Being stuff and not being unique enough are practically the same thing in terms of games. Call of Duty or Battlefield are well made and obviously have time put into them, but once they milk it 5-6 times over it starts to get stale and samey. Obviously AAA companies treat games not as videogames but as a business and do what they must in order to profit. Even nintendo is guilty of it, what with needing to buy amiibos in order to unlock stuff in some games; it's just physical dlc. It is the fault of the consumer that supports with their dollar what is and is not successful.
game development
is a business. AAA titles have millions of dollars at risk and you have to prove to investors that it's worth the dough they're slamming down on it. indie studios and hobbyist devs have the advantage of being small-scale and low-cost enough to take an idea and run with it, often regardless the risk or time investment required, but when you have that kind of money at stake and a massive studio that needs to keep its good name, you're going to have a hard time convincing investors to trust lofty ambitions over proven design. i'm mentioning this because you seem to be framing this as studios failing to understand something fundamental about game design, but reality is that you just have to make a lot of sacrifices when money is on the line, and often that means shedding your grand ideas and settling for what's realistic and what can be built from pieces you already have. studios honestly just don't have the resources to build or rethink their games from the ground up every time.
Development costs skyrocket because they throw away money putting smaller aspects above gameplay itself, like hiring voice actors and advertising the game everywhere possible. Advertising costs big bucks which is why game developers coddle streamers so they get free advertisement.
development costs are skyrocketing for a lot of complex reasons other than mismanagement of resources. games are becoming bigger and better, and more employees are necessary to divide tasks up more efficiently in order to sustain this growth, which costs money. we could never make modern games with the same budgets of games made ten years ago, because the economy and industry is always changing and growing. as game dev becomes a bigger and bigger industry, the scale of project that people are willing to fund will grow as well. advertisement is necessary to make sure your game is well-exposed and hyped up, so that people will actually buy your game. it costs money, but when you've already dropped millions on funding a game, you simply can't afford to let it go unknown.
Besides, DLC is fine if it's not cut out from the base game to sell later. Extra content is always great.
it pretty much never is. i'm sure this can vary greatly from studio to studio, but dlc is often made separate from main game development with the intent to be sold as dlc. maybe sometimes a certain part of a game doesn't quite work out within the time frame of ordinary development and that odd case ends up being delayed and sold later, but i doubt this makes up any significant portion of dlc. sometimes, certain roles in game dev may have nothing to do, and you're wasting money having them sit around twiddling their thumbs. with the onset of digital distribution, it's become much easier to assign teams to small content expansion projects, maybe just to make sure they have work to do or to train new employees or something, because you can sell that tiny amount content and justify the cost. and it doesn't take anything away from the main development. it doesn't make any business sense to deliberately make your game worse, because if your game is bad, people just won't buy it.
Microtransactions aren't as fine, mostly depends on the context in which you use it (pay2win vs cosmetics). RNG crates or lootbox microtransactions, however, do not give you a choice of what to get so you throw away money for something you didn't even want. Yet people keep throwing money at it, so companies will keep using it until it doesn't make them money any more, because that's business.
there's nothing inherently wrong with microtransactions. they help to continuously fund development and they're a godsend for modern free-to-play models that would otherwise have very few resources to work with and provide very little incentive for investment. you can certainly implement microtransactions in a way that hurts your game, just as with any design decision, but that doesn't mean they're bad design or bad business. loot box type things are a pretty good example of a
skinner box, and you can argue one way or another about whether that's a good thing, but either way it can be implemented in a humane manner. i think overwatch does a pretty decent job at this, at least where i'm at, because you have plenty of opportunities to get loot boxes through fair in-game means, but they let you pay if you really want more. but it's all cosmetic, so it doesn't really have a massive impact on gameplay, it just feels nice for the player, and that's worth something.
Keyword: SMALL. There's no problem with small patches and small improvements, when it's over loving 5 gigabytes of data it forgets over people who may not have the best internet (or no internet at all!), and there's no excuse for having THAT much to fix besides being rushed by publishers or being lazy.
i think conan understated the time period between finish a game and the game going to market. in reality, i'm pretty sure for AAA titles it can often be more like six months or more. that's a lot of down time. (btw this is where a lot of DLC, including a lot of that dreaded day-one DLC, is made or started as well, after the game is already done) the reason you need all this time is because you need to advertise the game, give reviewers a chance to play it, etc. during this time, you're also manufacturing physical copies and shipping them all over the world. the problem is that you can't modify the data on all those disks after they're produced. in game dev, problems often come up in unexpected places. sometimes you've worked on a part of your game for months and suddenly you add a feature and everything breaks. sometimes you're relying on a third party to deliver on a feature or a bit of code that never quite makes it to the deadline. stuff happens and sometimes it's hard to fix. it doesn't just happen because people are lazy, it happens because game dev is forgetin hard. it's not unlikely that studios are often put in a position where they would have to choose between fixing a major bug or implementing a major/minor feature. being able to digitally distribute a magic fix to a vast majority of your player base is loving phenomenal, and it lets studios breathe while they crunch to do the best they can with the time they've got. so please don't be upset with a studio for fixing their game, be glad that they have the tech to do it, because it lets them focus on making better games.
