I have noticed this trend as well, but I think it’s actually pretty good. Your package bunch of features you have been working on under a common theme and that builds some excitement.

Consider the alternative: “Get ready for build v1053” or “Prepare yourselves for update 1.2.24” that just doesn’t sound exciting and it’s probably not gonna draw in players who haven’t played the game in a while.

And also keep the psychology in mind a little bit, It seems less impressive to release seven small updates where each update only adds one relatively minor feature rather than one big update with seven new, but still relatively minor features

Yeah and YouTube already has a “pay money but still get ads plan”. And they’ll likely continue raising prices on all plans

I’ve never understood why gate is used as a suffix in this way.

Your prices are optimistically low. They’ll probably be double that and lock features behind the more expensive plan.