Yeah, that's true. To Bethesda's credit, they stopped doing that. But largely because mods do it better for free, and now they're trying to monetise that too. The fact was though, that the DLCs they made opened the industry's eyes to a new way of nickel and diming the customer base.

I still enjoy Bethesda games well enough if I decide to buy and play them at all (I won't be getting F4 for example), but they are a very damaging influence on the industry and criticising them for what they do makes you persona non grata in many communities. It's a similar case with Valve. Not so much with their games, but with their business practices. We all use Steam because it's great and convenient but Valve's lack of quality control for the store results in killing off genres and niches due to oversaturation with poor games. Not to mention they had a hand in paid mods too. Finally, their push for Valve branded Hardware is attempting to push PC gaming closer towards console gaming, with all the same limitations and problems that entails.