"Infinite Growth" is not even a problem, it's a utopian pipedream that happens if you literally do everything right, but it can't actually occur. As a business increases in sheer size, it becomes less stable, less efficient, and les responsive to price feedback. The only reason that large companies even exist is the result of government interference to directly protect them, so that they can be used as dependent entities to control the economy. Otherwise, they'd collapse.

As for what you're pointing out here with DLC, this isn't the result of greed, it's the result of desperation.

Fundamentally, the AAA gaming market is totally unsustainable at this point. Making games at the cost of millions of dollars for over a decade is a horrifically unprofitable investment. These are monetization strategies because the upfront sale price of the games (and their first month of purchases after release) aren't even close to paying for the cost of the game; and gamers themselves are terribly resistant to seeing a price for almost any game past $69.99. As a result the upfront price to the consumer hasn't really moved moved in 2 decades. And since inflation has risen dramatically in the past 2 decades, the value of those dollars has gone down. They have even outpaced the natural deflationary pressure of technological development.

As a result, the Triple-A gaming companies are trying to figure out how to make games at the same initial price point that they previously made, while trying to differentiate themselves from an Indie Scene that has effectively started making Single-A games for a $20 price point. But, the game companies are so bloated and inefficient that there really isn't a way for them to cut their production costs without cutting Triple-A consumer expectations.

A good example was when I was watching a Markiplier video on Fort Solis. Fort Solis is, effectively, a suspense & psychological horror walking simulator. Markiplier has been playing indie horror games for years, and almost all are very low budget, and he almost had a breakdown from the fact that Fort Solis was a proper AAA game which put excruciating detail into the environment... despite the fact that it was poorly optimized.

Now yes, it is impressive that there were visual artists that put months of work into designing specific levels you basically see once and pass by, and probably spent at least a full working week trying to get the lighting to reflect in the right way on a puddle of water. However, the diminishing returns to this effort are extreme.

At the same time, consooomers who aren't used to playing games under $45 are physically repulsed by lower graphical standards. I've met real people in real life who see the original Halo CE footage and say, "It's physically unplayable." While dated, it's certainly not that bad; but there's no question that a certain segment of gamers would take a moderating of graphical standards to what is relevant as a personal attack.

So, they're caught in a bind. They groomed consoomers into thinking that the obsessive graphical fidelity of walking simulators is normal, though it is totally unsustainable from a cost perspective. They can't raise upfront prices for video games without people freaking out, especially parents. So, as the value of the income they make goes down, and the cost and difficulty of their expense goes up; the only remaining strategy to keep money rolling in is through psychological addiction, and parasitizing whales to spend all of their money on one game.

It won't work, by the way. It's unsustainable and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs as we are going to see the biggest gaming crash since The Death Of The Arcade in the upcoming recession; which is less than 5 years away (probably more like 6 months if you ask me). And yeah, EA is not getting a bailout. Blackrock yes, but EA, no.