This feels like a very negative way to go about life. And that's coming from me, who most people I know in real life accuse me of being overly negative and a bummer lol
I think what really helped me have a different outlook on video games was hearing and reading stories from developers. Watching things like
Indie Game: The Movie or following
Giant Bomb (I haven't watched them for a long time; it's different these days) for like a decade where they'd have many friends/guests on who were developers or the guys would share second hand accounts from private, privileged conversations (similar to what
@Famine was touching on) about a game that came out. Hearing the horror stories. This isn't the correct thread for it, but like everyone dumping on Ian Bell as if everything is under his control and rides on his shoulders. For all we know, he had a production timeline set up that involved fixing all these issues etc pre-release, and then the publisher was like SURPRISE! You need to release this 3 months earlier than we talked about. Or we are pulling half your staff onto another project for the last 3 months. Deal with it.
So all of those potential nightmares could be happening at PD. Unexpected deaths, peoples parental leaves, financial reasons and losing your house, license deals falling through, milestones changing, SIE surprising them with different ultimatums etc etc. When you actually understand how hard and complex it is to make video games these days, it's a miracle anything comes out at all. And in the end, they are just video games. If an employee needs to leave work or take a vacation or family emergency or whatever infinite possibility you can think of, so that they can attend to that situation, is more important than a virtual car or track or feature coming to a game a day or two or a patch cycle later. **** happens.
Edit: Heres a great series as well:
Double Fine Dev Documentary Series. And before I get a bunch of "Polyphony isn't an indie dev!", it doesn't matter. When you hear the second hand stories from devs who've worked on huge AAA productions like Call of Duty or a Sony first party title, it's not totally different. It comes with it's own crazy set of hoops and hurdles.
Also, I finally realized the word I had been thinking about in relation to the paid and free DLC:
Subsidized. Yes, the tracks and cars are coming free with Spec 3, but the DLC could basically be subsidizing the cost of those.
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That is how I choose to believe this is all happening. I fall back on the nothing-is-free notion here. Somehow money is coming from somewhere to pay for those licenses and dev time.
