I've played Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2's DLC clans, Lasombra and Toreador, and they absolutely should have been in the base game

It's crazy, it's as if these corporations don't WANT my money. Never, EVER buy into day 1 DLC, it's the most anti-consumer practice in the entire games industry.

But Shadows & Silk has been made in conjunction with the rest of Bloodlines 2. It's been designed to be experienced at launch. This is not "new"; it's effectively part of the base game. But it's been purposefully siloed away to encourage players to shell out more cash. It's just a bad look.

This sums up my issue with this DLC. The two clans were part of the dev time when it came to developing Bloodines 2.

I see DLC mentioned and first thing I thought was did this game already release and I had no idea about it? If it's already out and no one is talking about it does it mean it's trash? Turns out it's still 2 months away from releasing.

But it's true this is paradox games we're talking about, more of a dlc studio than a games studio.

my new philosophy is pirating games with dlc

This is the future of game development. Games cost more to make, so they're going to pass the costs on to the consumer.

Right now games basically go for $70. There is a push for $80 and some developers are getting it (e.g. Nintendo with Mario Kart World). However, DLC will invariably push the game's cost closer to $100. To stick with MKW, it's not hard to see that not all the racers are in the game, who were in the last one. So the thinking there is they will probably be sold down the road for around $20 to get that game up to $100 total.

For a lot of gamers, the extra cost isn't that big of a deal. Gaming is still a cheap hobby, and all three console makers are seeing good numbers with their more expensive consoles. The PS5 and Xbox Series X weren't even improved, they just had their prices jacked up 10-20%. The Switch 2 is arguably just a minor uptick from the first model (and partially a downgrade from the OLED model) but it's something like 30-50% more? And it's selling like hotcakes, proving that gamers can afford to pay more, and will pay more. Not enough people are willing to put their foot down and declare that enough is enough when it comes to corporate greed. And with the costs of everything going up, it's not 100% greed driving the price increases. Developers gotta eat too.

I liked the Rockband model. You bought the base game for like $60 (or more like $200-250, whatever it was with the drums, guitar, and mic, but those were reasonable hardware costs) and then you bought the songs you wanted for $2 apiece. With the first two, the on-disc songs were mostly great. With the third one, it was more questionable, but since you could export the previous games' songs, it wasn't as bad. The fourth one's soundtrack mostly stunk, but then they gave us the ability to hide songs from certain sources, and by then we had over 150 songs from the previous 3 games (plus whatever DLC). Fun fact: Rockband is partially why console mods exist. Rockband 3 was the pilot program on Xbox 360, and to this day, you can load custom songs in it. It was never the intention to be able to do it for free, but the developers never cared that people were doing it. You could get uncensored songs, and you could get songs from other countries — there's a whole "J-Rockband" scene of people playing Japanese music on it — that the developers were never going to chart/sell. Not only were the developers all musicians, many of whom made customs for the paid market, but they have been "caught" playing the free customs as well. (The developer, Harmonix, is now part of Epic Games and is responsible for Fortnite Festival, which is free to play, but you can't use instrument controllers, and it's a revolving selection of songs.)

Sounds interesting, but I've never bought more than SC and Stellaris is because I don't do DLC. Their strategy puts me off before I even start.