The term DLC raises the bile in my throat. It is far too often associated with nearly insignificant changes to games, and comes at a price point that is intended to be insignificant (at least until you buy into all 5 small parts...).
Bioware tried to do this with mass effect 2 by having some of the content only unlockable if you purchased a new copy of the game. Having played through once with no dlc, the game was lackluster and short. On a second play through the characters suddenly had life, and the morality driven speech actions were suddenly available to perform (because there was enough time to build up moral points). This reeks of releasing a game half finished, and hoping that you can add enough content to get something worth playing (at the consumer's expense).
On the same note, dlc without a purpose is bull. Horse armor, different suits, and a new set of weapons that you'll never use is stupid. Woo hoo, I have a pair of new pistols, that have poorer stats than the ones I'm using now. Why the hell did I pay for this?
What's worse is when a game keeps a closed development system, and then expects you to pay for "game expansions" that they cranked out without any real effort. I like Fallout 3 for the open game play; what really matters is that the community now has its hands on development, and is releasing new expansions and mods (that fix the dev teams recurring issues) years after the game has been orphaned by the developer.
There will be a day whenever half the games are locked , and the $60 you pay for a new game buys you nothing but the bare essentials. I can imagine shooters where you only get three guns, rpgs where you are level capped, and every other game that has critical bug fixes as paid dlc. On that day I will begin pirating, considering it the moral high ground. For the time being I'll only pay for game of the year editions that come with the content the vanilla game should have had already.
Bile aside, dlc can be good. Several strategy games have done it well (starcraft, age of empires, etc...). They include enough content for the initial wave of purchasers to take another look, and give new players a reason to pick-up a copy of the game. The patches are free, and come in a timely manner so that the money you paid to play the game isn't wasted.
If shooters had new modes, and several new maps I could see paying for dlc (the distinction between expansion pack and dlc being personally irrelevant because they only differ in size). The issue is most companies release dlc at a break-neck speed without regards for quality control because executives see a new revenue stream; unfortunately they are poisoning this revenue stream with bland and over-priced bits to accomodate shorter development cycles and costs.
