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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1746 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 5, 2026

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Pedantry warning.

Sometimes game developers will release a full game, then a few months later release a few additional missions or scenarios sold separately from the base game. For decades, the standard term for such content was "expansion pack" or "mission pack". If the expansion pack can be played without having previously bought the base game, it would be referred to as a "standalone expansion/mission pack".

At some point in the 2010s (?), around the time that physical media began being phased out in favour of digital releases, "expansion/mission pack" was deprecated in favour of the new term "downloadable content (DLC)".

This term is stupid.

Any PC game purchased via Steam or similar digital storefronts will be downloaded to the user's PC: it is entirely accurate to describe any base game as "downloadable content" by virtue of it being content which one can download. Likewise games purchased via the PlayStation Store. Even if you buy a game in a DVD case from a brick-and-mortar shop, it often just contains a slip of paper with a download key.

"DLC" is an idiotic term to replace a perfectly descriptive and useful one. The only kind of video game content which can't be accurately described as "downloadable content" is video games released via physical media (discs, cartridges etc.). Bring back "expansion packs".

I'll cheekily play ball. If you're being this pedantic then you must also admit that the term DLC is still accurate, and furthermore some expansion packs repackage or compress the game files in such a way that actually shrinks it, I think Phantom Liberty and Blood & Wine are known for this, so the term Expansion Pack is not purely descriptive as there is compression instead of expansion. Would you insist on a different term for the few expansion/DLC sets that accomplish this paradox?

No one measures how much they're willing to spend on a video game (or additional content for a game) based on how many kilobytes it takes up. The classic metric is "hours of gameplay", which is imprecise and prone to Goodharting but still more illuminating than size on disc. If content purchased separately from the base game adds extra gameplay time, then it's an expansion pack, even if it entails a refactoring of the base game's code such that its size on disc is smaller. If purchasing an expansion pack actually removed hours of gameplay from the base game, I would concede the point that this can no longer be called an expansion pack, but to the best of my knowledge this has never happened.

you must also admit that the term DLC is still accurate

My point was not that the term "DLC" is inaccurate: it was that it isn't dispositive, and that it replaced a perfectly good term which was.

If purchasing an expansion pack actually removed hours of gameplay from the base game, I would concede the point that this can no longer be called an expansion pack, but to the best of my knowledge this has never happened.

Lots of games have DLCs explicitly meant to make the game easier and therefore faster to complete.

If they are different difficulty modes, then these expansion packs give the player the option of making the game easier and faster to complete. I'm talking about a hypothetical expansion pack which, upon installation, immediately removes five missions from the base campaign.

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