game claiming it would never add paid dlc, adds paid dlc that gives in game bonus move speed

Devs/publishers are the new politicians. Say never and think "maybe", ending in "of course" and "I never said exactly that, you interpreted it incorrectly."

Not surprised at all.

Name & shame?

people lie all the time, especially when there's money involved. ironically, there might not be any or much money involved with many games (no visibility and sales) but devs are still people, so they lie to save face when in fact it does the opposite. and as you said, many people are fine with it and applaud whatever they do.

Tower Unite is one of those games that will be in eternal "Early Access" limbo. I used to be supportive of their "efforts" for years, going all the way back to the early days of Garry's Mod Tower where it all started 15 years ago.
I ditched them a while ago because I got fed up with how janky that game has been for years and how little they seem to care about optimizing the performance of it. Their removal of dedicated server support was also an odd one. Seems I made the right choice because I would definitely have ditched them after hearing about this DLC.
Any time the game caught a bit of traction and had a lot of new players coming in, servers would be taking a massive shit because they can't scale the backend properly. They want to create a centralized experience, but they aren't really capable of supporting more than a few hundred players at once without issues.

Seems to me that they should've just added a monthly subscription entry to this game from the beginning judging by what they're trying to create. That would at least have set an expectation from the start.

With VR becoming so popular, you'd think Tower Unite would get VR support early on, but no, they didn't support VR at all, which made me lose interest. The arcade in VR could have been pretty cool. I got a much better experience albeit lacking in visual detail in the Pierhead Arcade games.

Oh no, your constitutional rights clearly have been violated. Let's pitchfork the developers.

On a serious matter: The quoted sentence is up to interpretation. Obviously, if the DLC is there, the game does have paid DLC. So, no discussion on that front. However, the second part - the one probably more important - is up for discussion. Are Speed Shoes considered content? No, a few items can hardly be called content even if they change some attributes and some developers actively try to sell item packs as content. They can be P2W but that item packs are not really content unless significant in-game behaviour change (like a Jetpack allowing you to fly around). So, the comment with every content will be a free update still stands (at least from my five minutes research time).

Also, for those to lazy to read some minutes. The item in question are Speed Shoes which make you faster (couldnt find out by how much though) inside the lobby. Within gameworlds, they are deactivated. Apparently, there are some kind of lobby events(?) where they could give advantage? Can't comment on that one.

Even if we assume that it is content. I would be hard-pressed to call this ill intention. I mean, do you think the developers talked 8 years ago: "I have this evil plan. We make a game and update it 8 years for free. We market it as game without DLC. And THEN in eight years we add DLC. *evilthundersound*). In best case, these are just changed circumstances or it stays like this because they decided that they want to provide a way to get the backer items without pissing off the backers. It doesn't automatically mean that they release 100 DLCs now.

Obviously, they have to adjust the store description. Though, it seems silly to whine about non-gameworld affecting items being sold after getting free updates for years. If it bothers you, just stop playing instead of pitch-forking.

I remember trying that game with some friends long ago. I ended up getting a refund on it. It was complete crap. IMO.

Maybe I'm a corporate shill, but I feel like this isn't a big deal. It's not DLC that adds any real content, it's a supporter nametag, a supporter trophy, and then something that makes traveling between mini-games faster. This is a pretty standard "donation dlc" where the people buying it are doing it to support the devs, not to get the meager rewards. I definitely wouldn't consider it a microtransaction, and it's barely a DLC (no new mini-games or locations)

https://steamcommunity.com/app/394690/discussions/0/4141691052148734424
so now if you spent 30$ or more you can run even faster