Aaah, but Comrade Task Force, how much, discounting sales, are all your Steam games worth?
That's how DLC works, you buy the main game one month and then a month or two down the line you see a bit of DLC and think "Hmmm, that looks nice, and for under a tenner too...well...why not spoil myself?" Repeat this several times in a year and you've spent nearly a hundred monetary denominations on one game
The same thing has been happening with Flight Sim for years, I dread to think how much every single bit of payware for FSX would cost if bundled together, it's only because of Steam that you can actually tote it all up and realise that it's over a grand and still rising!
Still, there's still some good freeware out there, UKtrainsim has a lot, and Flight sim has some fantastic freeware stuff...but sometimes it's hard not to ponder if the freeware makers are getting edged out of the market because of the ease and low pricing of DLC and the fact that nine times out of ten DLC content will come with high quality footplate/cabview/cockpit, sounds and model although there have been a couple of deviations from that in both Flight Sim and Railworks. Certainly the more complex sims become the harder it can be for modelers to match the quality of payware stuff and more ex-freeware modelers go over to payware. It's an interesting thing to study, market habits and that, but it's certainly a different market for trainsims now than it was with MSTS...and in some aspects not for the better. For example, the recently released West Coast North is a fantastically detailed line with one locomotive and some rolling stock for about thirty pounds. Now, a few years ago I purchased Great Eastern 1 for MSTS for about the same price and it came with a fantastically detailed route, five locomotives, lots of rolling stock and several multiple-units with original sounds and cabs (although a lot of the EMUs used the cabs from Making tracks earlier release 'London and South East' which I also brought and have). It does seem with Railworks that you are getting less for the same price, admittedly it's better quality than MSTS but, if you scale the ability of Railworks 2 against MSTS, then Great Eastern 1 was the same quality as if not greater quality than West Coast North. I'm not quite sure but I think it might be a longer route too.
It's a worrying trend and I hope that some of the smaller companies like Making Tracks start bucking it, but JustTrains and Railworks themselves have set a precedent, although perhaps no more of a precedent than has already been set for several years in the Flightsim community...
