Why should we pay $80 for a game, and then have to finish the game and fix it ourselves?
That's what I call being fools.
There's a strong argument to be had that the $60 sale price for a AAA game is unsustainable due to the high development costs and risk, but raising the sales price directly would negatively impact sales. The companies have a two fold issue where they are selling the games at too low a cost to profit from and they can't innovate too much without undertaking too much risk.
As a result they keep the initial sales price where it is to avoid losing sales, but they charge for additional content later. Since at this point people already own the game, they are going to be more likely to pay this, so it doesn't hurt sales. In order to solve for the innovation, companies allow the players to undertake the more risky and extreme changes to the content themselves while the company provides a stable and safe base game intended to be appealing to a broad base of players.
If you want to see this in action. Look at xcom, another Firaxis title. This is what the development team had to say about the Long War mod for their game.
"We're basically a 20-hour tutorial for Long War, and that's okay."
Interestingly, Firaxis didn't really take any of those highly-praised features provided by the mod into their sequel xcom 2. They once again just provided a stable base game. Perhaps they deemed it too risky or costly to implement the features created by the modders.
Now here's the interesting part. On the official site for XCOM 2 is "Long War 2"
Firaxis has hired the modding team and is working in tandem with them to create some sort of official expansion to the game.
Like it or not, Modders are considered an essential part of Gaming and companies are fully aware of this. We might not be aware of it but AAA games may be dying. We think they will always exist and we take them for granted, but this crazy behavior we see from big companies. That's how companies are adapting to keep AAA games alive.
Now, if we don't like this system. We can do something about it because we know how it works. Simply, don't buy the game when its released. Every new release will be full of bugs. Every new release will be missing features which will be sold down the road. Every new release will eventually be overhauled by talented modders. Since we know this all we have to do is wait. Just wait for the price to go down and buy he whole thing as a bundle, and immediately install the best, most recommended mods on it. Then we are getting exactly what we want immediately with no consequences.
