Adam Bruno

If you play any of today’s video games, chances are you’ve seen, if not purchased, some downloadable content. In fact, you may have played a game that felt woefully incomplete without said downloadable content. For better or worse, the trend is only going to increase. Before you click on the break, take a guess at how much money the Call of Duty franchise is expected to make on DLC alone next year.

If you guessed about $50-70 million, go ahead and double that number. CoD is expected to make about $100-140 million in 2010. “Call of Duty downloadable content (DLC) can be a solid contributor to ATVI’s 2010 EPS,” Broadpoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter explains. “As with the last two CoD titles, the game itself should maintain its $60 launch price until the next iteration (due in large part to the value of its online gameplay), but ATVI will also benefit significantly from the high-margin DLC potential enabled by the packaged product’s success.”

Schachter goes on to quote previous sales of CoD downloadable content, and it’s overwhelmingly easy to follow his logic when he makes an estimate for next year’s haul. Furthermore, Schachter doesn’t think Actiblizzard’ll stop at maps. “Though the company has not announced anything, we would not be surprised to see the content expand significantly beyond simple map packs to include new missions, modes of play, and in-game items,” he says.

The implications of developers such as Actiblizzard doing this are both good and bad. The good is that developers have more incentive to keep making interesting add-ons which will extend the playing time of your favorite games. The bad is that developers now may make us pay for features that previously would have been included at launch. Or they’ll do something like what I caught Square-Enix doing in my post about the DLC for My Life as a Darklord and nickle-and-dime us to death by making us pay for each feature individually.

Let’s hope they steer clear of that last bit, because then you’ll be seeing a lot more rants from me. Either way, there’s a sizable market for downloadable content, and it’s going to be liberally milked.

Source: Industry Gamers