As many of you know, Bethesda recently released Dawnguard, a DLC pack for Skyrim, on XBLA and PSN. This pack contains many new features, including mounted combat, elder vampires lords, the Dawnguard (which is essentially a group of vampire hunters, like the Belmont clan), new perks for vampirism and lycanthropy, dragon-bone weapons, and a visit to Soul Cairn (a plane of Oblivion). It's quite a bit of content.

Dawnguard is priced at 1600 Microsoft Points. That's about $20 for us weird Americans. Now, twenty dollars isn't a whole lot of money, but retail price for Skyrim was $70 when it came out! That's almost a third of the retail price for some weapons, two skill trees, new NPCs, and a new area to play in. I'd say that makes about 15% of the actual game, in value, priced at over twice that. In my eyes, I might as well wait two years for the Game of the Year Edition and save $40, rather than waste my money.

Dawnguard isn't the only DLC pack that has this issue. In fact, most of the downloadable content on Xbox Live is priced way too high (I don't own a Playstation, so sadly, I don't know how it is there. Maybe one of you guys can tell us). Call of Duty is the worst... $20 for 5 maps, in a game where (let's be totally honest here) gameplay is dominated by people who abuse power weapons, regardless of the map. Halo: Reach has the same problem, but at least Combat Evolved: Anniversary Edition came with the maps, so you were essentially buying a whole new game when you got the maps with it. It doesn't totally justify the price, but it makes it less painful on my wallet because I got a whole new game.

This has been a problem with add-on content since it was first conceived: Developers feel like the time they put into the game and the percentage of sales that the developers get means that the price must be high. Of course, people like me see it as DLC robbery, because we're not getting our money's worth. What happened to free features? In Crackdown, "Keys to the City" was ABSOLUTELY FREE, and you didn't even need the paid DLC to enjoy it! It was fun, even though I didn't pay a cent for it, so it made the other DLC easier to buy. But in Super Street Fighter IV, the DLC packs cost almost as much as the game: The game itself costs about $20, and the DLC costs 1600 MSP, so I might as well have gone out and bought the Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition instead, and saved myself twenty bucks.

For huge games like Skyrim and Call of Duty, gamers tend to not care how much the DLC costs - they'll just blindly purchase anything the developers throw at the community, without any regard as to whether or not it's "worth" the price. You guys should seriously discuss this with your friends, about ANY game's DLC, and discuss whether the content justifies what you paid. You might be surprised what they say.