1. Vote with your wallet. If it doesn't sell, a company that isn't planning on going bankrupt or taking major losses isn't going to sell similar products in the future.
2. Games still cost 60$ in the year 2016, which is the same number as in the year 1985, almost 31 years earlier. I'm no economist nor an insider in the gaming biz, but I speculate that
the reason why games are split up into DLC so much these days is that the value of 60$ since the 80s has pretty much halved due to inflation. If you sell a 50$ season pass on top of a 60$ game, it's basically 120$, which is what developers used to make back in the day.
3. Game budgets have blown up, the amount of people you need to pay, marketing, licenses for engines, music or development tools.. all those things have increased. You might say that games on the PS2 had more content, but the graphics are primitive compared to PS4. That's what the time is being spent on, because according to some hearsay, realistic graphics are the thing that markets a game to the masses according to some random publisher market research.
The Deadpool game had a budget of 200$ (GTA 5 was 320$ IIRC). The game got mixed reviews and since I can't find the sales figures on google, I suspect they broke even. These kinds of risks are what I speculate game publishers to be afraid of, so they want to make sure that a part of their consumers spend money on things like microtransactions and cosmetic DLC items.
I don't think your brown townogy with the paintings brown townogy is very appropriate, OP. Game graphics have evolved significantly, so saying that a painting today is just as detailed as a painting 10 years ago is a bit silly. The 99' Mona Lisa and the expansions should be painted in MS paint, the 2005 game should be all janky like a PS2 game and the Mona Lisa "now" should be as it is.
I feel that if publishers were ONLY interested in making money, they would've all flocked over to mobile gaming. There's much more money to be made there. Konami seems to have the "right idea" by jumping into pachinko, but they had pretty bad timing since it's currently being outlawed in Japan.