I agree. Strategy game do occupy a weird space, EU4 was a go to game for me for like 10 years. I appreciated the support for the game and did buy the DLC that changed mechanics (skipping most flavour packs). I remember people complaining about janky mechanics without DLC, but I know others would rollback to previous versions.

Funny thing is that despite playing EU4 for years and really enjoying the game. I feel little urge to upgrade to EU5.

The only DLC thing I hate is when there is DLC for sale on the same day of launch. That should be in the base game.

But the base game isn’t that expensive and most expansions are unnecessary game play wise. Even when I played paradox games I didn’t buy all the DLC

I’m a pessimist. The price increase won’t hurt them unless they lose more than 33% of the user base. Which is a big number of people choosing to change a habit/lifestyle.

Even if they do lose that amount, they could walk back the 50% and wait a few months and “only” increase it by 20%. People will feel good that they owned the big corpo and the big corpo still manages to increase profit.