long and ranty - it was LONGER, I cut some stuff to try and help, ha ha. But please, read on, and feel free to respond in the comments.

There are, to me, good and bad things about season passes, but overall? They're mostly a dumb thing to buy. It's just pre-ordering a game's DLC, often at the same time as you purchase the game, before you even get to play the game and see if you'll want more of it. Besides that, we often have no idea, or only a vague idea, of what the eventual DLC will even be, outside of the broadly obvious "more of the game." There does tend to be a discount aspect, true, usually amounting to getting one package free with the pass rather than paying full price for each item individually. For example, 2011's Mortal Kombat reboot offered a $15 season pass for its 4 downloadable characters, while each character individually cost $5. Borderlands 2 had a $30 season pass, including 4 expansions and a level cap increase pack totaling $45.

Now, I personally purchased both of those, I'll admit that. Even without knowing who they would be, I knew I would purchase more characters for Mortal Kombat, so why not save $5 on it? And with Borderlands 2, well, I didn't really get into Borderlands until shortly before the sequel was released, picking up a copy of the first game's GOTY edition on sale for $20. After tearing through every bit of content for the original twice solo and twice more with 3 other players, I knew that Borderlands 2 was definitely going to be a good game for me, and I had every reason to have faith in their expansion offerings. And in situations like that, I obviously understand why someone would grab the season pass.

Thing is though, if you're not in that boat, where you know you'll spend the money anyway, then there is no reason not to wait. Take your game home, play it, see if you end up wanting more of it, see what the DLC even ends up being. You can get the pass at literally any time. Hell, wait until all the DLC is released and see how it turns out if you want! Even after all the content is released, you can typically still purchase the season pass and get the discount if you want every single item, and if you only want one or two, you can save more money getting them individually. If you're extra bargain-oriented, wait entirely for the GOTY or Complete edition of the game.

Complete editions, of course, are another common gaming argument tied to season passes. You'll see people complain about how they paid $80+ to get the $60 game at launch and the $20+ season pass, and now these other people, these "lesser fans," get it all for $50 and the "true fans who really support the game" get shafted because they had to pay more to get "the REAL full game." The people who make those complaints are wrong. First, "complete edition" is (usually) a poor branding term. Regardless of how many missions or characters or stories were added, titles like Borderlands, Mortal Kombat, or Skyrim were not incomplete without their DLCs. Whatever other faults they may have, there is no way to honestly claim they are not complete experiences. Second, when it comes to complaining about the price, well, I've quoted Critical Miss before and I'll do it again: "Whenever you buy a product at launch you're paying a premium for early access. Those who wait are trading time with the product for potential cash savings. If any early adopters out there are somehow offended by the fact they're being consistently put out of pocket by those dastardly market forces, the solution is simple, STOP BEING AN EARLY ADOPTER." While they were discussing the fan outrage over the 3DS's early life cycle price drop, I feel the same statement is valid for games and their downloadable add-ons.

When you talk about the completeness of a game, though, there is another argument levied quite often against season passes, and that is the idea that content was either already present in the game and gated off for players to have to pay extra, or that content was purposely held back in order to make it extra DLC. Instances of the first are usually more common in the practice of pre-order bonuses (something I'll be talking about more in another entry), but they do happen with actual full DLC items, the most high-profile cases I can recall being Street Fighter x Tekken and the more recent Destiny. And when this happens, I will agree that to my mind, it's wrong. If it's on the disc and the download aspect is nothing more than an "unlock" patch, akin to the one time "remove ads" payment available in many mobile games, then yeah, fuck that. As I mentioned in my previous Mortal Kombat X post, this is usually easy to spot simply by the download size of the item in question. On the Xbox 360, these "unlock patches" were always 1**kb (I can't recall the exact number from memory), while content that actually needed to be downloaded and installed to the console was always some number of *mb or *gb. On current gen consoles, I haven't paid much attention to download sizes, but you still see the same difference between "unlock patches" happening almost instantaneously and real content taking at least a couple minutes. As I said, you don't see this often with "real" add-on content, but it's happened before, and probably will again at least a few times.

