Microsoft will include more of Alan Wake‘s Bright Falls adventure if you give the company your money directly rather than to a second-hand store.
If you’ve already watched the brand new Alan Wake trailer and thought it looked good, but still were going to wait to get a used copy for a few bucks less, there may be a reason to purchase the factory-sealed copy instead. Microsoft has announced that new copies of Alan Wake will include a code for free content that the used will not, unless the people that trade in the used copies don’t have the wherewithal to use the codes.
Such an inclusion is becoming the norm as publishers struggle to get gamers to purchase more new games and to ignore the sometimes only slightly-cheaper used games found at retailers such as GameStop. The most prominent example would be EA’s “Project Ten Dollar,” where it includes free DLC with new games such as Mass Effect 2‘s Cerberus Network.
Alan Wake‘s first DLC pack wasn’t detailed, but it’ll cost a premium for anyone that doesn’t buy the game new. Maybe Alan will get an extra big flashlight to kill whatever the hell he has to fight that I still can’t figure out from the trailer.
Extra content for supporting a game’s developer/publisher is always a good thing, but it requires that a large chunk of consumers actually know about it to have an effect. I’m absolutely for methods such as these that give the creators of a game a revenue stream from all people that purchase it, but seemingly don’t harm those that buy a used copy. Free extra content will only become more prevalent as time goes on, but whether it’ll actually make a difference or not is the question.
