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It’s not a game, series or franchise- ITS A PLATFORM!

These days its trendy to describe your game as a platform. This conjures images of one large purchase that is the basis for more content arriving later. Its not meant to sound like they’re nickel and dimeing you, but really it is.

Rock Band was the first game to describe it self as a platform. The idea is you don’t need to have every Rock Band disc that comes out in order to have everything. If you bought Rock Band 1, you could import all (bar) 5 songs into Rock Band 2. They’d be stored on your hard drive. If you wanted to play a RB 1 song whilst you have the RB2 disc in the tray you can. There’s a $5 fee, ostensibly to cover the placate the rights holders of the music licensed for the first game, but it doesn’t matter, you can have all those songs. But at some stage you need to have both discs in your possession to do this (though yes, you can rent RB1 and import). You can’t just buy RB2 and DL songs that were in RB1 from the Rock Band store. You will likely have to do this for every iteration of RB that comes down the pipe.
Guitar Hero World Tour is late to the party on this whole platform thing. You cannot import DLC you bought for GHII or III into world tour so I’m guessing that’s reserved for World Tour 2.

Singstar on PS3 has a good way of dealing with this. On PS2, there are dozens of disc-based standalone track packs for Singstar. On PS3, there’s Singstore. You only have to have one singstar PS3 disc to use as a key and you can download new tracks all the time. I have Singstar PS3 vol 2 and have bought some Queen songs from the store- these play back fine in Singstar ABBA. I’m not sure if the ABBA tracks will make it onto Singstore but for most part you can buy any track that’s been released for any singstar game (in your territory, at least). There’s apparently a patch coming for non-backwards compatible PS3′s that will let you play PS2 Singstar Discs on a PS3. Yes, the Singstore is rather slow and clunky, but it works (eventually).

Burnout Paradise is a good example of a platform in a more traditional game. Criterion have made Paradise City and have been constantly adding new features via free (and soon, pay to play) patches. Its almost as if Paradise City is what you get if you want Burnout for the next few years. GTA IV is also going down this road with its DLC. You spend a lot of effort making a huge sprawling city, why make it obsolete within a year (a la Vice City), you can make DLC cheaper and quicker than a full game or expansion pack.

PC Gamers will tell you PC has been doing this for years. WoW is a good example of a platform in this context. But so is the Source Engine and Steam, home as it is to CS: Source, DoD: S, HL2 and its episodes, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc. Any popular games with moddability (Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights) have had their life extended for years thanks to all the new content that’s been made available.

Console gamers are seeing this with Little Big Planet. But you don’t hear too much about this being a platform- which means LBP2 is coming next year. Games such as CoD4 Modern Warfare have proven to be incredibly popular but for some reason, possibly related to money, Activision has chosen not to support the game as a platform, for which they could sell more map packs and expansions and gone straight to another standalone game in CoD WaW. Why? Well $5 or $10 map packs are nice. But a $50 or $60 game is nicer.