Actually, Sony has quite a bit to do with this. While the game may be made by Polyphony Digital, let's not forget that PD is owned lock, stock, and barrel by Sony Computer Entertainment. It's a first-party developer, basically in-house, they just happen to have their own office down the street.
Also bear in mind that GTHD
isn't the same as what EA is doing. EA will charge you full price for a game (and then some, for the next-gen versions), and then nickle-and-dime you afterwards.
On the flip side, by all accounts, GTHD
will retail for next to nothing. Five, ten bucks, maybe. There are even rumors that the disc itself will be
free. That makes the nickle-and-diming a little easier to take, since in the long run, it'll only cost you as much as a normal game, maybe less, depending on what you buy.
Atari did kind of the same thing with
Test Drive Unlimited. While they will be charging for the car packs that come later, the base game itself was twenty dollars cheaper than every other X360 game.. the same that most first-party PS2 games cost. So again, even if you buy a few of the car packs, it's not costing you any more than a full-priced game.
There
are people out there who are doing this at least partially the right way. EA is not one of them.
Me, I think they're missing the definition of the word...
Microtransactions. When I think "micro" in terms of money, I think of downloads that literally cost a dime. A quarter. What companies like EA don't understand is that they'd actually make
more money selling things at such a low cost, because so many more people would buy them. There are too many people out there who simply refuse to pay ten dollars for a new uniform for your team in
Madden. But imagine how many people would buy it if it cost only fifty cents.