“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
If the game is so riddled with bugs it famously needs modders to create mods for the sake of fixing the product, there is quite the significant tie between longevity of an unplayable game and mods. See, the problem is your wording sees the cause and effect the wrong way around. Hopefully this helps you to understand.
Oh and yiu ask about people continuing to play Bugthesda’s games on console, I’ll happily point out you’re asking fir a logical answer from a market that proliferated child gambling, standardised season passes and the standard of the complete version of a game release costing 100 bucks before the industry still found an excuse to increase the usual price of 60 bucks up to 70. It’s not because something is bad that idiots won’t buy it.
I’ve played Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the latter two at launch. I’ve never installed mods for any of these games, and I rarely install mods in general. Skyrim had a rough launch, where it would crash for me frequently, but that problem was resolved within a few weeks, tops. They’re all very playable, and I never felt like I needed mods to fix them, which is why they also sell well on consoles.
Inflation is a fact of life, and prices were going to increase somehow, especially since a lot of AAA games these days are recklessly large, including Bethesda games. There’s a lot more at play with the way DLC works and the pricing around them than just trying to sneak a price increase by you, but the short answer is: I don’t think it’s a big deal to have an entry level price for a game and another price for the game and expansion content.