You're missing the point of "self-regulation". The companies try to push crappy, low value DLC on us more and more, as it becomes more and more a standard practise, making eventual full games cost money out the ass. Self-regulation would mean bad (immoral, impractical, or as is the case here unethical and bad for the consumer) practises that start as a marketing / business idea cooked up by their marketing psychologists along with a whole campaign and manner of presentation would be dropped rather than adopted more and more as standard practise, as not enough money would flow in from consumers. As it stands now, gamers have become more and more complacent (also younger and younger, which also influences things tremendously) and accepting of situations that are bad for them, objectively speaking, in the end. All because of the next "must-have" killer app. and failure to understand the impact purchases of these products make / lack of ability to understand long-term effects of sales on products attempting to experiment with some new contrivance in the land of DLC / crippled base games. Hence, the self-regulation that you'd for example see in the IT sector in the form of no company getting away with selling a software package / platform with bad support to large clients, or very specifically focussed markets with a very tight target consumer base like farm equipment such as tractors, is lacking. You won't ever really see a bad tractor come out, some new tractor that breaks down within a year of purchase, or a more topical comparison - a tractor for which you have to pay between 50 - 100% of the original price of the tractor to purchase some basic crop harvesting trailer you hook up to it that can really be considered a standard, needed purchase for 90% of farmers, for whom the base tractor would be close to useless. Because if they tried to pull a stunt like that, not one farmer would buy their crap, the product would cause a loss rather than net gain, and maybe even cause the company to go belly-up.

This refusal to buy products that set a bad standard in the trends in product pricing and presentation presented by companies is now lacking, direly, in the games industry - hence, it lacks self-regulation. The companies can and do get away with stuff that is just plain ridiculous, often charging up the ass for stuff that would have been considered a PATCH back in the day, or releasing a game with locked DLC, or a half-finished game that they intend from the get-go to just sell DLC for, to finally sell the customer a full game in the form of base game + 2/3 high priced DLC (often even releasing a buggy as hell game, and addressing issues customers have in patches that ship WITH the DLC). Mass Effect Three, CoD games and their map packs (and now season passes), Aliens - Colonial Marines, Train Simulator, and Street Fighter games come to mind as games that have done some of these things.

Here's some further examples.

Realistically, any responsible and smart consumer should boycott any product that shafts them instead of support it with their money. That hasn't happened in the games biz for the past +/- 10 years, due to what the guy I replied to said - "no matter how much you want their game.."; people only go "oh I want, I get, durrr", which makes sense in a way due to the intangibility and difficulty to assess the objective value of a non-physical, entertainment based product coupled with, again, younger and younger consumers. Also, due to more and more casual gamers sinking the their money into the industry for about the same amount of content / value as what core gamers used to get 3 times as much value for - only to the casual gamer, it matters not, as he's spending the same amount core gamers used to pay for their gaming, on average, so nothing back-breaking to them, and since they're casuals, as long as they have their quick little fix, they're happy. So what if they paid 2 - 3 times as much for any individual product? They're buying only one game and its' DLC, or a bunch of smaller ones - not the same amount of products as core gamers, who now have to shell out top dollar, 2 - 3 times as much as they used to, to get the same amount of value / enjoyment / hours out of their purchases.

Don't even get me started on DRM - how gamers have for years also supported games / companies using shitty DRM that installs itself deeper in your system than some viruses and rootkits (Sony CD shit), or cripples your PC somehow, or causes other games to fail to launch (all three things posted before this apply to Starforce and Tages), or makes you install a driver that can cause your CD drive to suddenly fail to read many CDs, including music CDs and make you have to reinstall Windows (Starforce), culls user data / sifts through personal files (Origin), has "max activation" limits (Batman games, Ass. Creed games and lots more), has always-online DRM that fails to work properly for MANY users, even though it's made by the same people that made the OS of 90% of the consumers and is installed as part of the OS (GFWL - I still can NOT run Section 8 Prejudice to this day, no way no how, no fix presented by any party involved including the game dev - they can't fix it on their end; and I'm one of MANY with the identical problem, including people who won't ever see a penny back for their purchase), or DRM that leaves gaping security holes on your system if installed (Uplay and Origin both had this).

To post something very on-topic - the vulnerability in Uplay that made it possible to launch arbitrary code using unsigned commands through an URL on a webpage should have made everyone boycott the product, never to use it again. The problem there is, not many understood the risk it presented. Not enough people cared to inform themselves as to what it might mean, either. It means that when the vulnerability was still in there, a malicious user could (just as an example scenario - the sky's the limit with such freedom on someone's PC) easily make a link on his web page, that when clicked, launched a Uplay game, but also silently (without pop-ups or user confirmation / notification of any kind) installed a trojan, rootkit, or any other nice piece of malware on your PC. Fun fact - it took them two whole days after some coders tipped them off to it to publicly acknowledge it existed, then several more days to fix this, and was caused by an extremely simple, noobish mistake in coding. The people that discovered the bug even said that looking at the code, it seemed as though it was written by a noob coder, not an experienced professional. If that isn't enough to make all consumers go "wait a minute fuck that shit. AND FUCK YOUR SHITTY SOFTWARE" in unison (especially considering the lax response from the company in taking so long to respond publicly to multiple reports as well as even longer to actually address a [quite small] fix), hey well, that just shows how dumb the consumer has become.

Now, we're all paying for peoples' brainless gluttony and idiocy in the past 10 - 15 years. Or would you argue that the stuff presented above are all good things for us gamers? Can you touch your toes and say

"Yes master, deeper, deeper!"