Is it normal to have "microtransactions" in $60 AAA games?

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Ruler said:

whats so bad abobout selling 5 dollars more? Just look at these Microtransactions and DLC how much it costs and compare that to 5 dollars. And they are allready nickel and dim games for 70 $/€ if you preorder them.

Let's use 100 people as the number of people who buy a game, just for the sake of my example here.  Then let's say that the game company needs $6,500 to stay afloat.  If they can sell the game to all 100 people at $65 they are fine, sure.  However, lets say that only 90% of people are willing to accept an across the board game price increase.  This means that they only have 90 people buying the game and are now short $650 of their afloat number.  So instead they sell the game for the accepted $60, and are now $500 away.  They then add microtransactions.  This way the few people that are willing to pay for the microtransactions can make up for (and in a lot of cases exceed) the loss that they would experience otherwise.

One study I read shows that 1 in 10 people buy microtransactions in AAA titles.  This means that of those 100 people 10 are going to buy microtransactions.  That gets them a better chance of hitting their number.  Especially since they aren't alienating the already expectant userbase by increasing price across the board.

 

Edit: your mention of DLC and microtransactions vs increased base cost is essential taking the cost of something optional (no one is requiring you to buy the dlc to play the game at the initial price) and making it required.