Game of the Year in 2015, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has since changed the way the industry looks at open world RPGs and you can bet that within the next few years we will see a surge of RPGs that follow a formula similar to it. The Witcher’s effect on the gaming industry, however, doesn’t stop there.

The Witcher 3 has vast catalog of DLC available, including new quests, costumes, weapons and full-on expansions, and it’s clear that developer CD Projekt RED nailed down their marketing strategy. Instead of nickel and diming gamers for every piece of DLC that came through their, door CD Projekt RED instead approached DLC with a different goal in mind. They wanted to not only extend the life of their game, but also refine and tweak every aspect of it until it was as near perfect as it could possibly be. With sixteen pieces of near perfect add-ons that were most importantly free, CD Projekt RED built a foundation of trust with their loyal fans before extending their first paid DLC onto the market.

“If you’re having to pay money for a video game DLC, it needs to be worthwhile. A lot of these things… if we released our free DLCs but instead they were paid… even if they were, like, a couple of bucks each, I personally probably would not buy them. There was enough content in the base game that you wouldn’t need to pay for those things. The larger DLCs – I find it’s nice, because you have the time to really focus and make something really good, really new.” Jamie Bury, Senior Animator at CD Projekt RED, told Alex Donaldson of VG 24/7.

This quote from Donaldson’s interview with Bury perfectly encapsulates the rule-breaking take CD Projekt RED had taken with DLC. Bury himself understands that most DLC that is released these days for games are worthless and add almost nothing to the overall game. Hearts of Stone clocked in an extra ten hours of playtime while Blood and Wine will add on another twenty hours. Combined together, that’s thirty plus hours worth of extra content at the low and affordable price of $24.99. The average amount of content in AAA games produced for this generation runs about 26.9 hours, making the Witcher 3’s next expansion pack running a mere six hours short of being a full standalone game.

If you really think about it, CD Projekt RED has essentially created a fourth game for their franchise with Blood and Wine as major AAA games like Rise of the Tomb Raider (which ran about 25.5 hours to complete), Call of Duty: Black Ops III (which ran 19.3 hours) and Halo 5: Guardians (which ran 14.3 hours) cost more and provided less hours of content. Yes, we know that Halo and Call of Duty have a well-established multiplayer that adds on additional hours to the game, but the average gamer is spending $59.99 on AAA games that falls below the minimum of The Witcher 3’s second DLC add-on.

Compared to full priced AAA games, CD Project Red does a phenomenal job with the way they treat their DLC. The Witcher 3 will close out its final content sometime this year with Blood and Wine. but the impact it had made on the gaming industry will far exceed its twenty-hour campaign.