The second thing, however, the idea that content is specifically held back, is usually harder for me to get on board with (USUALLY. This will be important shortly). I recall an interview with the South Park guys during production for Stick of Truth where they said that at one point they were told that some idea they had could be used as DLC and they said essentially "no, to hell with that, it goes in the game," and they were widely praised by gamers for that attitude. But that's not how game development works. (to be fair, I am not a game developer, of course. All I know is what I've been told in conversations with game developers, and what I've read in books.) Game development is a long, and increasingly more expensive project. And the discs games are pressed on can hold only a set, finite amount of data (obviously this only applies to physical copies, but of course digital copies will be the same game, and so are affected by the size limit as well). At some point in development, you have to stop adding features and quest lines and characters and actually start producing the damn game. Of course some ideas are going to end up cut or be thought up too late or require too much time to implement at the stage where they come to mind or would be just too damn big. Also, many gamers (some polls and studies would suggest most gamers, although they want in a very specific way that literally every dev says is not viable way to do it, conversation for another day) want their games to have DLC support after they launch, keeping the game fresh for longer and adding to the replay value. I fail to see a problem with that. If on day one of development for Skyrim, Steve said "hey it would be neat to go back to Morrowind," and the team went "we like that idea, but we're making Skyrim, so let's do that first," and after Skyrim was done they all said "okay, so what do we want to do expansion-wise" and then everyone remembered Morrowind Steve's cool idea and Dragonborn happened? If you think that's an unreasonable system, I just cannot understand you.

TL;DR from the jump to here - I don't think season passes are the worst thing, and for some players in some cases, they're probably actually worth it. But overall, there is no reason to buy them right at a game's launch, especially without knowing what you'll get, especially since there is some room for publishers to jerk customers around with them.

I could continue for quite a while about season passes in general, and in fact I think up above I end up seeming a little less negative on them than I actually am, but I do want to get to the Batman part without writing the next Song of Ice and Fire novel, so let's move to that, shall we?

I'll start at Batman's season pass price point, $40, which you may notice is over half the cost of the game itself. Jesus. In my Mortal Kombat X post, I lamented the odd jump on DLC prices we've seen with the new generation of consoles. Season passes on the 360 and PS3 were, as I mentioned, typically $20-25. I've seen some claim $50 as a season pass price, but while I don't have any proof in front of me, almost every season pass was pitched to me by a GameStop employee. Any number of people can vouch for the fact that it would be easier to name the last gen games I DIDN'T buy at launch, and I was never pitched a $50 season pass. I can't speak to Call of Duty or Battlefield, perhaps those really did have $50 map packs, but season passes for other games? Offhand I can't recall anything above Borderlands 2. Last gen, the high point for a season pass price was $30. Current gen, $30 is the standard, just because. Game development costs didn't necessitate a price raise on entire games, but somehow it did require a $5-10 increase on DLC costs. Arkham Knight is jumping that even further, while offering nothing that shows it's not purely because WB Games CAN.

Initially, we were offered only the vaguest possible outline for the season pass. A largely negative response led to at least a few more specifics, but it's still a shit sales pitch. A prequel story campaign featuring Batgirl. And then, every month for 6 months, new story missions featuring "new villains invading Gotham City," challenge maps, new Batmobiles and racetracks, and character skins. It's still vague as hell. And frankly, neither Arkham City or Origins instill a lot of confidence for DLC offerings.

The Batgirl prequel is the big brought-to-you-by-fan-and-press-outcry reveal, which as far as we know will be this game's equivalent to the lackluster Harley Quinn's Revenge and Cold, Cold Heart story expansions. The rest of the content is said to be delivered over six months, and we know nothing else about it. New story missions with new villains could be great, but it could also be nothing more than a series of 20 minute goon fight paths culminating in a typically disappointing Arkham boss fight bookended with quick cutscenes. Challenge maps at least we all know what to expect, but for every Arkham fan I've talked to who loves challenge maps, I've talked to another one who couldn't give a shit about them.* Character skins get the standard pantomimed jerk-off response as always, unless they do the PS1 Spider-Man thing and have different suits actually offer different things. And the Batmobiles and racetracks? They haven't even shown us that feature in action on a video, let alone let us see it played, and they want us to buy it. On top of that, are the new Batmobiles going to be actually different cars, or just more skins? Is the 1960s TV Batmobile gonna show up and handle like a tank/sports car hybrid?

