Why Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen Is A $40 Retail Game

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, an expansion to Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma game, is slated for release this April, both as a retail title and as a download. Dark Arisen isn’t just an expansion, though—it includes all the content from the original Dragon’s Dogma in it as well, and is being released for $39.99.

The response on the Internet has been that $40 seems a little on the steep side, and that this issue could have been circumvented by simply releasing Dark Arisen as a downloadable update for a lower price, like, say, $20.

Capcom’s Senior Vice-President, Christian Svensson, doesn’t disagree, but shares that, unfortunately, “major technical limitations” got in the way of pursuing the digital-only upgrade plan, which is originally what Capcom were aiming for. On the Capcom forums, Svensson wrote:

I get it guys. We went round and round with the team on this topic as it would have been a preferred option from our standpoint too. As it turns out, I’m sorry but unfortunately there were major technical limitations that would couldn’t [sic] allow for a digital upgrade path. The original game was just not designed to be expanded (no hooks in the original code) and so a full-game delivery mechanism was the only option.

 

We also tried to explore a number of mechanisms to try and otherwise put this full product in original owners hands at a discount digitally but we would have run afowl of a few first party policies (not any first party’s fault, t’was our fault).

 

So instead, we’re packing more than $20 worth of value in digital rewards for existing users: 100K rift crystals (which in DDDA have a LOT more uses than they did in DD vanilla) the Gransys armor pack and the unlimited Ferrystone. We hope this will be a sufficent  “thank you” for being part of the first wave of Dragon’s Dogma fans given the development limitations we had.

 

Thanks again for your continued support and I hope to see you in Gransys in April.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen will be released in North America on April 23rd and Europe on April 26th. The PlayStation 3 will get the game as both a retail and download title at launch, while the Xbox 360 will get the download version sometime during Summer in Europe.