I remember having to buy a cheat cartridge (which costs the same as a full priced game) in order to unlock content that was already on the cartridge thermselves - inaccessible during normal gameplay or passwords / cheat codes.

Secret levels on Super Mario World, secret battle stages on Super Bomberman 2. That kinda thing.

I don't remember people complaining about it back then.

I never heard about that. Were they maybe just not fully ready to be put in the main game in time?

But they wheren't intended for play while on disc dlc is.

People would also complain if the game was 50 per cent more expensive and had all the on-disc DLC unlocked from the outset.

So how is a company meant to be profitable while making these games that have DLC? Big budget games are not cheap to produce.

I would have thought and hoped that with the massive number of high profile game developers that went out of business last year that consumers would have woken up and realised that there is a profitability problem with game development at the moment, but nah, of course not.

Are you talking about things like the Game Genie? I wouldn't say that really compares to DLC, as you usually just buy one device to work with all games on the system, and they were made by independent companies and not the game developers.

@Bass_XO
The only "secret" levels in Super Mario World that would require a cheat device are a couple unused "test" levels. As to Super Bomberman, are you sure it was 2? GameFAQs lists a secret levels password for Super Bomberman 3 (JP/PAL).
You heard of Super Bomberman 5 for the Super Famicom? It's got a few secret levels hidden behind passwords, but if you don't want to have to enter passwords, you could pay about 10x the price to get a gold cartridge version that has them unlocked.

I think the closest to DLC on SNES was the Satellaview service in Japan. The modem's BIOS cart had a slot for Memory Pak carts that were somewhat similar to Game Boy carts to store downloaded games, and a couple retail games like RPG Maker 2 used a similar cart to that modem BIOS, and could read those Memory Paks to load DLC from Satellaview.

the things you unlocked with such devices were things that have never been finished in development or cut off from the game, but they were left on the medium. this is not dlc like we know it. its just a few lines of code that were forgotten and not intended to be played

You've missed his point entirely. The test levels and glitchy abilities and cheats mentioned in the original post were never meant to be accessed, period, not even by customers who handed over their firstborn. This isn't the same argument at all, but nice try, guys.