How many of these things will we get? Will it be mostly real shit, or will it be 2 of each real thing and then 50 cosmetic skins? How will stuff be split up? Bursts of new content weekly adding fresh side missions? One big pack each month, a slow trickle making people pop back in a game they've 100%-ed already? What's the estimated percentage saved by buying the season pass instead of shopping individually? What's the estimated costs of the items in the pass? Could you get a better deal buying everything but the skins or the challange maps or the Batmobiles? Will they bother to make skins carry over for cutscenes or will it be that annoying quirk of immediate magical changing clothes? It really, seriously may be a more fun time to wait six months for everything to come out, buy only the things you want, and play the game for the first time with the fullest goddamn Gotham City possible. It's too easy to see the season pass content turning into something you grudgingly play because you already paid for it - not an attitude conducive to fun gaming time.

And on top of all of that, the fact that WB Games is the publisher here, and WB Games is one of the studios that we know for a fact does carve out completed, on-disc content to serve their own purposes, developers and fans be damned. Arkham City's Catwoman missions, a key piece of the game's marketing from the minute the first reveal went live, and which were integrated throughout the game's story, not just a prequel or sequel, cut out by WB to make an online pass for their offline singleplayer game, announced only 5 days before release. You may remember online passes as publishers' efforts to curb used game sales, where you got a one-time code for the online features of a game, typically multiplayer components, with new copies of a game. If you purchased a used copy, you'd have to give the publisher $10 to unlock those online features. Arkham City had no online components, the Catwoman missions were on-disc, and were widely discussed by developer Rocksteady in every promotional interview as being a part of the game. In the end GameStop was just giving codes to anyone who bought a used copy anyway.

WB Games, the publisher that outright said they wouldn't fix bugs and glitches for Arkham Origins after a certain point because they had moved the team to DLC they could sell for extra money. Major, sometimes game-breaking glitches still exist in Arkham Origins, including some that sprang up from the patches they DID do. The publisher that carved completed content out of Shadows of Mordor and Mortal Kombat X to make pre-order bonuses and "special edition" content. The publisher that put some of F.E.A.R. 3's multiplayer modes (the unique, actually interesting ones) behind an online pass and never fixed the problem when many, many new copies had codes that didn't work. That cut Dying Light's "Be The Zombie" multiplayer mode for a pre-order bonus. The publisher that rushed out LEGO The Hobbit in between the second and third films, featuring only the first two movies, promising a DLC expansion around the film's release date to add it to the game, and then cancelled the expansion without telling anyone until they decided they had had enough questions about it and confirmed it wouldn't be coming - in March 2015, 3 and half months after the movie released, with a statement that flat out says (I'm translating here) "the game currently ends on a cliffhanger with multiple loose ends still to be tied up, hahaha, in your face, please buy our Hobbit blurays," 

Hell, given the timing of MKX's announcements for the season pass fighters and the presence of WB, many people are wondering if those DLC characters are a case of something being purposely held back to sell. I want to believe that it's just that NetherRealm was excited and wanted to announce what they were working on while discs were being pressed and servers being prepped, but seriously, WB is maybe the worst about this. Yes, even worse than EA, even worse than Activision. Someone told me they wondered if they bumped Arkham's DLC cost to compensate for being the North American publisher for CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 3, for which the developer has already promised 16 free pieces of DLC as well as two expansions available for $10 and $20 separately or in a $25 season pass. And because WB, now I kind of wonder that too. THAT is how bad WB is.

This is going to sound contradictory, but seriously, that list of add-ons does not come off sounding like $40 worth of content. Ordinarily I hate arguing the cost versus the time for games. A game that knows what it wants to do and does it well and it takes 8-10 hours (what up Vanquish, Binary Domain) has as much right to be $60 as Fallout: Jesus Christ Why Would Scorpions Get That Big. When someone says it's not right for Bethesda to charge $20 for Dawnguard or Dragonborn because Skyrim was $60 and the expansions aren't one-third the size of the base game, that's asinine to me. The price on video games is not a 1-to-1 like that. Either Skyrim expansion, for example, if they had been done as stand alone experiences by some other studio and released as downloadable titles, would have been praised left and right for how much content they had for $20. How do you claim they aren't worth that just because they're expansions? 

