well DLC has always cost money on top of the base game so i’m not sure what your point is.
edit:
you’re ignoring that if you buy all DLCs you get much more content compared to old $60 games. If you want to look at this fairly you need to come up with some way of quantifying the content involved which is not easy to do.
I do agree that some DLCs are clearly designed as money grabs (like most premium/gold launch editions). But i disagree with lumping all DLC into that category, especially bigger expansions that release a year or more later.
And, what makes the debate difficult with them is that they’ve always viewed adult content as a “risky” subject - due to higher frequency of support cases, chargebacks, general frustration, etc. As such, some processor that sell their service to adult businesses may charge higher rates - rates that stores like Steam or Itch are probably less willing to pay for 90% of their library.
but game platforms are clearly not your typical “adult business”. there are payment issues with adult businesses because they use shady billing practices like dark patterns, automatic renewals after a “free” trial, etc. I don’t know of any popular game platform that is anywhere close to that shady.
Once this review is complete, we will introduce new compliance measures. For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.
kind of a clever way to say “hey don’t give us grief, if you want to change this go complain to visa and mastercard.”
the payment processors didn’t randomly wake up this week and decide to ban NSFW video games on a power trip.
they are being financially pressured in some way to threaten game platforms that they’ll remove their services completely. the implication of that is they’re worried about losing even more money than they make from payments on game platforms.
from the payment processors perspective, they’re thinking, “okay this is not a hill we want to die on and it’s a small percentage of our business anyway.”
this is nothing new, yet clearly it isn’t stopping execs from (rightfully) casting diverse actors. they aren’t cancelling a $200m mediocre show because of a few noisy bigots.