In general I loathe the move to expecting players to put their hands in their pockets over and over again for a game.
I started gaming back when buying a game meant going to a store, buying a box with a disc in it (or indeed a cassette tape) and that was what you got. If the game had a showstopping bug at release and if it was a massively popular game and if you were lucky, you might find that a patch for it found its way onto a magazine coverdisc a few months later.
If any of our younger readers are thinking 'OK pops, so how could that possibly be better than what we have now, when gamebreaking bugs can get patched within a day of a game's release and we can get loads of super add-on content via the gift of DLC' the answer is this. Very few games were actually shipped with gamebreaking bugs to begin with back in the day because knowing that there would be no way to fix them, companies did a hell of a lot more QA before release rather than treating their customers as unpaid beta testers when they should be playing a new release game, and as for all that whizz-bang DLC, half of it would have been in the sequel game and the other half would have been where it belonged - in the original release game, without you being expected to pay another £15 to buy the actual full experience of the game.
I think the early days of the internet and gaming were the best. There was a sweet spot from a consumer's point of view for a while when the internet was enabling the release of patches, yet the software companies hadn't learned that you could also shake the money tree a lot harder using it.
Steam has really been the driver of much of the move to what we have now; there's no question that it's done good things by allowing a lot of indies to reach audiences the likes of which they could only have dreamed of (for example Stardew Valley, in my opinion one of the most inspiring stories to come out of gaming in recent years would not have been shipping over a million copies and getting game of the year nominations in 1990, it would have been a college project that may have ended up being shared round between a mailing group and stuck on some shareware compilations) but the other side of the coin is that it empowers the large developers to basically rinse their players in previously unimagined ways and I don't find that a good thing.
Having accepted that the software companies are clearly not going to change the move towards more and more DLC/add-ons though (one of the reasons that I buy virtually nothing at release now and wait until I can get the whole shebang in a steam sale) I think the way that E D does it is fine, or at least as fine as you can get within the overall model. E D's microtransaction stuff in the shops is not gameplay critical, it confers no advantage and as such, I think it's perfectly OK to say to players 'take it or leave it'. I understand why some players think basic colour packs should be included, but it's really not a big deal to me at all - if the stuff was gameplay related it would be, but it's not.
The future of the season pass model is what interests me. I actually liked it as a concept (within the overall context given above) in that you paid a set amount for a set number of updates and knew where you stood with them. I don't know for sure if they're going to change it after 2.4 although it was hinted at and if they do change it, I have no idea what it will change to. As long as we don't move to a scenario where players are regularly being milked for actual gameplay content though, I suspect I'll still be OK with it.
