The real reason we’ve been getting so much licensed content…
As a person who prefers licensed content over original content, it’s a great time to be playing DBD! But I do understand those who enjoy original content more. However, I do think there’s a very simple reason that DBD has been leaning heavily into licensed content recently…
The reason is Iridescent Shards.
DBD is my go to game of choice and has been for many years. As such, I have a ridiculous amount of Iri Shards to spend. But there’s only one thing I ever spend them on; Original Chapters. Why spend money on substantial content when you can get it for free? That’s the whole point of Iri Shards. And I’m sure I’m not alone. There are plenty of players that spend their shards exclusively on Original Chapter. A decent chunk of the player base at a minimum probably do this.
Behavior is a business first. And that’s probably why we’ve been getting so much licensed content recently. Original Chapters are potential profit, while licensed chapters are guaranteed profit.
This does put behavior in a bit of a small bind tho. Original chapters are the bread and butter of DBD, but these days it’s so easy to get that bread and butter for free. So to make profit, DBD has been releasing more licensed content, at the cost of potentially awesome original content. (The Unknown is a great example of an amazing original killer…….that I got for free.)
Just food for thought for those who prefer original content. I understand why you love it, just like I hope you understand what original content has taken a bit of a back seat in recent years.
Comments
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The sad thing is, if they focused on producing better content less frequently, people would be more incentivised to spend money on skins and other sources of revenue. The more chapters drop within a year, and the lower quality state they're in (I can count the number of good chapters we've had since Project W on one hand) the less likely people are to keep playing and spending.
Licences used to make massive splashes in the playercount, bringing in old and new players alike. Now dropping some of the biggest licences ever - ALIEN?! - didn't even make a dent.
If they focused on fixing the damn game instead of churning out content seeking endless growth, maybe they'd actually be doing better off. There'd definitely be a higher playercount and we wouldn't be reaching dangerous levels of player turnover. But we'll never know, because the higher ups demand more.
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meh
it’s not that simple, there’s a version of this where a license doesn’t perform as expected and the minimum guarantees owed to the licensor are too high
granted, we’ll never know the specifics of each license but just saying it’s not as simple as secure a license and profit
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Original chapters allow BHVR more creative control than licensed chapters so they can create more skins (and potentially super good one that people will spend money on). Ex: Myers has 1 skin + 3 weapon skins. Pyramid head has 3. Twins has 15. The newest original (Unknown) has >10. Vecna and Chucky each have 1.
But, licensed chapters bring more non-DBD players to try the game and that's the value. Keeping old players playing is nice and a good thing to do, but those players are gonna play with the new killers whether they are original or licensed. Most potential new people aren't going to see a new original character and then decide to play. They will come when they see something they are already familiar with.2 -
I dont think this. The general public of DBD care FAR more for content than anything else. I always bring this up but its a good example when DBD had a 6 month time of no content between Pig and Clown the playerbase dropped rapidly.
Even though the players were informed that a whole host of new features was coming including most majorly the cosmetics shop but still no one cared because they want content and they want it now not later. I think things like that make BHVR wary of trying to decrease the content production0 -
Not to be a bummer on a dramatic title, but I think what you're writing is pretty obvious. Of course BHVR wants licenses. Even if you took Iri shards out of the equation, licenses would do better. Lara Croft will bring in more people than 'athletic archeologist' and Bubba has more of a connection than Billy.
The Iri Shards are just a layer on top of that.
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Don't worry , the next one is original for sure. Just look at that …. thing … in macmillan estate. IT grows. It gonna be a nice big spider when it comes out :D
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I can dispel this theory: No, the reason isn't Iridescent Shards. If you play enough to get every character with Shards, that's awesome and we're happy you enjoy the game enough to do so, we appreciate you just for playing. This isn't something we're worried about, that's why Iridescent Shards are there in the first place.
In reality, we love both creating new original content and bringing iconic characters into the game. There are times where we get a lot of opportunities to work with some really cool franchises and we don't want to say no to any of them, and there are times where we have more time to work on our own original stuff. Some years we have more licenses, some less. It fluctuates from year to year.
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i feel like comparing a 6 month content drought from when the game was less than 2 years old and a return to the 3-month content cycle we had previously from when the game is over 8 years old is not an entirely fair comparison. the general public of DBD like new content, but they are not going to spend money on this new content if the game is a bugged, unbalanced mess caused by dropping so much content. since lara croft dropped - which was mid july, btw - we've had gamebreaking bugs related to endurance systems, generators auto-completing, and entire sections of the map not loading. and this isn't something new, either - the technical polish of dbd's patches has been on a steady decline for the past year and a bit now, it's a noticeable pattern.
correlation does not equal causation, but in my opinion it is absolutely related to when they changed it from a 4 chapter/year content cycle to a 6 chapter/year content cycle, particularly when combined with the layoffs we've seen taking place this year (not just at bhvr, but across the entire industry). the last time patch cycles were consistently this bad was when we were seeing the chapters developed entirely during covid when remote working was not yet ironed out, and before that? i cannot think of a consistent chapter cycle that broke the game as much as a binding of kin → all kill, and now dnd → tomb raider → castlevania. even darkness among us wasn't this bad.
the general public of dbd care about content, but when there's not actually a game to play im not convinced more content will fix the issue.
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