I personally abhor the micro transactions that EA shoves down their faithful customers' throats. They could have easily included this 'Rivertown' in the retail game but decided to remove it and then sell it as an 'update' on the same day as release. Compared to developers like Valve who build value in their games by offering free content updates for long periods of time, I can't believe more people are not upset by EA's business practices. I am sure it is getting EA a lot of money but I personally do not support such practices.

Has anyone else seen any kind of backlash to this practice?
It seems to be a growing trend for console games now too. Expansion packs are one thing but many times these are features that could've easily been in the retail game that are obviously stripped out to be sold back as an extra expense.
Any thoughts or opinions?

Where does it say you have to pay for the Rivertown city? It sounds like it's available as a free download. And even if it's not, you're getting $10 to spend on Sims items just for registering, so if you want the town you can get it with free money to spare, or instead save them to spend on other items you see. Either way, none of these are being "shoved down their faithful customers' throats," if you don't want it you don't have to get it, free or otherwise.

And where are you getting that they removed it from the game to put online? Just because it's available at launch doesn't necessarily mean it could have been available on disc. The game was delayed four months, remember. They may have already budgeted out all their disc space for the original Feb. launch and didn't have the room for a whole new town. Maybe they didn't begin building it until the last month, after the game would have gone off to be manufactured. Maybe they could have fit it on, but would have had to cut out a few prebuilt homes or other items. Maybe they just didn't feel like putting it on the disc since the Internet's an easy enough distribution venue, and it gets people to look at their online storefront. Regardless, there's nothing in this situation that should in any way approach "abhor" levels of disgust. Save that righteous outrage for something that deserves it.

I personally prefer building my own communities when I play The Sims 2. But if I were to put myself in the shoes of someone who liked to play the pre-built cities with relationships and what-not already set into place, then I suppose I would be annoyed that Riverview is pushed back as paid-for downloadable content. If, however, it's free, then I don't see a problem. I'd personally prefer it to be separate aka optional, that way it won't take up my hard drive space or installation time.

If anything, it's a consumer-friendly form of copyright protection. "Get TS3, like TS3? Register your game and get a free download! Check out what other kinds of stuff you can get too!" This is exactly the same sort of thing you'd get with most any other game. Exclusive skin download, map download, tool editor, etc. Note that previous TS games generally already came with 3 or so neighborhoods already. The Sims 2 allowed the importation of custom towns (through SimCity, through other players, etc) as well as templated towns via an in-game editor. There is hardly some sort of content restriction on neighborhoods/virtual real estate. This sort of download also encourages newer players of The Sims to see the activity that other Sims players put into the game and the sort of content or ideas they have, whether downlohttp://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23421ads, tutorials, stories, or whatever.

Valve is no stranger to this practice either nor is any other developer. Moreover, unless you're a part of the development of that game, it's a little kneejerk and naive to say that some feature or content could hae been 'easily' put into the game. Beyond technical constraints, there are always legal, budgetary, and publisher constraints among other things that the playerbase rarely hears about. And not all of that is always about greedy and trying to milk players.

A friend of mine worked on Mass Effect and told me a little story about how the Mako originally had vectored thrusting as opposed to the bunny hopping that it had in the final product. It was changed because the higher ups deemed that it was too difficult/confusing/whatever. So while the Mako 'could have been easily' made a lot more maneuverable, it wasn't and not for lack of talent, idea, fun, or time.

Instances like this likely happen all the time.

Oops. Not sure how that URL got in there.