Yes, that's one of the transgressors! ;)

I think I'm locked in the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk!

It gets pretty absurd if the mass of DLCs end up being much more costly than the main game. That's when it starts to feel predatory to me. It isn't even a good sales tactic, IMO, because psychologically customers are more likely to feel ripped off if they have to pay more for extras than for the base game. Sometimes it almost gets close to F2P territory even. Not what you'd expect when buying a full priced single player game.

BUT ...

as hard as it can be, I think it helps to try and let go off the idea that you need to play everything connected to a game. Often games overstay their welcome even before you reach the ending of the base campaign. And some companies are known to produce rather bad DLCs anyway (including Ubisoft). Or DLCs just introduce game modes that you probably wouldn't enjoy anyway etc. Nothing wrong with just skipping those.

horse armor?

Oh yea those cursed Ubisoft games and their extremely milking DLCs and passes.
I got Assassin's Creed Odyssey only last year on Winter Sale for 23 euros (Ultimate Edition and I got Assassin's Creed III Remastered + Liberty HD as a bonus together with that pack - with or without bonus I didn't settled for anything less than everything)

BUT I have a friend of mine who literally got scammed by Ubisoft with AC Valhalla - so a fair warning to anyone who buys and preorders in general (some devs/pubs may be worth it some definitely not).

He is a big fan of AC franchise so naturally after some time thinking if he should preorder or not he did it - Ultimate Edition no less - he payed for it around 120 or 130 euros. Well, all good and nice until Ubisoft released that so called big DLC Dawn of Ragnarok - which should be included in the Ultimate Edition after all 130 euros is a lot of money for one game and they did advertise that it will include all future released content.
Guess what, it is not - Ultimate Edition does not exist anymore and Ubisoft just put up a new edition called "Complete Edition" for the same price - 120 or 130 euros.
When he asked on support about it they told him that Dawn of Ragnarok is not included in the Season Pass and it is a special DLC.

While I can't blame you, the base Digital Edition plays just fine on its own, and also allows one to try out most of the proper expansion DLCs one by one via a rotating weekly free trial. The DLC are just there to provide variety -- while one can certainly play with them all enabled, I don't think you'll find too many (non-psychotic) experienced players that would recommend that. This is a game with which you'd do well to abandon the notion of "gotta own all the parts!"

Something I have a bigger problem with currently is that several of the DLC for the Digital Edition (plus the base standalone spin-off game Talisman: Origins cost more here than on Steam, at least in my region.

I was going insane this week about how much DLC Steel Division 2 has for it. Is it really necessary to have that much? Why not just make one big DLC?

Yeah, makes you miss the good old days when GOG sold games only as complete editions, and with worldwide pricing, doesn't it?

There've been developers and publishers who have been doing that for a while now. I think some of Paradox's games have been criticized for including fixes to long-standing issues in paid expansion DLC, rather than pushing them as updates to the base game. But I've never really partaken of their games, so I can't speak to specifics.

I thought I remembered that being GOG's stance... but... then thought I must have been misremembering.

On multiple occasions I have dropped my interest in a game (which I haven't acquired) after the first DLC for it get released.

Graveyard Keeper, Endzone...some games look interesting as is, but the moment I realize their makers decided to go the DLC route, I just press the switch in my mind and drop any interested in those games.

For games that are just too good to miss even when they have tons of DLC, I tend to accept that fate, focus on the important DLCs (that add gameplay content) and ignore unnecessary ones (like item packs for Two Point Hospital).

It's a curse on our wallets, it's a scourge of the industry...but DLCs are here for a while now and they are not gonna disappear any time soon.

Yea it's crazy. I had wishlisted Relayer Advanced because it looked interesting.. now it just launched, with two editions, a season pass, a dlc pack, and 13 dlcs? Get outta my wishlist right now.

Yeah, back in the day when DLCs were called mission disks (for obvious reasons), it wasn't as annoying as they came out maybe a year after the real game was released, and extended its lifetime.

Now when there are several different versions from the launch day, in some cases even slightly different versions for those who preorder the game, it's beyond ridiculous.

Simply trying to study what kind of versions the game has takes a lot of time.


Having said that, I am willing to make one notable exception here.
In some simulator games, which really aren't my favourite genre at all, it makes some sense that you can buy separately those trains or trainlines or whatever that you want to be playing.

But that's such a super niche that it probably wouldn't work otherwise, and presumably it's even more convenient for those players to get only what they exactly want instead of downloading 100 scenery packs and using only two.

Thinking of new DLCs is not hard. Here is one I just thought of:

New DLC:

Cool Lips $1.99

You can now wear blue lipstick. We added a couple of mirrors to the game so you will have more chances to see yourself with those cold cool lips.

I have a better one:

Game Reset $5.00

This consumable DLC allows you to reset your game, deleting saved data, so that you can then start a new game. This DLC can only be used once, after which you need to purchase it again if you wish to do so a second time.

(Worth noting that enforcing the requirement for this DLC would require the use of DRM.)