I guess you can spend a lot of money if you buy them on release, but I personally never do. And both their games and the DLCs pack are always on some sale. I'm pretty sure I bought Stellaris for like 10 euros and eventually bought a bunch of its DLC in some DLC pack for another 10 euros. The same for Cities Skylines basically. 20 euros for the amount of fun I took out of those games is hardly a lot.

How’s it any different than buying a new game though?

In the end, is paying $30 for DLC and getting another 50 hours of gameplay really that much worse than paying $60 for a new game?

As long as I actually use the DLC, to me it’s equivalent. I’m paying money to extend the hours of entertainment I’m getting.

It's a game I like and it gets more and more stuff. The only times games keep adding more things to itself is either a very infrequent constant subscription fee, or more frequent DLCs. There's only so much you can do off the sales of the base game.

Ive got collective thousands of hours in paradox titles. The good dlcs (and there are trash ones I haven’t bought) adds dozens of hours of playtime. They also keep the mod community active which adds hundreds more.

It seems expensive but 10-20 bucks every few months is reasonable to me.

My bigger issue is some of them are starting to feel very paytowin with the feature/power creep (compare vanilla Russia/Ottomans in EUIV to dlc versions for an example)

I'm fine with paying money as long as what I'm getting for it is commensurate to what I'm paying. I don't think that Paradox is a particularly bad actor there (not the best, either). I mean, the DLC model permits funding production of more stuff for a game that one likes in a direction that one would like.

There are a number of games where DLC is sold by publishers at vastly higher prices than the content in the base game, though, and where the base game is kind of indadequate on its own. That is something that I'm not really enthusiastic about.

It probably works out about the same as buying a subscription for a game, which many do for lots of games. I still think it's egregious, but then again I own all Stellaris DLC, so...