DLCs are not only new skins. A DLC with a new vehicle and a new weapon? How the hell am I supposed to know whether they are worth it for the gameplay? If they are completely irrelevant, I'd think no one would buy them, hence they wouldn't be made by the publisher either because I'm sure they only want to make content that people feel are relevant.

Not all expansion packs for 20 years old game were that good either. But at least there weren't usually dozen different expansion packs for one game.

And I am specifically talking about content made by the original publisher/developer, not user-made content.

So how do you evaluate each small DLC? Googling for reviews of each of them separately? My point was that trying to figure out the relevance and usefulness of each of the dozen DLCs makes already buying the damn game too much work, so the idea of simply buying it all and doing the evaluation by yourself starts to sound a good idea.

And of course GOTYs are the preferred way because buying the base game + DLCs separately is most of the time laughably overpriced. Look at e.g. the Darksiders Franchise pack (which is a kind of "GOTY" with not only Darksiders 1+2, but all the D2 DLCs too): that bundle costs _less_ than the Darksiders 2 base game alone.

Except when we are talking about 20 year old GOG games, right?

If most DLCs are completely useless, how come they get made?