But that Arkham Knight list reads a lot like what plenty of games promised us last gen for $20, and WB isn't showing us the work for their "times two" math. And again, as much as I hate comparing the price and size like this: just under WB's own umbrella and around the same time, The Witcher 3 is planning to deliver 16 free DLC items, starting with an armor set and additional cosmetic options for Geralt, a new monster hunt contract mission, and an alternate skin for one of Geralt's companions, with the rest to be announced as they finish it. The season pass will cost $25 for what they promise will be 30+ hours of new story content and side missions, including one entirely new region added to the game world. And unlike WB with Arkham Knight, CD Projekt RED is actually communicating with their fans, offering details like estimated dates and the actual costs of each item separately. WB said "hey there's gonna be some stuff, so give us 2 weeks of groceries/a tank and a half of gas/4 movie tickets/a bleacher seat family pack of baseball tickets."

Well. That was a big wall of negatives. I want to get a little positive before I wrap it up though, so I hope you're okay with a little bit more. I hope you'll notice I don't have a bad thing to say about Rocksteady, the Arkham Knight (and Asylum & City) developers. I have no reason to! Rocksteady has done great work on this franchise, and Origins wasn't their fault. They're talented, clearly passionate developers, and even with only three titles under their belts, the quality of their work started from pretty good with Urban Chaos on the PS2 and only went up with their Arkham titles. The worst thing I can say about Rocksteady Studios is that Harley Quinn's Revenge can't get a reaction stronger than a half-hearted "eh" on the story front. Arkham Knight is still my second most anticipated game of the year, and I have zero doubts I'll love it. I'm even willing to bet that I pick up at least some of the DLC. Seriously.

Announcing the free Witcher 3 DLC plans, CD Projekt RED co-founder Marcin Iwinski told Polygon, "If we ever decide to release paid content for Wild Hunt, I promise you, gamers will see why we decided to charge for it. We'll ask ourselves a simple question: Could anyone feel ripped off when they buy it? If there's even a slightest possibility they will, we won't do it."

And then, in the release announcing the expansions, Iwinski offered, "With the development of Wild Hunt coming to an end, the team has embarked upon the creation of two new really big adventures set in The Witcher universe. We remember the time when add-on disks truly expanded games by delivering meaningful content. As gamers, we'd like to bring that back. We've said in the past that if we ever decide to release paid content, it will be vast in size and represent real value for the money. Both our expansions offer more hours of gameplay than quite a few standalone games out there. While we're offering the Expansion Pass now, we want to make one thing clear: don't buy it if you have any doubts. Wait for reviews or play The Witcher and see if you like it first. As always, it's your call."

Those statements represent the problem with Arkham Knight's season pass as much as they represent good things about CD Projekt RED and The Witcher 3. Because it really could turn out that it's totally worth paying half the cost of the game again and then some to add the content they have planned. I hope, obviously, that that's the case! But the season pass idea, as much as it sometimes hypes the "savings" it offers customers, wasn't really created as a way to provide value. What it really does, what it was made to do, is provide a good faith incentive to try and get players to keep their games when they finish them, to get fewer people selling games back to GameStop or passing them on to friends or family (or at least to keep it from happening so close to the release window). But WB Games wants you to go add a season pass to your Arkham Knight pre-order right now, or tack it on at the register on release day, and they want you to do it for a vaguely described offering with a higher-than-normal price, in a cynical effort to manipulate that good faith for quicker profits. And given that obvious manipulation, and looking at WB's publisher history of DLC practices, that makes the Arkham Knight pass bullshit. The fewer people that shell out for it up front, the better.

*I'm firmly in the latter camp. I play a Batman game to experience a Batman story, not beat high scores in combat arenas. Then again, I'm also someone incredibly disappointed in all of Bat-media's increasing focus on Batman the combatant over Batman the detective and Batman the human man. It's a discussion for another time, but these days most Batman stuff only pays lip service to the point of him being NOT an all-powerful super being. They've taken Batman's skills to the same ridiculous level they took Wolverine's healing factor for a while.