Below is a copy and paste from a post I made on coh2.org (company of heroes fansite):
Oh boy, this is kind of hard for me to accept and I'm not sure who's responsible for it: SEGA or Relic? On the one hand, similar bullshit with DLC has occurred with Total War but on the other hand SEGA hasn't been opposed to supporting other PC titles with free DLC (e.g.: if you had purchased Renegade Ops by its first Christmas, the week of Christmas SEGA gave all buyers of Renegade Ops its Coldstrike Campaign DLC free of charge, Sonic Racing Transformed has received 2 free PC DLC characters before paid DLC has even showed up). As such it's hard to know exactly who's making what call, how much Relic has a say independent of SEGA?
Overall though I'm a big SEGA fan and a big Relic fan, and that's why these abuses are hard for me to swallow. I don't feel the fanbase is being treated fairly by these prices, at all. I spent $100 on CE, which ended up rather useless and a waste of money (frankly $40 above retail should absolutely be a DLC season pass given the CE includes almost nothing else of note). I rarely buy games at launch, as I'm a college student on a fixed income, but felt it particularly important to support the sequel to what I considered one of the best games ever. So I did for this game.
Now there's this:
skins (48 * $1.99) = $95.52
+ faceplates (4 * $1.99) = $7.96
+ ToW expansions (2 * $9.99) = $19.98
+ cost of commanders = (11 * $2.99) + (8 * $3.99) = $64.81
Total (just DLC, not counting base game) = $188.27
Obviously this counts the Theatre of War DLC, which I don't mind at all. The skins however? Whilst I'd be fine with skins in theory, it should be $1.99 for all vehicles, charging separately for class of vehicle is just ludicrous. They aren't finished yet either, so assuming you bought at $59.99 you're now $248.26 into CoH2. Completely unacceptable, if they wanted to do DLC like this it needed to be a free2play game. The commanders are even worse, as they are distinctly linked to the competitive multiplayer aspect of this game and serve to undermine its credibility. It's hard to argue a game's multiplayer should be taken seriously when there's a very valid argument to be had about pay2win and player inequalities based on DLC.
I've supported Relic through a lot of the mistakes made with CoH2, I've attempted to be understanding of the position they came from under THQ's financial duress. The questionable performance of the game, the lack of SLI/Crossfire, initial balance issues (which I expected and find their improvements in this regard totally satisfactory)....
The lesson? GotY/Complete packs of all future SEGA RTS games for $10-15 on Steam sales. I don't care if I have to wait 2 or 3 years.
P.S.: Sorry Relic employees if these decisions are coming out of SEGA, in that case not much you guys can do and its up to us as consumers to deem this business model sub-standard.
I am posting this on SEGABits mostly to inform other SEGA fans who don't follow CoH2 as to what SEGA/Relic are up to. I've never seen SEGA participate in a DLC scheme so egregious and am very disappointed that it's been allowed to occur. The fact it hasn't really been noticed outside the coh community is surprising to me as well.
