You can blame corporate all you want, but in the end it’s the fuckers who end up buying this shit that enables it and makes it an industry standard.

Meh. None of these were born like that. DLC was born because after the game was successful devs thought “cool let’s develop some more content and sell that as well”.

Early access was born because “shit we literally starve while we develop our game because we have no money, because our game isn’t done yet to sell it”.

Free to play was born… Well, pretty much like that probably.

But the other two were made greedy after the fact, they’re not inherently an evil system. Even free to play can work when only selling cosmetics, where everyone has the same gameplay.

You just have to check and see how the developers of a game behave, how each system is implemented.