One of my most anticipated games if this year just came out, Star Wars Battlefront. Having spent much of my formative youth playing the original two Battlefront games with my younger brother, needless to say I was excited to relive my memories of the Star Wars shooter. When I got the game, I was surprised with the direction the series took.

Mainly, making it almost entirely multiplayer and having a $50 season pass for downloadable content. Let's have a little background for those out there who may not know exactly what I'm talking about. In the heyday of video games, every single video game was put onto shelves for consumers to buy in its entirety. You were able to play the full video game that the creators intended you to play for the one time price of $49.99. Some of these games even hold up to this day and are loved by people across the world.

Flash forward to today, where video games now typically cost $60. You would think, "Gee, that's a more expensive price for a game than before, but they must have more things happening with them, right?" In some cases, yes, there is a lot more content in today's video games than in the past purely because of the advance in technology has allowed for that. However, in some cases, these $60 games are not what I would consider to be "full games." Instead, the company will release part of a game and then offer more of the game for a price. They may offer what is called a season pass, which is basically a pre-order all of the downloadable content that will be released in the future for the game. This DLC as it is shortened to can be a variety of things, from new character skins to full levels of the game. Normally a season pass costs around $30.

Herein lies the problem: you are basically paying the price of the game and a half for what in the past would be considered the full game. In some cases, like with the newly released Battlefront, you are almost paying for the price of two games to receive content that should have been released with the game to begin with.

There is an interesting chart found at Kotaku that sums up exactly what companies are doing with video games as compared to the past using the Mona Lisa as the example.

As you can see, there are also things called micro-transactions involved, usually put in the game to make things easier for the players. Remember the fatalities in the Mortal Kombat series that were so hard to pull off due to the complex button inputs? Now you can buy 30 Easy Fatality tokens that allow you to do something that required practice easily for $4.99! Want to build things faster? You can rush your construction job for $5! Normally micro-transactions are how free application games on mobile devices make their money, but now video games that you already paid for are taking up the micro-transaction flag and waving it in the faces of their customers.

Now why do developers do this? For one thing, its to get the game out on shelves in a timely fashion. If the game isn't complete, they'll just release the content they intended to be in the game for a price. Sometimes the games don't even come out working the right way, as was the case for Batman: Arkham Knight for the PC which was so plagued with glitches and bugs that it was pulled from shelves a week after its release in June and only put back on sale at the end of October, where it STILL had terrible bugs that caused the company to issue full refunds. This game also suffers from DLC syndrome, and though it boast about a large amount of content available with this season pass, it is just another cash grab from another video game developer.

While some downloadable content truly is just additional material that weren't meant to be part of the game, in most cases DLC is locking the rest of the game behind a pay wall. Its a terrible system of taking people's hard earned money and wringing them dry because they know the audience wants THE FULL GAME. Hopefully in the future companies go back to the way things were and release games in their full glory for the one time sum of money instead of constantly asking for the blood donations of their customers.