Need for Speed Won’t Have Paid DLC, No Way To Even Charge Players

Ghost Games creative director Craig Sullivan has made an unusual pledge for the recently released reboot of Need for Speed; there will be no paid DLC.

Here’s Craig’s statement in full:

Everything we're doing is focusing on listening to what the fans are asking for. They're certainly not saying to us, 'Can you build a load of stuff and charge us for it?' They're not saying that, so we're not doing that. I know some people when we do press like this, they say, 'Yeah, but I'm sure it'll all change in a week or two, or six months.' It's not going to. The plan is that there are no transactions in this game. All of the content that we're going to give you–a pretty substantial amount in the future, starting pretty soon–is going to be free. That's what players deserve.

In this day and age when even Nintendo is selling DLC, and Need for Speed publisher is one of the biggest proponents of DLC, Ghost Games’ stand is unusual, but it goes even more than that. It’s easy to look at other games released in the same time frame, such as Halo 5 Guardians, and point at their DLC, but even prior Need for Speed games have had DLC, such as Need for Speed Most Wanted.

This was also the case for Ghost Games’s first Need for Speed and Criterion Games’ last, Need for Speed Rivals, which came out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. This is a palpable deviation from how older Need for Speed games were sold, and it should be interesting to see if it works out for Ghost Games and they will continue this policy moving forward.