Disclaimer, I do not work for Paradox. That being said:
Paradox is still far from AAA. If you look at a typical AAA game at the height of its development, its usually a few hundred, over even over a thousand people working on it. As far as I've been told, at the height of development for Stellaris (?) before release, it had around 40 devs (might mix it up with EU4 or Hoi4 but im pretty sure I'm not, if any dev or support rep is willing to correct feel free to do so). For comparison, GTA V had over a thousand.
Paradox DLC policy isn't perfect. Over time, Paradox Games since the implementation of the current DLC policy will ramp up quite the cost. But, look at it objectively, taking EU4 as an example.
All of EU4 costs around 360€ without a sale, with the base game being 40€. The base game is perfectly playable and fine for casual gamers who just want to do some alt history on occasion. Those people will usually only buy a few DLCs for regions or game functions they like, such as El Dorado for the new world (my first DLC ever bought because I love the Incas).
Then theres those that invested and keep investing thousands of hours into the game, like myself nowadays - every two months or so I go into an EU4 frenzy where the only thing I do except for school is play the game. While recent DLC's have somewhat gone down in quality for eu4 as well as other Paradox Games, they have said publically that they are aware of it and want to improve on it, and also catch up on "tech debt". That is why 2019 is the year without a DLC for eu4 so to speak. Last one (Golden Century) was released last year in November, and the european expansion will be released early next year (though no exact date was given yet).
Now to look at numbers because numbers are fun and happy and don't hurt anyone. Except it's Pi or 41.8885 which I have concluded is the actual answer to life the universe and everything because Douglas Adams made a rounding error, (the golden ratio *4)² told me so. Anyway lets not get into that now. NUMBERS!
Lets look at The Witcher 3. Very well known and well received game, by one of the more revered publishers and devs remaining. On release it cost 50 or 60€ iirc (30 atm) without DLC's (now its about 60 with DLC's) but lets go with 50€ for simplicity and leniency. People take 25h (speedrun) -100h (completionist) to complete it, so lets go with 65h. So if you complete it once, you spend 77 cents per hour of entertainment. If you were to buy all of EU4 for 360€, a game that is constantly being developed 6 years after release, you would need to spend 468 hours on the game to have the same "cents per hour of entertainment" value. Which, for many active EU4 players, is very little and still considered a beginner at the game. And that is without any sale, but all DLC's bought as bulk during a non-sale period. Which, given that Paradox does -25-75% sales fairly often, is not in Paradox's favor in my calculation.
Anyway, conclusion is, Paradox DLC policy is not great, but given what they do, that they keep developing the game and add features/fix bugs years after its release, many even for free or from previous DLC content, it is very justifiable given the replayability of (most of) their games that apply this policy.
-Void
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