Gamasutra Expert Blogs: From DLC To Owning Ideas

In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra. Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share. We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the official posting guidelines. Here are the top blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Expert Blogs On The Economics Of Content Updates, DLC, And In-Game Advertising Alan Wilson Developers like Valve take any opportunity to discuss the value of free content updates, and in this in-depth blog post, Alan Wilson of Tripwire Interactive -- which has seen great success on Valve's Steam with games like Killing Floor and Red Orchestra -- dives into both the philosophy and the practical financial impact of that strategy on sales. Ideas I Did Not Own Ted Brown In a well-told recollection sure to be familiar to game developers everywhere, Ted Brown describes a childhood experience of reading into a game design's implications -- then realizing others had already done the same. Player Types: The Tourist Dan Bress Continuing his ambitious goal to re-catalogue player types in Western-style MMOs, Dan Press does a deep dive into the "tourist" player type. Further Notes On Marketing For Indie Games Paul Taylor In August, Paul Taylor wrote on marketing indie games for Gamasutra. Now, jumping off of article feedback and his own reflections, he revisits the topic with a "micropostmortem" of his studio's own Determinance. Fighting The Good Fight; Why Fighting Games Need Their Arses Kicked [Part 1] Daniel Boutros Before directly getting into the subject implied by this article's title, Daniel Boutros starts off by discussing why people love fighting games -- the arse-kicking presumably comes in a future installment.