Companies do it because you make more money for less effort, it's called games as a service. Instead of having to develop a game from scratch every few years and hope the income lasts until their next release, they create a game that they can use as a platform for expansions and microtransactions to provide consistent income over 7-10 years. Young gamers are getting so used to it that I've seen them call people entitled and unreasonable for calling out the devs on missing features at launch. They'll say things like "The game just came out 2 months ago, why do you expect them to have already added feature X to the game?" As someone who started out with Nintendo games that had no possibility of having new features added, that mentality is baffling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_as_a_service

> " Young gamers are getting so used to it "

Young consumers of all sorts are participants in a war many of them don't even realize exists. A war in which their opposition are marketing professionals, trained in psychology in universities to trick and exploit children. Against this, a lot of kids don't stand a chance. And it seems the marketers sleep at night by blaming the parents for failing to protect their children from predators like themselves, or by making what they (mistakenly) believe to be favorable analogies to other predatory industries targeting children, such as "collectable card games" or 900 number "video game tip lines."

I agree with your point about non-apple platforms. I cannot enumerate all of them, but it would be silly of me to expect all of them to handle that scenario gracefully, and I believe they should be required to.

However, Starcraft 2 is complete and been this way since the inception. They added microtransactions years after the full release, and they all boil down to cosmetics and other completely optional and non-necessary things, like skins and banners, i.e. cosmetics. Something for hardcore fans to buy in order to support their game, but absolutely non-essential for the actual full experience. And I am saying that as someone who hasn't spent a single dime on Starcraft 2, aside from buying the full game on release (+the expansions that came out years later) and putting hundreds of hours into it.

They mean the fact that the game came out in instalments, which is a ridiculous complaint and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Considering that each installment might as well been a different game, just using the same engine and graphics, I agree that it is a ridiculous complaint. Each installment had a 12hr+ single player campaign + 12hr+ co-op campaign + completely different multiplayer experience.

There are plenty of games you can buy on the iOS store. What's wrong with buying a whole game?

Even "whole" games (like the latest $60 FIFA release) have unlimited microtransactions. And it's not limited to iOS, or Android. It's on most internet connected platforms.