[phrom]

At least my lament is not so much that it is naked profit seeking, but that it is naked profit seeking that warps the product.

In the example of games, that additional revenue stream of day 1 DLC means content being arbitrarily cut off from the game before it's even released. That premium subscription with a +30% XP bonus is often a -30% XP loss for normal players in disguise. Those loot boxes and battle passes are holding hostage rewards that would be given out naturally through gameplay in another time. Those energy and gacha systems are preying on whales and gamblers.

In the case of software, at the same time the subscription model got popular, every application has also been reimagined as a "service, not a product". Maybe the death of local desktop apps would have happened anyway. I don't know.

[rincebrain]

Sure, it's quite possible and often happens that you do day 1 on-disc DLC and other such nonsense based on the warped incentives (though usually, I would say, the specific example of a large XP bonus isn't that they balanced around that and gave everyone -30% afterward, because that leads to horrible backlash like...I think it was Battlefront 2 where the XP system very clearly was not balanced for you not paying, and people threw a huge fit?).

As I said, I'm no more of a fan than anyone else of this, but I don't know what a better alternative here would be. The gap in cost versus upfront price is pretty large, and I doubt many developers could charge $300 or something like that and get a net gain in income.