Yeah, I've seen the obvious increase in DLC over the last 5-6 years, but you know what? A majority of the time DLC involves a fair bit of man-hours, which spread over a whole studio (as a studio will always be involved in any DLC released) will cost money, and so these people have to be paid, which is lost revenue as far as the publisher is concerned, and- oh look, you have to pay money to buy something that people made, how absurd and outrageous.
Before you jump down my throat and say "But Vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalve update TF2 for freeeeeeeeeeeee" - I know, how utterly amazing that a studio which is directly funded by one of the most successful digital distribution enterprises to date is releasing DLC for free!
And don't forget about the micro-transactions that TF2 has now incorporated, which I notice has been swept under the rug as everyone injects even more money into it.

I know this isn't strictly relevant to the matter at hand, however I think it's a parallel to what the BF3 pre-order content is.

You talk about how in the future publishers (cough activision) will be restricting content depending on where you buy it and how much you pay, which I'm not arguing against, it's a fair point, however why not pay for the content if you want it? If you don't want to pay extra for content, don't pay extra for the content and just don't buy it, it's fairly simple I think that if you don't want it, don't pay for it, no one is forcing you to buy this content.

I may not agree with this gaming dystopia where if you want to unlock a specialised class you have to pay £3.49 to unlock the class in-game, but it may well happen, and if you want to stop it, don't pay for it, that'll show 'em, right?

Wait, the casual gaming masses will still pay for it, and there's nothing we can do about it, it's a fact of the industry that the kiddies who buy CoD 17: Return to AMERICA and pay through the nose for the latest maps, guns and classes outrageously overweigh those of us who disagree with this form of marketing and profiteering and as such, we have to follow suit.

Until Activision, EA and other Publishing giants decide that they're going to cater for the hardcore minority then they're not going to care that 500,000* hardcore players are boycotting their DLC when the 10 million* sheeple go for it as quickly as they can, with a fist-fulla-dollars.


*Figures plucked from guesstimates, the 10million was from MW2's sales, and the 500,000 is a reasonable estimate of the number of hardcore gamers who'd follow a boycott such as this.