Soul Calibur IV, DLC clothing packs... Male clothing, £2.49 per set. The female clothing sets, £3.29 each.... biased at all?
When DLC value exceeds more than the cost of the original game, and provides mere distractions, then yes, things have gone too far. In fairness, it is very easy to understand why it's done.
The single purchase model of games is a very bad system for making money, people make a single purchase, end of revenue. After the first 2 months of sales on a game, the income just dries up as a game leaves people's memory and drops down the chart list. Subscription models tend to alienate a lot of people, but can provide a very good income stream.
Episodic content quite often fails due to poor planning and budgeting, they never plan a 3 episode release as a single project, so they burn up all their funding setting up the engine and environments for the first episode and never get the chance to continue. One of the big reasons for episodic is to pull in some cash early to help cover some of the costs in setting up, but when they get a poor return on the first release, they pull out, even though most of the heavy work was already done. (sponsors too concerned with short term rather than long term....). Plan 3 episodes in 3 years, with the first to be released in 18-24 months, you may generate a lot more revenue than a single purchase of a 3 year game. But because they separate it into 3 individually budgeted projects, it gets canned at stage one...
Micro-payments can also work when done correctly, as with DLC, but for a lot of people, these packs don't add anything extra, and with a lot of PC games which encourage modding, you can always get someone's mod for free.
