I've long maintained video games are a good entertainment value. Compare the average video game to the average movie. A movie costs $20 on DVD and provides about 2 hours of entertainment ($10 per hour). A game costs $50 or $60 and provides at least 10 hours of entertainment ($5 to $6 per hour) and frequently provides more. The new BioWare RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, is a great value. There's at least 40 or 50 hours of gameplay (without the mandatory replays for earning trophies/achievements). At $60 for the console version of the game, that's about $1.50 per hour of entertainment.

DLC (downloadable content) is another matter entirely. The "Stone Prisoner" DLC is included free with new copies of the game, so that's a wash. If you buy a used copy of the game, however, it will cost you $15 to download about an hour's worth of additional content. The $7 "Warden's Keep" takes about 30 minutes to play (if that). That's half again as expensive per hour of entertainment as a movie! No wonder publishers love DLC.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 recently released a character pack that gives you five new characters to play with (that don't actually add any playtime) and four missions that take about 20 to 30 minutes of extra playtime. All for $10--a rate of $20 per hour for the extra entertainment!

DLC makes sense for online competitive games where extra characters or items can change and freshen online play. Burnout Paradise made extra cars that added great value to online play and some extra playtime to offline single-player. It's hard to measure extra online play; but, generally that will be a good value. It seems, though, as if DLC intended for offline, single-player games is extremely over-priced.

With the cost of game development spiralling ever higher, it's only natural for publishers to seek to recoup costs through other avenues than just upping the cost of the game itself (which they can't do because the console manufacturers want to keep game prices low to increase attach rates). Still, the price-gouging that takes place with DLC seems a bit excessive. Surely they could sell-through more DLC if they reduced the cost to put the value at least closer to the $10 per hour of entertainment provided by a movie.