Change in the DLC policy?

[Dantès]

Hello everyone.

Recently i contacted the Skullgirls team on Facebook to address a little issue i had with the release of Eliza's DLC. I asked for some clarifications on how the whole DLC thing worked, you know, the 3-months-free thing.
But then i received a reply that, although not completely (and somewhat confusingly) related to the question i asked, really concerned me.

Here's the answer i received:

Sorry for the confusion! Up until the release of Beowulf, each DLC character has been available to download for free for a period of 3 months after their release. If you downloaded them during that free period, you would keep them forever. This means that if you didn't download Squigly, Big Band, or Eliza during their 3-month free periods, then you don't get them for free. That is how it works on PS3 and Xbox360 as well.

With the release of Beowulf, we have changed this somewhat. Now, for a period of three months after the character is released, anyone who owns the game will have the DLC character (Beowulf, in this case) automatically added to their Library. After three months, they will have to go pay for and download him manually. It'll work this same way for Robo Fortune as well once she's released.

If I understand correctly (and i may well be wrong!), he's basically saying that now we have to pay for the DLC character no matter what, even though it's after 3 months of having him for free. So basically you have the character "on trial" for 3 months, and then if you want to keep playing him you have to pay?
This is really confusing since I kept reading announcements everywhere about how i would have "Owned him [Beowulf] forever", especially on this very site and forum, if i downloded his DLC within the first 3 months.

Can someone help me shed some light on this? Did i miss some change in the DLC policy news? I don't mean to be whiny, but wouldn't something like this cause some kind of uproar (yet i found nothing about it, not here, nor on the official site, nor on the internet)? I mean, if that's really how the whole thing was changed and i didn't badly misinterpret it, it feels kind of... unfair.



P.S.: Just for completion, here's what I originally asked to the Skullgirls Facebook page, although it's trivial and... not completely related to the answer i got, for some reason? But it doesn't matter that much.

Spoiler

Hi,
I bought SkullGirl the 17 November 2013 during a Steam sales.
If i remember correctly the offer included the game, the Squigly DLC and all the future DLC (Color Palette Bundle was not included).

For various reasons i stoppe using pc for some months and when i reinstalled Skullgirl on my pc i found that Eliza was relased few months ago but it was not added to my dlc.

So I'm pretty confused. It's me who remember wrong and the offer that i bought does not include future dlc, or there is some kind of error?

Thanks a lot for your time!

P.P.S.: I'm sorry if i missed the right section to open this thread and make this question. I double and triple-checked the forum before posting this here, so if i still made a mistake, well... feel free to call me dumb!

 

[Mr. X]

@render

 

[Flotilla]

I'm pretty sure the situation is "If you own Skullgirls Encore during Beowulf's free period, Beowulf is automatically redeemed onto your account for you to enjoy until the end of time. If you miss this free period by buying Skullgirls Encore after Beowulf's free period ends, you'll have to buy him."

This is to prevent oblivious people from buying Skullgirls Encore during Beowulf's free period yet forgetting to redeem Beowulf, I assume.

 

[earlfriend]

Hi. Sorry our response was confusing. Flotilla is 100% right. The "policy" has not changed and you won't have to pay (EVER) if you download him during the free period. We were not implying that you would have to pay $5 after the 3-month free period was up.

What we were trying to convey was that as of the release of Beowulf DLC, instead of just putting him out there and expecting everyone to keep up to date on the news that a new DLC character was released, anyone who had Skullgirls in their library would automatically have Beowulf added to it. This lets us avoid a situation where a DLC character is released and someone forgets to download them, then gets angry at us when we say "sorry dude, you had three months to get it."

This only applies to Steam.

Also I wrote most of this post before reading Flotilla's, where he basically already answered your question. Consider this official confirmation that what he said is correct!

You have nothing to worry about.


EDIT: I'm also not actually sure the change we made to the way the character DLC is distributed even worked. Can anyone confirm whether they had to manually download Beowulf or if he just showed up in their library? We told Marvelous to set it up so it would work that way, but I never actually followed up to see if it worked or if it ended up working the way it did with previous characters.