With Payday 3 and Cities: Skylines 2 having questionable launches, one of the biggest complaints I've seen from both games, besides glitches and performance, is that they are also barebones compared to their predecessors.
It is thanks to DLC, their sequels must essentially become clean slates.
A higher number at the end of a series' title typically indicates that there's going to be more. Problem is, there's too much for the publishers to be comfortable with.
Making a worthy sequel means selling EVERYTHING (DLC included!) from the previous game, plus some.
Doing this under a standard AAA video game price tag (typically ~$70 USD) is nearly impossible, considering that the total cost of the DLC from the previous installment far surpasses that.
The total cost of Payday 2 with all DLC included is supposedly $97
The total cost of Cities: Skylines with base game, deluxe edition upgrade, and all major expansions and map packs, cost supposedly $186
The total cost of Sims 3 and all DLC is supposedly $439
So publishers have the choice to just sell everything (+ DLC) from the previous game with its prices utterly nuked, or start from scratch.
"Maybe [Starbreeze] could have innovated more? It’s playing to their strengths and their audience. It has a huge audience! It’s the right thing to do. It’s tough to compete with their own product the way that they do. Payday 2 has so much content."
Yes, Payday 2 has a lot of content. A lot of content that could've also been in Payday 3, but doing so would've meant making everything in Payday 2 essentially worthless.
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