Oh how naïve of you Jim: of COURSE publishers have a "AAA rulebook" that mandates things like season passes, pre-order content, multiple editions, etc. Mostly it's their marketing department that mandates those things.
And it's not hard to understand why: Whenever a company sees any other company have success with any new monetization scheme, whatever it is, they will all immediately try to jump on that bandwagon too. It's not like they call each other to scheme those things out. When EA first came out with online passes, it wasn't long before other devs followed suit and implemented their own. They basically just try to copy the current market leaders. Don't wonder why everything is open world now.
What's sad is that games typically start out free of such shackles. When in pre-production, game concepts are made with the simple goal of producing a solid, fun game, like back in the days. It's only further down the line, when the game has been prototyped to hell and back and is ready to enter production, that the game will drop on the marketing dept's desk. And this is where it all goes to shit. The marketing department will typically request changes to make the game as "marketable" as possible in their eyes. This includes all the pre-order, season pass, etc. bullshit. I've seen many productions be broken to literal tears by the changes marketing depts have asked of them.
