There's no special difference behind the scenes between developing free and paid DLC. My salary and compensation doesn't change depending on the kind of content I work on. All DLC development pulls from the same "ongoing development for the game" budget, be it free or paid. Paid content funds the ongoing development and free content is created primarily for player retention. The two work symbiotically to keep devs like me employed and to provide players like you more game content to play.

When development for a time period (a year, a total # of DLCs, etc.) is approved by the executives, we figure out what the distribution will be over the course of the time period. We establish our target revenue and set up a delivery schedule for those content drops. Then we work towards the goals set in the schedule as we go. The schedule might be X free DLC on this date, Y paid DLC on that date, and both free and companion paid DLC Z on this other date. God of War Ragnarok's Valhalla DLC was likely the last bit of scheduled GoWR content the team was tasked with building before sunsetting the project and moving on to their next big project.

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