Homefront: The Revolution developer Dambuster Games is following suit with various other games studios by offering a substantial portion of its DLC absolutely free of charge. But what’s the catch, you say? Well, it’s not a catch per se, but Dambuster says it will offset the cost of offering additional content for free by enabling players to purchase ‘loot crates’ with real money.
Before the phrase ‘pay-to-win’ starts getting thrown about all over the place, Homefront‘s designer Fasahat Salim told Gamespot in a recent interview that the opposite couldn’t be more true.
It’s absolutely not a pay-to-win system because everything we’re providing in these resistance crates is available for free in the game through normal play. All we’re offering is, for those players that don’t necessarily have the time to invest in the game, to unlock those cool things. It’s basically just a time saver for them; a shortcut to unlocking these things. They pay a little bit of money but they’re not getting anything that’s exclusive to them.
It’s a model that’s proven effective in the past for games like Halo 5: Guardians and the Call Of Duty series through the sale of ‘Supply Drop’ type packages, so there’s no reason that such a thing can’t work for Homefront, too.
In regards to the actual free DLC headed your way, Salim says:
Everything that’s available in the game is available for free, and even after release we’re going to continue to be delivering missions, drip-feeding them into the community for at least a year. There’s always going to be new content delivered for free, players are going to have lots of stuff to dig their teeth into.
We’re not doing any sort of packs. We’re not making map packs or anything like that. As we’re done with a mission, we’re going to release it, the community can go ahead and play it, and we’re going to keep doing that for at least a year after release.
Seems like a pretty solid plan, if we do say so ourselves. Whether Dambuster will actually be able to deliver on the promise of constant updates is another matter entirely.
We’ll see what happens when Homefront: The Revolution releases May 20 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. For those of you with an Xbox One, Dambuster plans on holding a beta starting on February 11 exclusively for Microsoft’s console.