I agree with you, but also.... IDK, this might be a fanboy of me cause I live, breathe, eat Gran Turismo.... But we get a lot of free stuff from the developers that other companies would at least charge 5$ for.... Sure, they have the microtransactions (Which I have not touched since day one), but other than that.... One paid content drop in 3 years of the game's lifespan is not a bad trade-off. Just my two cents on this. I know I will be getting this day one.
You are not wrong, but the value of such "free content" has to be contextualized. If PD gives away for free content that nobody wants, is it really free?
I mean, 99.9% of the playerbase wouldn't pay for the Toyota Alphard, or the Hipace.
Putting either of those in a 5 car pack for 5$, would be bad, because they would be forcing players to pay for them, to get access to the cars they actually want that may be available in the pack.
If they gave those crappy things for free, but put the cars that players actually wanted as paid DLC, it would feel quite insulting.
They couldn't also release cars that were already premium in past games, because even though they are remodeled, it would feel like content had been held back just to sell to players.
Paid DLCs would require PD to listen to players, to make sure the packs would be desirable, with cars that players actually want.
Any sort of "Season Pass", that accounts for all paid DLCs, would have to be nicely priced, and would require transparency as to what content would be available. Imagine paying 50$ for it, to get 130 cars, which include things like random SUVs, random vans, duplicates, VGTs, cars from previous games, and only a few absolutely new to the franchise and highly desirable cars. This wouldn't cut it.
We also have to contextualize the GT Sport and GT7 base car lists. GTS had a pretty bad car list. People bought the game under the premise that it would end up getting up to 500 cars via free updates. Although we didn't get to 500, not even close, the cars added were most of the time pretty good.
In GT7 the car list was severely outdated, smaller than the direct competition (Forza), so free updates were pretty much a requirement, following the praise and expectations they got from GTS in that regard. If you paid for those 130 cars, you would end up with a game with a similar amount of cars as Forza Motorsport (base game only), except Forza somehow would still have a better car list overall.
With this new DLC, the main complaint is that this should have been in the game from the start, or atleast something similar to it. Instead, we bought the game with a pretty bad offline portion, that barely improved with updates, only to get shafted with a paid solution that fixes many of the criticism the base game has.
