Well Pachter has always been in favour of greed, it's better for profits and he's all (and only) about the profits. But noting that it's probably legal for the consumer to hack the disc and unlock the DLC without paying is just observing that if there were a lot of hack savvy consumers out there on disk DLC could be an unprofitable way of selling DLC.

Fortunately for the companies very few people are hack savvy enough to be able to crack these puppies, so the companies lose very little (if anything).

In principle as long as the game you think you bought is the one you can play without paying for the on disk DLC then the publisher isn't being dodgy, and in that respect ODDLC = D1DLC. Is different if the game is objectively incomplete without the ODDLC = but then again if it's objectively incomplete with D!DLC that's just as bad.

I don't mind having unlock content that is free to the new game buyer but must be purchased by the used game buyer. But essential content that must be purchased by the new game buyer is dirty pool.

not sure if relevant here, but doesn't MS also supply multiple versions of it's OSs on a single disk (Win 7 Starter, Home premium, Ultimate etc.)?
In that case is it justified to pay for the home premium license but "crack" it to the ultimate version?

This is pretty much how I feel. Otherwise game developers can just finish a game, lock off 20% of it, call in DLC and effectively charge you more than RRP for what amounts to nothing more than one full game.

There's nothing stopping them from doing this six months later as a an actual downloadable expansion but I at least appreciate the attempt to make it look like I'm not being ripped off.

On-disc and day 1 DLC is of course despicable but that goes for most DLC nowadays.

Most DLC nowadays even if it comes out after half a year gives this cynical taste because it's so apparent that they consiously planned to add these meaningless DLC packages for easy profit without much extra effort from the developer. For 90% of games, even my favorite ones, the DLC feels very artificial and soulless and very very cynical.

All these good games, really great games in themselves, Dragon Age, Red Dead, Assassin's Creed, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Dead Space, LA Noire, Battlefield, Mass Effect, Borderlands etc etc I go to PSN and I discover so many goddam DLC packs and I just wanna say fuck you, this isn't bonus content, this is a cynical rip off.

Capcom, Activision, EA, Bioware, etc are notoriously bad for DLC. It is good to wait for GOTY edition and get all of the DLC included.

This is actually less clear than you might think.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/07/23/29099.htm

I haven't looked into it closely enough to know just how applicable it is to games, though the line "(t)he owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing" suggest an opening.

It's sufficiently unclear that any court ruling would be politically motivated, and then be appealed until the year 2050. So it's de facto legal as in no one will prosecute you.

Patcher talking sense, this is new. But he loses marks for how obvious this point is.

What has that man done to Pach?!

Patcher finally makes sense:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eOZ2u5KFCpE#t=595s