Okay, then let's remove all reticle for all non-paying players. See if you can hit your expected target without any reticle.

I do agree you won't get any competitive advantage from having another reticle than the standard one - but this stuff used to be free! I just played some Serious Sam: TFE the other day again and it comes with over 2 dozen different reticles. It's not pay to win, but it's pure greed! Keep in mind that you shell out 110$ (Game + Season Pass) already, that should be more than enough to finance this game, especially without the singleplayer campaign and it's expensive voice actors.

This is why I barely buy new games from those big publishers anymore. They just got way too greedy.

About both graphs konnichiva posted:

Yes, development costs are stagnating. The publishers are producing less games than in the past, that's also true. But the correlation between the 2 is wrong.

Publishers needed to produce at least one game or expansion pack every quarter to not have a huge gap in their revenue charts. With DLC though, that need vanished, as the spendings from those are not mostly limited to the release quarter, but are spread out throughout the year, thus providing a nice baseline without the need for those niche offerings, hence why they cut them out. They didn't get cut to reduce development costs, they got cut just because they weren't necessary anymore, since with DLC whey got the same income from much less effort.

And that's where it took a turn for the worse. Things that were in games in the past got cut out to be sold as DLC. Unlockables got grindier and grindier for you shell out the money instead. And then came the lootboxes and other Gatcha schemes where you don't even know what you'll get for your money - and most of the time what you get is trash you already have or don't need. Hence why on the second graph the income keeps growing and growing - pretty much exclusively from DLC. The publishers have mostly consolidated onto their core series, with sometimes a new IP to catch a market their core IP are not covering. But since they only cut out smaller games and their new IP are almost always something big, it's telling that their development budgets are not increasing: they don't spend much on their core IP anymore; just look at all the recycling in CoD or Fifa. And no, that's ot necessary for them to break even, it's just cheaper for them and thus even more profitable.

Like I said in an earlier post here, Dragon Age: Origins was the last game from EA that I bought, and it had the writings on the wall. I bought the steelbook edition with the Stone prisoner DLC and Blood Dragon Armor. But during gameplay iy got very obvious that both Shale and the infamous Warden's Keep (infamous due to the questgiver is with you in camp and wants you to accept his mission. If you do, you get sent to the shop to buy said mission, something unthinkable at the time but sadly not today anymore) were just cut out of the finished game to sell them separately and make an extra buck out of them.

But DA:O also had the right kind of DLC, the kind I can agree with: Prequel missions for several characters, a perspective flip where you play as the Blight instead of trying to stop it, a mission specially for experienced players with high difficulty and an entire Expansion pack with a new storyline. Those all can give a game more value - but how often do we see those kinds nowadays?

So what? Irrelevant to what I said.

Many people also skip DLC and microtransactions.

The content would have still existed. The content would have simply been more comprehensive and better bang-for-buck. - They used to call such content an "expansion pack".
Or... It would just simply be included within the game itself from the outset... Plenty of examples where questionable content that pertains to a games story was cut and made DLC after the fact.

People keep buying DLC and Microtransactions... So Publishers will try any kind of tactic to monetize anything and everything... If you like DLC, then sure. You like it. But that just means you support the current industry trend... And you don't really get the right to whinge when things go south.

Don't worry, he's been completely irrelevant since the beginning of the discussion. 

"But but but but pixel value !" ... That's not the topic at all, but he's apparently unable to admit anything if Nintendo is involved. 

Developers have said before that some DLC is completely original and would not have been included in the base game if DLC did not exist.  In fact, developers have said that there is tons of content that is cut for design and narrative considerations that might show up as DLC but would not otherwise find its way to consumer.  I've read such about Obsidian and BioWare and I'm pretty sure someone involved with Borderlands said the same thing. 

And if you're going to equate DLC with microtransactions (which is ridiculous) then "expansion packs" are the same thing.  Anyone who bought those doesn't get to whinge, either.

So they are only figures to many people, but people here act like it is only DLCs to everyone

When you get amiibo, you don't have to use it for game but as a figure collection instead, the red dot DLC things, not so much "but he's apparently unable to admit anything if Nintendo is involved", i will if they only have one way to use it as DLC but nope, not the case with amiibo, it have at least 2 ways to use. Also, wonder what will you do if Sony is involved

@ bolded: Yeah, though the reason for this is generally that including all those things would make them miss the deadline even with weeks of crunchtime. In Indie cases, it can also be due to financial reasons, as including them would delay the release too long for them to finance the development. I can understand the latter case, especially if the developers are upfront about it. Often in those cases, the DLC is then free or at least pretty cheap and good value for money.

The former however, not so much. Especially if the deadline from the publisher is so short that the developer has to decide right at the beginning what they can include and what not (happened at least twice with Obsidian, once for KotOR II and then with Fallout New Vegas). I don't fault the developers about that, it's just ridiculous behavior from the publishers. And with the DLC in mind they know they can do this with impunity, so it's sometimes an enforced trope.

Paid DLC is a form of Microtransactions, but not all microtransactions are DLC. Expansion packs are much bigger and generally sell at the price of an Indie game (around 20 bucks generally) and come with lots of content; their cheaper price mostly stems from reusing all the assets from the base game and only developing few new things for them. But I agree conflating all of them is ridiculous

I never said anything to the contrary. I am well aware some DLC is "original".

See my point regarding: Expansion packs for those.

Expansion packs were actually substantial and often featured additional campaigns, FMV's, units and so on. (I.E. StarCraft Brood Wars.)
They were actually substantial, they were actually worth buying.

DLC? More often than not... Is just a waste of time and money. - Are there exceptions? Of course. There always is.
But as the whole, Microtransactions and DLC is a bane on gaming... It has blown out the cost to purchase a game in it's entirety, it hasn't really offered the consumer more bang-for-buck.

I kinda agree with you.

Tons of gaming youtubers still promoting gambling sites to kids while faking winning huge amounts,its disgusting and they should be punished for this.