Wait, We Have Limited-Time DLC Now?

If you ever wanted to play a game about deep-sea diving, in which you help dolphins and fight off sharks in order to serve the latter up in your sushi restaurant, Dave the Diver is the game for you. If you’d like it to include long-extinct aquatic monstrosities and a community of mermaids, you’re in luck. But if you want two enormous kaiju to wreak havoc on your precious lagoon, you’ve only got until November.

Dave the Diver’s Godzilla DLC is a brilliant marketing step. The game has already been a resounding success, and a collaboration with Lovecraftian fishing game Dredge secured both titles’ status as indie darlings. And the road from chthonic crossovers leads straight to kaiju kingdom.

An official Godzilla crossover is a dream come true, and the free update is downloading to my hard drive as I write these words. But why is it time-limited? If you don’t download it before November 23, 2024, you can never play it. What?

Brain Worms

This isn’t some piece of artistic expression, like John Malkovich’s film 100 Years which will be unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 2115. I’m certain there’ll be indie games out there that have utilised limited distribution in order to further their message – like the copies of Fahrenheit 451 that come with a match gently attached to the spine. But this isn’t that.

I’m racking my brain to try to work out exactly why this DLC has such limited distribution. Why can you only download it for precisely six months? There’s nothing in the Godzilla lore about kaiju half-lives or attack patterns that makes it make sense, there’s no anniversary for Dave the Diver or developer Mintrocket that I can see, either.

It must be a rights issue. Nexon must have purchased the rights to include Godzilla in their game for a limited time. Nexon is a multi-billion dollar company, so I’m not sure why it didn’t dive into the petty cash for the full rights (presuming this is the reason). That said, I’ve seen too many companies over-invest in expansion after moderate successes in recent years, only to lay off entire workforces when profits don’t continue to exponentially increase. Maybe caution is the best practice, but that doesn’t stop this whole thing from being weird.

The Preservation Issue

I play a fair few live-service games. My biggest love is Apex Legends, but I’ve also been known to dabble in Fortnite and Warzone when my friends are online. These always-evolving platforms are constantly iterating, and never looking back. Season after season, entire maps are destroyed, new ones are built, and game-changing alterations keep the playerbase engaged. Everything always has to be new, new, new.

I didn’t get it at first. I liked the OG Fortnite map, and I didn’t want to learn a new one. Where were Tilted Towers and Tomato Town? (Disclaimer: I can’t remember exactly which POIs Epic removed in the first major map update). Slowly, I got on board. When I played more and more of the battle royale games, I needed that breath of fresh air every season. But still, we can never go back.

I wish someone, somewhere, somehow, had preserved every gamestate for these live-service games like Minecraft does. I hope that future generations will be able to log onto a website and play a match of Season 1 Apex Legends, before switching to a Season 5 match, then Season 21. Otherwise all these moments are lost in time, captured only through streamers’ YouTube videos and unplayable evermore.

I feel worse when I think about the loss of single-player games. Games like PT, which cannot be downloaded any more and is only available on specific consoles which downloaded it at just the right time. Like the entirety of the Nintendo DS eShop, which hosted hundreds of games that were never released physically or on any other hardware. A portion of Dave the Diver is soon to go the same way.

Why?

I just don’t get it. This is so unnecessary. It’s so annoying. This isn’t someone’s hard work being ripped from the internet because Nintendo doesn’t want to pay for the DS’ servers any more, this is calculated and planned. This is corporate bosses saving pennies. The three Godzilla missions could be a writer’s magnum opus, their favourite project they’ve worked on to date, and if they meet someone at GDC next year and explain it to them excitedly, that person won’t be able to experience it for themselves.

This is a symptom of modern media. We live in a time when finished movies are scrapped for tax write-offs; when games are removed from online stores without a moment’s notice. How long do you give the Redfall servers before that sad chapter of Arkane’s biography is scratched from the history books and sent down the memory hole?

Media is seen only in terms of profit. Cash in on the Godzilla DLC, then remove it. (Yes, it’s free DLC, but presumably the idea is to encourage more people to buy the base game.) Extract as much money from the adoring public, then shut the doors behind you. Making video games is an art. Video games are art. Every game. Yes, you might think Harold Halibut is more artistic than Call of Duty, but someone still had to design every level, craft every rifle, and write every line of dialogue in Black Ops 6.

Sadly, that’s not how executives think. And that’s why the games industry is in the state it is today. Embracer hoovered up studios to extract profits, then fired thousands of innocent workers when a deal went south. It didn’t care about the beautiful games those thousands were working on, it didn’t care about their livelihoods. It cared about one thing: money. It’s sad to see Dave the Diver fall into the same trap.

I hope gaming can recover from the 2020s. But with mass consolidation, an endless stream of layoffs, and limited-release media to cash in on trends, I’m not sure we’ll make it to the ‘30s. Godzilla swallow us up and save us from this misery. It would be a more dignified fate.

Next: It’s Official: There’ll Never Be Another Game Like Baldur’s Gate 3