I feel really bad for the people working on these games. PAYDAY 3 will eventually reach success in a niche, but will likely be hated by those same people.

The objective behind a game like this, or Sims, or FIFA/FC, is not to create a great gameplay experience. Sadly, they make a passable game, that will help them leech money sustainably for a considerable amount of time, through endless DLC. Paradox will inevitably make Colossal Order do the same with C:S2, despite them claiming that it'll be fewer but larger DLC.

There are very few studios I will refuse to show respect for, and the one behind PAYDAY is one of them. Just like what remains of Maxis

I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.

Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going "you're not SUPPOSED to guy every pack". Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn't get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don't even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don't do anything without cottage living. And they already didn't do much WITH it)

The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it's such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can't control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn't have fairies somehow but there's rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but... you won't be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.

So, it's not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one... for that's about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like "what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?" They barely add anything new.

I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.

CK3 was the last straw for me. It's been years, and the DLC released is both expensive and lacking in the mechanics of CK2.

Yeah, and Payday 2 had basically nothing at launch compared to Payday and people bitched about the lack of content after only two years.

What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That's simply not possible. So it's either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.