https://twitter.com/draginol/status/631476327179264000 According to Brad, there are more than 5. The crime of poor communication is miles better than the crime of nickel-and-diming your fans. I hope this gets cleared up.

Brad admitted the marketing team messed up. My outrage is justified until I know the true value of what people are buying. If it's worth the money, I'll offer a full apology and buy two copies of the DLC on the spot (one for my wife and one for me.)

I'm not an unreasonable person. I just have a major-league hatred for profit-first gaming companies. If anything, player-first and profit-first should be so closely tied together as to be indistinguishable from one another. If you're good to the consumer, the consumer will be good to you... and they'll tell their friends.

You can't take a joke?

I keed, I keed,

When you start GC3 on the start menu there should be a get reward tab click it and then go to your email inbox there will be a email from stardock with a code copy it! come out of everything and go on your steam library page click on add game then use a code paste the code in and voila! you get the DLC activated if you've already downloaded it?

Thanks to Grathoke as he told me on my free gift code thread

I've had the gold rush event!

The gift DLC contains additional ship parts.

Holy shit, people are actually defending this?

This was a basic feature in GC2 which has been stripped away and repackaged as DLC for the sequel. This is the kind of scummy shit I expect EA to do, not Stardock.

"But there are Mega Events in the base game too!" -- Yeah, the boring vanilla ones. Want something interesting to happen in your game? Better fork over $5!.

So long as there are more than 5 events for $5, I'm fine with it. I hate DLC but I see the way the winds are blowing. I only get really outraged when I feel I'm being flim-flammed by crappy deals. That's why I got upset earlier. No less than Brad Wardell himself assured me personally that the DLC contains more than what was shown. As he and his company have never given me reason to doubt his word, I've dropped my own complaint.

Don't think my eye has wavered. If I feel like I'm being flim-flammed, I'll be on him like white on rice. Stardock is one of the very few companies I can still trust and, while I may just be some housebound cripple, I'm still a loudmouth consumer and, as Brad said, he is beholden to people like us (not the other way around.)

https://twitter.com/draginol/status/631476327179264000

https://twitter.com/draginol/status/631534113145622528

https://twitter.com/draginol/status/631580327178305536

Mega Events were not a release feature in GalCiv 2. They came in with the Dark Avatar expansion. Also, a lot of people disabled them because they didn't like them.

The idea that Stardock "stripped out" this feature is just silly.

Of course it was stripped out. They made a batch of these mega events then hand-picked several to take out and sell as DLC.

Sigh, you don't really get how DLC works, do you?

DLC allows a company to keep making money and so supporting a product for longer. You're getting about 5 years of free patches based on DLC sales. Otherwise, SD couldn't afford to support this game for more than 3 or 4 patches.

And you know what the really cool bit is? You can just not buy the ones you don't feel are worth it. Others will. And that will provide the money for SD to make more free patches for the everyone. And when they don't like a DLC and don't buy it, it might be something you feel is worthwhile. I didn't buy the map editor - couldn't give a toss about making maps tbh - but I certainly got and used the patch that was release at the same time.

DLC models are a bit like inverse social security. We all get the benefit when just some of us pay in. If you don't want this one, then don't buy it. It will still pay for the next raft of patches that are implemented, which you will receive for free. You're getting a bunch of free Mega events from the patch based on someone else paying for the work that was put into the ones you don't get.

Exactly. It's a better model than either "whole price up front" or "pay to play". It gives you permanent access to the game while still giving an incentive to the game company to maintain, fix, and improve the game.

The only DLC concept variant that can be considered an evil scam is the "pay to win". As long as SD doesn't offer DLCs giving you access to more powerful stuff or the like, it's ok.

So, simply pick and choose DLCs according to taste. You don't have to have them all.

Besides, it's $5, folks! You pay more for a coffee...

Depends how big those 5 events are, tbh.

Scenario 1. Stardock releases a DLC with 5 events. Each is a 1-off event that applies a basic modifier for 5 turns. 

Scenario 2. Stardock releases a DLC with 5 events. 3 of these events introduce entire new races to the game when they fire, complete with their own ship designs, ship models, tech trees and building sets. The other two cause total game-changing behaviour - say, 1 introduces a whole new resource and victory condition; the other introduces a count-down to extinction effect which fires smaller, minor events every 5-10 turns.

Both of these are 5 events for $5. The first one is a rip-off, since any modder could quickly replicate it in about 20 minutes; it would take a junior staff member about the same time, and so likely cost the company somewhere in the region of $10 to make. The second one has had a team of designers, developers, scripters and artists working on it for a week or so, spent another week in QA making sure it all works right, and likely cost about $10,000 in wages and running costs to make. 

It's easy to wrap this up as '5 events for $5', but it's generally not so simple once you look at how the sausage is made. What you're doing is paying for the game to remain in live development. Think of the actual content in the DLC as founder's perks for kick-starting the next patch, like MMOs that give you funny hats if you pay for a subscription. What you're actually paying for is the cool new dungeon they're adding for everybody in 3 months. The DLC is just the T-Shirt that says 'I contributed to Deathwazzok Furnace'.