Increase your own enjoyment of a game by making everyone else’s experience WORSE. It’s all about relative enjoyment, after all.

Background:

One common method that video game developers use to make additional money beyond the initial sale of a game is to sell additional downloadable content (“DLC”) online.

This typically includes things like:

  • New missions and areas.
  • Ridiculous hats or costumes for your character.
  • Additional absurd guns / swords / etc.
  • Additional in-game currency
  • Various things to give the player an advantage in online play (derisively known as “pay-to-win”)

Proposal:

However, there remains one entirely untapped type of DLC: instead of just allowing a user to add features to their own game, what if a user could instead pay money to make someone else’s game worse?

Options include:

  • Set the player’s game language to Esperanto.
  • Provide your own new and annoying replacement sound effects (or voiced dialog!) for the game, which are then uploaded and overwrite the original game’s sound effects (example: bullet ricochet sound replaced by horse whinny).
  • Replace all character models by rubber ducks (Figure 1).
  • Flip all character models 180°, but nothing else changes.
  • In-game music re-recorded by the Portsmouth Sinfonia (check online for videos).

ruin_dlc.png

Fig. 1: Now that everyone’s head is a rubber duck, this space marine game takes on a different character.

Conclusion:

If you work at a major game development studio, you should make sure you get reassigned to the division that works on this sort of thing—it’s going to be a career-maker, for sure.

PROS: Brings in additional revenue, reviewers will love it (since they tend to like unusual or experimental things).

CONS: None!