Buying DLC for Game Pass and PS Plus titles can seem essential, but you're left owning content you can't use

Nothing in this world is permanent. Everything goes away, in the end. We’re all going to die. Even the universe itself, ultimately, is running on a clock. Heat death is coming for us all. But, more immediately, we have to contend with things we love dearly cycling in and out of our chosen subscription services. Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown leaves Netflix, Final Fantasy 13 leaves Game Pass, all the worthwhile PlayStation exclusives leave the it-was-never-permanent PS Plus Collection. Life goes on. We learn. We grow.

I am a massive Monster Hunter fan. Long-time readers of the site may know this by now; I can’t seem to shut the hell up about it. For my sins, I own the massive and very good expansion to Monster Hunter Rise, Sunbreak, no less than three times – on Switch, on PC, and now on Xbox. After the game was added to Xbox Game Pass at the start of the year, I thought I’d jump back in again… little did I know I’d get hooked (again) and go as far as owning the DLC for a third time. I have a problem, yes, but that’s not what this piece is about.

Owning the DLC but not the main game puts me in a weird space when it comes to being able to access content I own… given that I access the base game via Game Pass, but now I have a paid expansion on my account, that means that when Capcom inevitably rotates Rise out of the service, I will be left with £30+ of DLC that I cannot access. Unless I swing for the base game out of my own wallet. Which feels kinda counter-intuitive to what Game Pass is trying to achieve with its all-you-can-eat buffet promises.

I’m not averse to buying games, let me get that straight. As developers get put to work harder and publisher margins grow, I’m more eager than ever to support the actual developers crunching away on the frontlines – that’s why I am more than happy to pay good money for the titles I actually want to support (three times over, in some cases). And DLC like Sunbreak is an essential part of the business plan in the age of subscriptions-as-a-service, too; fueling whatever Monster Hunter game Capcom is working on next, even indirectly, is fine by me. Vote with your wallet and all that. I just wish DLC situations like this didn’t leave consumers in a weird place where they may not be able to access stuff they’ve already paid for.

There was an alternative option: go for the more expensive combined edition where I get Rise and Sunbreak together, for about £20 more. But – despite what the public would have you believe – us games media types aren’t all living off our PlayStation/Xbox/anti-games lobby bribe money. I live in London, in a rented house with a garden. It’s a miracle I can afford to eat, let alone pay for game DLC. This month, my £30 game budget is being spent on DLC for a publisher and developer that I want to support, even if that means the end result is, in about six months’ time, I will have to buy access to the base game (that I will have long since completed).

In an era where developers are keen to make money back on titles that are added to subscription services by providing shortcuts, cosmetics, or even bonafide old-fashioned DLC packages like Sunbreak, peculiar ownership schisms like this are going to occur. It’s the nature of the beast. For better and for worse.

But as I consider the likelihood that I will be locked away from my progress as the Game Pass landscape shifts, I start to wonder: should I have just stuck with my Switch save? No, I wanted to see it all in gorgeous 4K without that now-standard Switch chug. So, should I have stuck with PC? No, because I want to play it on my sofa. So then, should I have got it on my PlayStation – where I would have been forced into actually buying the base game, and then the DLC when it launched a few months later?

Am I really in the situation where I’m thinking that not playing a game for free, day one, might be better – because it means I’ll always own and have access to my data in the future? It appears so. It’s a worrying quirk of Xbox Game Pass, and something we should all be mindful of if we’re picking up games that will get expansions later on down the line.

The same thing happens with Destiny, where various parts of the game have been made available for free, or via Game Pass, and now the rights situation when playing cross-platform is an absolute nightmare (I am still locked away from all my Forsaken stuff on Xbox, because I played that expansion on PlayStation, for example).

As cross-play proliferates and subscription services continue their incessant march into the dominant position in the gaming landscape, situations like this are going to get more common, and even messier. We’re already seeing games that you own get delisted from virtual storefronts. We’re already seeing entire libraries shut down. This is the danger that comes with digital content ‘ownership’ and something that game preservationists have been sounding the alarm bells about for years.

I guess I never really understood the problem first-hand until I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of last night, thinking about what would happen if my 100+ hour Xbox save of Monster Hunter Rise was suddenly taken away from me before I had chance to complete all the bastard-hard achievements for slaying massive monsters. It takes all sorts, I suppose.