According to Gears 3 executive producer Rod Fergusson states that the fact that the game and the DLC are on the same disc is basically irrelevent. ”We’re not saying that everything on the disc is the product. The disc is another delivery mechanism.”
Fergusson then claimed Epic was trying to be “transparent”, stating that the 1.42MB download to unlock the DLC was intentionally letting gamers know that the DLC was on-disc. ”We didn’t want to artificially pad it,” Fergusson related, ”I know of instances where other (game companies) have said, ‘We’ll put a downloadable video in there.’ That would get the file size up, but it would also reek of dirty tricks, if detected. “People hack the (download) streams, and when they do, they think that you’re trying to pull a ruse.”
The reason the DLC is on-disc, according to Fergusson, is that the developer had started working on it around the time that Gears of War 3 was supposed to be released. However, Gears 3 ended up being delayed several months, and by the time the DLC was finished, the game was about to release - so the developer put the DLC on disc. This allowed the developer to avoid an update to Gears of War 3 that would allow those who didn’t DL the DLC to actually see the DLC content in-game.
Epic stated that the $60 content in the main game was already chock full of goodies. The question is - should Epic have put the DLC on the Xbox Live Marketplace server even though the DLC was finished, just to keep up appearances? Let us know what you think.
