"Just don't buy the Microtransactions! EASY!" No. For many, that's now how this works. The problem is simple: When you want to sell something, there has to be a need for it. It's easy for us to surmise that everything in a MTX list (take, Dragon's Dogma 2 for instance) is "extra" or "unneeded" since you get it all in the game. No harm, no foul, right? Wrong. When you try to sell items, you try to make a need. You need an impetus for purchase. When you start attaching money into items you earn in the game, who is to say: "The game developers were told to make sure that we limit X item because they are selling it as DLC." So maybe that game designer was going to put an super rare item drop on that hard boss, or maybe at the end of that hard dungeon. But nope! They ended up putting a lesser item there to influence folks to want to BUY that particular rarer item as DLC. Now did this actually happen? WHO KNOWS. Could it actually happen? Think about it... ABSOLUTELY. Think of the companies we're talking about here. You honestly think they wouldn't change the mechanics/game play/drop rate of items to encourage players to buy them as DLC? So many folks view this as a slippery slope (which, over the decades, it's clear we've been sliding down). Is it going to be that one day, an RPG like this releases with a 14 page PDF on real-prices of every single item in the game for purchase? Sounds ridiculous, right? But tell me something... If these companies thought they COULD do that and get away with it, would they? And what direction are we going in right now? 🤣 I want to end this ridiculously long post with this: This is all a thought-experiment on why people get so angry at single-player DLC. There are thousands of reasons people hate it, but this is mine. If you're one of the ones that doesn't like single-player DLC, why? If you don't mind it at all after reading all this, why? And finally, if you are one of the people who says, "It's cool, they can do whatever they want, I just won't buy it," are you fully confident that stuff like this isn't going to get much worse over time? And if so, why? Ok, good talk! 🤣