Today I checked the eShop and saw that Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland was added to the Coming Soon section. (The game will release on May 24th for Switch and PS4... and probably PC, but who cares.)

Aside from the standard edition for €60, there was also a set offered for €75. Said set includes DLC that, if bought individually, would cost €28.50. Saving €13.50 may sound like a good deal on the surface, but if you look at the individual pieces, you see this:

1 costume - €3.49
1 costume - €3.49
1 costume - €3.49
BGM pack - €8.99
Extra Dungeon - €8.99

Yes, you are reading that right. They aren't selling a costume pack for €3.49, no, it is really only a single costume. And if you are thinking that that has to be bikini DLC when it's so expensive, then you are wrong. The three costumes above allow you to dress up three Atelier Lulua characters with the standard outfits of Rorona, Cordelia and Sterk from the game Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland. The BGM pack contains 180 tracks from previous Gust games, but paying for music... who wants that. The extra dungeon is Machina Domain which players of the Atelier Arland trilogy will already know from Atelier Rorona and Atelier Meruru, so a familiar dungeon layout with extremely strong enemies and bosses.

Alright, Gust is greedy even with a season pass option. Atelier Lydie & Suelle: The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings, a title that released a good year ago on multiple platforms, had an €80 season pass for individual pieces that amounted to ~€95. The DLC included expensive costumes, music, playable characters (€10 for each one) and an extra dungeon (also €10).

Apparently enough players pay those prices when Gust continues with these DLC practices. Almost forgot to mention that Atelier Lulua doesn't have only one season pass, but three:

https://www.play-asia.com/blog/2019/04/05/3-season-passes-for-atelier-lulua-the-scion-of-arland-jp-ver-revealed/

The other two season passes are more expensive because they have more costumes. Actual gameplay value is only delivered in the form of the playable characters Totori and Meruru (the heroines of game 2 and 3 in the Arland trilogy) who will also have their own event scenes. Purchasing the characters individually will likely cost €9 each.

Those are seriously baffling prices. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had a €30 expansion pass (no individual pieces up for purchase) and that came with costumes, a few additional characters with their own sidequests, 20 additional sidequests and a battle arena. That's more value than what Atelier Lulua offers with its DLC, and that at about one third of the price. And that's before the comparison gets plain unfair, because the XC2 expansion pass also included an essentially separate game that had a length of 25-35 hours.

Shame on all the people who've let it come to this.

That's Koei Tecmo for ya. They lead in expensive pointless DLC. Do I have to remind you that every piece of DLC in Dead or Alive 5 amounted to $1500?

€8.99 for 180 songs? That actually sounds like a bargain lol, everything else seems ridiculously overpriced though... fuck that.

The same company showed that they can do it differently with the Fire Emblem Warriors DLC. A €20 season pass contained three packs, each one with three characters, various new perks for weapons and three history maps that added about ~20 hours of gameplay. But maybe that's because it was a collaboration with Nintendo.

If I had to guess, their strategy isn't to sell to as many people as possible. It's to squeeze as much money as they can from the few serious fans who play it. (It's the same strategy you'll see in many mobile games.) I couldn't imagine spending more than $5 on the game itself, much less DLC, but I'm sure there are those who love to collect all the cute costumes and dress up all the characters.

My niche is stories like Made In Abyss, and I can't resist collecting all the books, concept artbooks, and dvds of it I can. Similar thing, I bet.

Atelier Lydie & Suelle had a BGM pack that was free to download for a limited time. I must have most of the music from the Lulua BGM pack on my Switch already, because the L&S pack contained more than 500 tracks.

Yes. That's totally why. 

Absolutely.

It is not a coincidence that the Atelier series became heavily focused around a mostly female cast. They notes from Compile Heart. 

The same people that buy DLC for Dynasty Warriors games?

So... you?