It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.


And the other side of the coin, with the advent of DLC, being able to take a complete game and carve pieces off of it to sell separately for more profit.
For a long while, DLC has been just an excuse to foist unnecessary content on the consumer for sales. There are a few notable exceptions in this like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, earlier Borderlands, and, surprisingly, the recent Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon.
For the most part, though, I have not bought DLC without thoroughly vetting it. I’m not talking about cosmetics. I’m talking about actual story/content additions being overpriced fetch quests which are, more often than not, just vehicles for more useless cosmetics.
As an example, Fallout 4 DLC (much like the basegame itself) was a mistake seated in brand loyalty/a hope of redeeming the title. The DLC featured cosmetic additions for their Sims style settlement minigame, a couple cutesy fetch quests for armor, and two unfinished story DLCs that played like the elevator pitch of what would have eventually been fleshed out of this we’re an earlier entry in the series.
With most story DLC, at best, you get a lackluster and entirely forgettable addition to the basegame. At worst, you get horse armor disguised as a new campaign or an unforgivably half assed hodge podge of storylines that cheapen the rest of your experience with the game.