This kind of thing is one of the reasons why I have no real sympathy for the gaming industry. The whole point of direct to drive downloads was to reduce development costs by cutting out the cost of disks, packaging, manuals, shipping and other things. Allowing game companies to deliver the same content faster, and cheaper, and reducing prices to you the consumer.
In reality when you DL a product you wind up paying the same exact price as if you bought it in a store, except you don't get a "disk in hand" AND are missing little things like instruction manuals, and other perks.
What's more it seems to be used as an excuse to gouge gamers for very minor content additions, as well as to be lazy about making sure a game works since nowadays throwing out updates is relatively easy.
Right now I suspect PC gamers are only getting a lot of "free" content because of the irritation over systems like Windows Live, or Steam, which is ultimatly what they would have to use to distribute this stuff. It's a bit differant than with a console user where they just push a few buttons, as opposed to having to install software that might mess with the res tof the stuff on your system. Given that the core development of many games might be on the PC despite how it seems, it makes sense to distribute that version.
At any rate, I have a tendency to look back at things like "The Forge Of Virtue" and "The Silver Seed" for "Ultima 7/Ultima 7 part 2" as examples of what content upgrades should be, and I also consider that they were disc based content additions, from a differant era.
To be honest it seems like $10 a pop is a rip off for what you get in some of these additions especially given the complete lack of packaging, no return options, and similar things.
This is one of the reasons why while I do not exactly support piracy, I have a hard time feeling sympathetic to the gaming industry. Face it, they are extremely greedy, who have no problem with lying to their consumer base, and whom will do anything to forcibly wring a few extra bucks out of us. All their talk about innovations to lower prices and such (like DLing games directly) were lies because all they did was lower the production costs to increase their profits, charging us the same bloody thing.
The industry as a whole doesn't care, their going to continue to charge us $10 a pop for expansions and make a DL cost the same as an actual packaged game. What's more, I imagine they are already debating things like "hmmm, I wonder if the market will stand it being $15 for a minor expansion, and how many additional corners we can cut. Our market is addicts so it's not like they are going to REALLY stop gaming. For all their talk of Boycots, does it ever happen? Muhwahahahaha".
Also I will be honest Steam is a bloody intrusive spyware fest that I feel cripples the performance of games that involve it. Yet of course the very fact that it is intrusive is
why developers are loving it. I hate it with a passion, yet fear it's the face of the future of legitimate PC gaming.