Oh jeez. I thought you'd be able to read a bit more into the 'laughable' fake shampoo analogy - I just didn't want to belabor an obvious point too much so I used an extreme example as a shortcut. But let me now spell it out - it does not have to be *illegal* or a scam for my point to make sense - the substitute 'shampoo' just has to be the minimum the lawyers say the vendor can get away with. It can be (say) 70% water and 30% shampoo. You still cut costs by 70%, you still lose 50% of your customers. Is that a good long term business strategy? Is the analogy less 'laughable' now?
Nope, business actually do that and they don't lose customers. 1$ or 1£ shops have tons of those low-quality items, so do Aldi and LIDL. People who have less money to spend buy those. People with more money spend more and get higher quality products.
BioWare DLC is evolving. It used to be all about getting a few more hours of the games you liked, in a self contained story. Now it's more brutal. Now it holds you hostage, locking you out of important NPCs, powerful items or important story points. Eg you're lost at the start of ME3 unless you played arrival. So it comes as a thinly disguised stealth price increase of the original game. These are 'hit and run' business tactics designed to make a quick buck and lose goodwill. It may work today, but will the proverbial 'biodrone' still be pre-ordering games that do stuff like that in 2 years time?
So, basically, they might just get a different type of audience. No longer the hardcore following they used, but lots of different groups of people with different budgets and different amount of times to play games.
Microtransactions is a massive business. Whether it will last for 3 years or decades, I don't know. The point is businesses need to evolve to keep generating profits. At this point in time they see their profits increasing this way without losing too many people. If they see things changing they are SUPPOSED to change as well.
As a separate example: I remember playing Fallout 1 and 2. After Fallout 2, they were working on 3 and NMA-fallout was reporting on it. When they cancelled it NMA-fallout and their followers went rabid and attacked Interplay every day.
They swore they would never want a Fallout without an isometric view and turn based combat. There comes Bethesda and makes a First Person Shooter RPG and they change their minds and love it.
People will get used to DLC and how it works. They will know that games without DLC are not complete and will just buy everything. OR they will be happy with the game without the DLC. Or they might just buy the major DLCs. Or ...
We don't know. Neither do Bioware. They see profits remaining strong or even get stronger thanks to DLC, at the very least until the Medium-term. So that's what they do.
You might disagree, but I'm assuming that since so many companies are adopting this model that it actually means it works.
At the same time however, you do see a lot of smaller companies who are promising DRM-free software which seems to work quite well for smaller companies, so I guess there must be some support for that at least. If the same thing happens for DLC (=> DLC-free games) then you could say that Bioware might be wrong.