system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:why are DLCs the standard for gaming now?

With many of the games coming out now downloadable content seems to be available for preorder immediately after the game is out. I don't play video games often for this exact reason, I feel as though I am being sold 3/4 of a game just to wait to buy the rest of it at a later date. From a business perspective why would a company not want to send out the whole finished product to make the game more appealing and an overall better experience?
gpt
Some companies do that; hold back features to resell them as DLC. We call those companies assholes.

On the other hand, for companies that aren't assholes, you need to look at things with the timetable for development in mind. During the lifecycle of a game's development, different groups within the dev team have different amounts of work to do. There are months between the day a game releases and the day that the content-creation group stops having work to do, and historically a lot of the time that meant that those guys would either move to another project or get laid off. You don't need animators once the animations for a game are in place; there's lots of work being done, but it's QA and debugging past a certain point, things that the art guys can't help with.

Nowadays, those art guys can just jump right into working on any planned DLC. So even though there's still months before the game releases, you've got guys working on the DLC because they literally can't work on the main game any longer.