Once upon a time, expansion packs were an incredibly common occurrence in PC gaming. Nearly all big game titles would be followed with an expansion pack promising either new features and gameplay or, at the very least, plenty more of the same.

Some expansions have become so synonymous with their original games that it would feel weird to play without them. Baldur’s Gate 2 was infinitely enhanced by the Throne of Bhaal, Diablo 2 by the Lord of Destruction, and how many World of Warcraft players are still playing with the original game only?

But these days, Downloadable Content (DLC) has taken over the expansion pack, and fewer titles are getting worthy, full sized expansions to play with. The business reasoning for this is more than obvious, but I’m still struggling to work out why gamers have actually made DLC into such a profitable venture for the industry.

When you reduce DLC to a simple calculation of price vs. content, it’s hard to understand why people are willing to hand over so much cash.

Dragon Age - having both DLC and an expansion pack - is a great example when calculating the ‘worth’ of DLC compared to a traditional expansion.

Both Wardens Keep and Return to Ostagar combined will provide the typical player with, at most, 4 hours of gameplay combined and buying them new from the BioWare store will set you back £10. Now, compare that with £20 for the Awakening expansion, where double the price gets you around four times the amount of play.

There’s plenty more examples of this. Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fallout 3… eventually this DLC often becomes better value as part of the Game of the Year editions, but if you want to play it as it gets released, you’re looking at far less value per hour of gameplay than you can find in nearly all expansions and much less than the original title itself.

Of course, the length of a game isn’t the only factor in whether or not it’s worth purchasing. However, most modern DLC is focused entirely on adding a little bit more content to an existing game. Where many expansions add new gameplay elements or features, hardly any DLC attempts this.

So why we all go out and hand over our money for the latest piece of clothing or helmet and don’t think much of spending a few pennies, we could be missing out on expansions that could really enhance some of our favourite games and come close – or even surpass – the quality of the original titles.

Not all DLC is a bad idea, of course. Point Lookout was priced well and added a substantial amount of free content. Likewise, not all expansions are good value for money; buying all the Sims 2 expansions separately as they were released would have cost a small fortune.

In most cases though, DLC feels like a weak alternative to a real expansion. I’m not interested in a new hat or a single new car to drive in a game that already provided me with a whole wardrobe of hats or city full of cars.

It doesn’t make me want to go back and play a game I’ve completed just because a single mission has been added.

That’s the other beauty of expansions. Their length and detail allows you to have an experience not far off from what the original game offered.

There’s no stop-starting and waiting between releases to play a short piece of content. Sure, expansion packs come out much less frequently, but historically developers have hardly pushed out epic amounts of DLC for new titles.

Supporting games after release is admirable whatever system a publisher chooses to use, but expansions have always proved to deliver a wider range of content for a lower price.

If Baldur’s Gate 2 was released today we’d probably get 2 new weapons and a three hour quest instead of 30 hour long expansion, and that would have been a real shame.