This is unfortunately a misrepresentation of the computer games industry. Cost to create a product hasn't gone up with inflation - it's gone up much, much faster. Small increases in graphics require large increases in team size. Games industry professional wages are increasing as demand for their skills increases.
I found your posts well-researched so far, so I'll trust you on this one (though if you have a quotable link, I'd still be grateful - for example, given the current situation on the job market with all these unemployed programmers and artists, I'd expect wages to be quite low.). However, I still can't believe that any realistic increase in costs can account for the fact that combined individual DLCs are more expensive than comparable expansion packs were. If anything, I'd expect DLC to be substantially cheaper.
For a regular expansion pack, costs (apart from creating the content) consisted of:
- obtaining and burning the CD/DVD, designing and printing the front side
- designing, printing, and folding the box
- possibly designing, printing, and folding the manual
- putting all of that together
- possibly storing it until sold
The publisher then sells a number of copies wholesale. The wholesale buyer may then resell it to smaller shops, or put the game on display on its own shops. In any case, he also has costs for shipping, he has to pay rent for his store, etc. All this is added to the product and finally makes up the retail price. I.e., all the things I listed so far are things that the customer ultimately has to pay for.
Now, compare that to DLC. You have _no_ costs for packaging, printing, assembling, or storage. Instead of shipping costs you have bandwidth costs which are smaller by an order of magnitude, especially for small files like DLC. You have less middle-men involved who want or need their piece of the pie.
Even if the costs for content creation have risen, I see no way how they could have risen so much that they outweigh all the savings listed above.
I think that DLC _could_ have been a win/win situation for publishers and customers - less expenses for publishers, lower prices for customers, both win. That's what I expected from DLC some years ago. But it didn't work this way, and the reason for this is that the publishers discovered that they can have even more "win" if they don't relay their savings to the customers. Moreover, they can even _increase_ prices (despite having lower expenses) because they are now much more flexible and can respond quicker to the market. They can start selling their product at a very high price, reaping maximal profits from the people who can't wait and/or who don't care so much for their money. Then they can slightly reduce the prices, continue to sell, and from time to time they can do a "weekend sale" for a lower price. With Steam, they can see how many people log on and see the offer, they can see how many people who haven't bought the product for the current price were then willing to buy it for the lower price. then they can adjust the price if calculation point to a higher profit. The way DLC is handled right now is great for publishers, especially with Steam and all the data it collects, you can be almost sure to maximize your profit. But it's very far from the customer-friendly invention that DLC _could_ have been, imho.
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I thought a euro was 1,0-1,2 dollars, but it's about 1,5dollars. Oh, well, it's good for the US economy 
