> Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry.
I'm not saying that there aren't greedy game companies, or outright nefarious practices; but speaking as an industry insider I can at least understand why the entire industry has lurched this way.
There's 3 things that you must take on faith are true:
1) Microtransactions bring in money.
2) Games cost more to produce than they ever have.
3) Roughly 90% of gamers are very price sensitive.
So, if you leave out micro transactions, then your budget is slashed and you have to make a lesser game, you might think this is fine, but our competitors will (and do, because we have a very tight policy regarding microtransactions) walk all over us in terms of budget. R&D is expensive and we'll be playing catch-up for years.
You could of course, attempt to keep the budget and not introduce micro-transactions. You could argue that our games make a modest profit even without monetisation but that's certainly not always true, and the closer we move to operating on the breadline the more likely we are to make "safe" choices because risking anything could put hundreds of people out of work (and, we are guilty of this in some cases; see: Assassins Creed)
Finally you could say: well, if the cost of producing games has increased, why not increase the base price instead of chopping it up into add-ons to create special editions and in-game content that needs to be purchased. The answer is of course that if we raise the base price people will be outraged, games can be expensive (if you only play a handful of hours they are more expensive than a movie ticket, but obviously the cost-per-hour of entertainment goes down if you enjoy the game- still, there is personal risk for this) so people aren't willing to risk $100-$120 for a base game, in fact, many people wait for the game to come down in price before buying (as high as 15% of players based on the last time I looked at our market segmentation).
I mean, I understand, it's not enriching your experience to have paywalled content inside the game. But what you don't realise is that a lot of the content that even made it in to the base game, made it in on the fact that there are people who _really_ want to buy a special hat.