For our new friends: Hiii! I'm Raine. The resident Wordy McWordstorm! Thousand words or more is barely a warm-up, you'll get used to it. 
I'm surprised more games don't go for $100 on release day when they're expected to sell well. Same for consoles, honestly.
They just wouldn't sell, honestly. Games at $70 are already struggling to hit sales expectations; PS3 at $600 and wanting to work two jobs to afford one is still a running joke.
The problem with a lot of these games is simply that... people aren't actually asking for what they're (attempting to) offering? Like, no, most games do not need massive, empty open worlds. Final Fantasy XV absolutely suffered from it, as an example, and it sounds like XVI and Remake/Rebirth did too. Asset reuse is king for cost savings, but even there - Sega/Atlus want $70+ for the effort.
The majority of players were already not finishing games in the PS2 era, long before the open world craze. Far fewer are now. Like take Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - according to Trophy statistics, 56.8% of people finished the main story. For the PS4 version of God of War: Ragnarok, it's 54.3%. Those are big games, but... then you look at the obvious punching bag in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla? That's just 20.1%.
Just 1 in 5 players has finished the main story in Valhalla, and yet... go look at how much DLC exists for that game. Who asked for that? AC Mirage is even a $50 game that was originally supposed to be
more DLC for Valhalla, but then just sold by itself instead?! It's lunacy.
Pointless and expensive DLC is the same thing. People who don't want to spend more on a game will buy the base game and save their money. Those with money to burn will spend it on the DLC. If you think games are too expensive already, then you should be all for it, because the alternative is likely higher base game prices.
It's... a little more complicated than that, based on which (kinds of) game we're playing or looking forward to.
Like a lot of DLC, especially coming out of Japan in the last 15 years, has been
aggressive. Two of my go-to examples are Namco's Tales series and Nippon Ichi's Disgaea series.
With Tales you used to be able to earn alternative outfits/costumes in-game for all of the characters, and many of those were tied to side quests or little story arcs. However, once Namco realized they could
sell those outfits? Well, what you could earn in-game took a larger and larger hit per release. Price tags are ridiculous, and unjustified because - shockingly - a lot of the costumes are actually just homages to past Tales games/characters. And the icing on the cake: A lot of those side quests and story arcs? Well, they disappeared alongside their rewards. I remember one game, I don't recall which off-hand, ended up removing and selling the (obligatory and cringe-worthy) swimsuits - and the Namco Bandai Isle themepark/casino/beach portion of the game came with it.
With Disgaea, originally, a lot of the post-game was comprised of funny cameo fights. Like in Disgaea 2, you would find and battle the main trio from Disgaea 1 - as well as characters from loosely-related NIS games like Prier from La Pucelle or Marjoly from Marl Kingdom - and it was just nonsensical fun and tongue-in-cheek stuff. But, again, DLC means you can sell parts of the game for more profit. So Disgaea 3 launched with... let's say
a lot of DLC. All immensely overpriced. All using the same upressed sprites that already existed, all being past characters
and their silly little interactions, so on and so forth. That continued, minimally, for D2: A Brighter Darkness. I haven't looked at the DLC practices since, but hey let's go do that now:
Learn more about Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless for Nintendo Switch
www.nintendo.com
Oh yeah, they're still fucking doing it. Literally reselling you
the same characters and sprites each and every game for $8 or more.
AND IT DOESN'T SELL! A subset of a subset of a niche crowd even looks at it, much less purchases it. The company has teetered on bankruptcy for years.
DLC, in general, doesn't sell by the way - it's not just NIS. Multiple companies have gone on record saying that their story/expansion/whatever DLC either struggles to break even or only manages modest profit. You can peruse sites like TrueAchievements or PSNProfiles and see how horrible adoption rate is for DLC that "arguably matters," to say nothing of all the DLC that exists (cosmetics and the like) that don't add anything of substance to the game.
We don't really need to
(and I might have already I don't remember what I've ranted about in the thread at this point 
), but I'll also remind everyone:
- On-disc DLC! Remember those 512kb unlock licenses so you could access things already pressed onto the disc you bought?
- Pre-order bonuses! Everybody loves those; things you sometimes literally can't even attain later because they don't add them to the store.
- Online Pass! Dead now, but they could always go back to it: You had to buy a "new" copy of the game, otherwise parts of the game you just legitimately purchased were locked away or otherwise rendered unusable.
- RPG/Gacha mechanics! We
could play games with coherent world and design structure, but then we wouldn't deliver Recurrent User Spendingâ„¢ by buying the game, buying the ability to
play the game, constantly churn on the gear/progression conveyor belt... also, annual premium releases!
I mean, whether it's actually true or not:
- If DLC exists, publishers want you to purchase it. This, by virtue of
just existing, means the game's loop or mechanics are compromised in some way. Whether things have been made just a little more grindy and repetitive so you'll purchase boosts/skips, whether drop rates have been negatively tinkered with so you either have to insanely grind or fork over money, whether the core genre has been affected - Ubisoft adding RPG-lite mechanics to Assassin's Creed and making it
literally impossible to assassinate someone arbitrarily higher level than you (IT'S IN THE FUCKING TITLE UBISOFT). Somewhere, something has been meddled with. Will continue to be meddled with.
- Continuing from that, Sega: $70 for base Persona 3 Reload, $35 for The Journey that has existed in FES since 2006. There is not, at present to my knowledge, any indication that you can purchase just The Journey when that releases in June. $30~$40 "expansions" are becoming the new norm; Kingdom Hearts III did it, Elden Ring is doing it, there's a whole lot more. But back to Sega: Removing New Game Plus from Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and selling it back to you for $15??
Games just increased by $10 mostly across the board, and the year has seen nothing but massive layoffs. Profits are up, layoffs. We just sold the studio and made massive, unreasonable amounts of wealth for ourselves - MORE. FUCKING. LAYOFFS.
...Wait at some point I realized this wasn't about DLC anymore and I'm just ranting and raving about capitalism as usual. Apologies!
So in summation, Fuck Capitalism.
