I remember him doing this about the Catwoman day one DLC for Arkham City but he got shot down pretty quickly by either Ryan or Jeff.
I don't remember the details; maybe gamestop was printing new codes for used copies? But Vinny wasn't really able to express why he found it so distasteful. Apparently he had just heard it, and it gave him an immediate gut reaction. I don't remember anyone shutting him down, just not understanding exactly what his reaction was to. (As in: yeah, it's shady, but why is it shadier than stuff that's already being done?)
Edit: I think I remember now. Gamestop was printing catwoman DLC codes for used copies. Vinny had an objection to it because it seemed to violate the spirit of 'project $10', so what's the point? His objection seemed to hinge on publishers being hypocritical about the scarcity of their digital goods, by basically lampshading how the scarcity is totally fabricated. But that's always been the case -- scarcity was never a valid argument in favor of Project $10. And in this case, it was actually beneficial to the customer, as the cost of the DLC codes was being handled by gamestop and WB, not the consumer -- so it didn't seem like a reasonable thing to complain about. Project $10 by itself is much more objectionable, this is more of a lateral step, if not a very slight improvement.
It's just so fucking weird in this industry that the press sides more often thant not with the publisher rather than the consumers, and think it's mostly due to how vocal gaming enthusiasts are, in comments, message boards and social networking sites.
I don't think it's as simple as that. It's more that the gaming enthusiasts usually make asses out of themselves. They may even have a point, but they drown themselves out more often than not, and generally GB replies to the dumbassery. A big part of the dumbness comes from the enthusiasts assuming that they wholly represent 'consumers', so complaints very rarely stay as low-key as 'I don't like it'/'I won't buy it', and instead go to "no one likes it"/"it shouldn't be made". And if you're basically ambivalent about the whole thing, and you see a bunch of people talking as if their extremist opinions represent you, well, you might feel the need to distance yourself from that sort of behavior. Yeah, there's probably more productive ways to do it than calling everyone dumbasses, but that's not how Ryan expresses his opinions publically.