Uber Waddles said:
Releasing DLC after a game has got some ground on it is never a bad thing. But there is NO way DLC would be done THIS early after the games release for it not to be on the disk we dropped $60-$150 for.
Even Infinity Ward didnt sink that low Bungie. I am disappointed. Remember when you had credability?
That's actually not true, if you know how software (especially games) are developed.
There is a point in time during a game's development at which a game is feature locked. Essentially, that means that the developers know everything they're going to put into a game; they cannot add anything else - if they were adding new things all the time, they'd never finish, right? So you now have an (admittedly small) pool of designers who aren't doing anything on the project. You can pay them to do nothing, you can have them start work on a new project, or you can fire them if you want to be a dick.
Next, there's a content lock. This is much further down the line, and it means that everything that exists is all there is. You aren't going to be implementing more levels, you aren't going to be implementing more enemies, you aren't going to be adding anything major; this is about making sure what exists works - and no new content will ever go on the disc. This is usually a few months (or less) before a game's release.
By this time, a lot of content that may have originally been planned will probably have been cut. Either there wasn't enough time to finish it, or it existed and just wasn't any good and would have dragged the final game down - there are any number of reasons why something would have been cut to give the designers time to work on something that worked instead of fixing something iffy.
So, after the content lock, when you have programmers and maybe an artist or two working on polishing and fixing what exists, what are you going to do with all of those other artists/modelers/animators/coders that now have no work? You could again, fire them, put them on a new project, or have them sit around and do nothing.
...OR, and this is becoming increasingly common, you could put them back to work on stuff that was cut for wholly legitimate reasons. Again, the actual disc is content and feature locked, you
cannot add anything more to it. They couldn't put this on the retail product if they wanted to.
Since most of the hard work is done (engine, underlying structure and gameplay), it's usually a lot quicker to finish this stuff. And that's how you get early DLC; it's not shady at all, it's just a good use of resources.