Sleeping Dogs GOTY: How do I prevent getting the DLC bonuses in the beginning?

In Sleeping Dogs GOTY, I get all the DLCs unlocked after an hour of play, and then I get like 8 level-ups, 200000$ (and also cars, outfits etc...). So, I learned almost every skill there is in the beginning. It killed for me all the motivation in playing it.

Is that normal? How was it in the original Sleeping Dogs?
Is there a way to prevent getting the DLC bonuses in the beginning?

I assume GOTY includes all DLC listed in Steam under the DLC pack. The only way I know about to actually "deactivate" a DLC is asking Steam support to permanently remove it from your account without any refunds. So I can only give you a list of the benefits provided by the DLCs here and you have to be honest with yourself to not "use" them, e.g. always consider yourself to be 200k poorer than you are:

• I'll skip the cars, clothes and weapons, since they shouldn't be difficult to notice - basically you don't own anything but a motorbike and your own clothes in the beginning
• Police Protection Pack: Apart from the SWAT stuff it adds the "High Speed" mission and gives you some police XP (not enough for a full point on its own though)
• The High Roller Pack: $200k and premature access to the Tuono vehicle and High Roller outfit
• Martial Arts Pack gives you slight Triad XP boost (again not enough for a point on its own, but still...)
• The Red Envelope Pack: those red envelopes scattered around town containing $50k each
• Top Dog Gold Pack / Top Dog Silver Pack: A total of both 8 police and triad skill points
• The Zodiac Tournament: That tournament

So in summary, if you don't want to use the too severe DLC bonuses, don't collect the red envelopes and always leave $200k and 8 triad/police skill point unused...

If you're on PC (or can somehow access the respective files on your console), you can remove/rename the respective files (and probably have to deactivate updates for the game) I found a list of the DLCs' respective filenames here, extended by me on how cheat-y they are:

1E6323E1.dat Top Dog Gold Pack # pure cheat
576E446C.dat Top Dog Silver Pack # pure cheat
AC8D6F78.dat High Roller Pack # pure cheat
E58008F5.dat Red Envelope Pack # cheat, but you have to search them
E80C9CFE.dat police protection pack # swat clothes/vehicles, high speed mission (farm police XP)
3E97A062.dat Tactical Soldier Pack # clothes & weapons
8C79ECFB.dat Retro Triad Pack # clothes
67EE992C.dat Martial Arts Pack # clothes, dummy, shaolin showdown mission (farm triad XP)
81F578F0.dat Dragon Master Pack # collection of other DLC
613E5E9C.dat Square Enix Character Pack # clothes
849D8C70.dat Street Racer Pack # additional races
B41D5130.dat Community Gift Pack # ???
BA29F60B.dat Ghost Pig Pack # clothes
CD90EBFD.dat Screen Legends Pack # clothes, sword
D500D5B5.dat Deep Undercover Pack # clothes, car, CB radio
F3249186.dat Gangland Style Pack # tattoos
FD1036BD.dat Valve T-Shirt Pack # clothes
779AC7EF.dat SWAT Pack # cop mission (clothes?)
5AE2D067.dat Drunken Fist Pack # clothes
9ADD7588.dat Monkey King Pack # clothes, cloud-bike
41CADD1F.dat Law Enforcer Pack # HKPD clothes & cars
28333911.dat Movie Masters Pack # clothes
C8F81F7D.dat Triad Enforcer Pack # clothes, car
7A1653E4.dat gsp pack # clothes

Story DLC:
D3D01205.dat Wheels of Fury # mission for/with powerful car
E0E8FC75.dat Zodiac Tournament Pack
13EFB7EA.dat Nightmare in North Point # separate from main game
????????.dat Year of the Snake # separate from main game

With the introduction of a proper system in the current Steam Beta, which will go live soon, you can actually disable single DLC's based on your preference:

Just remove the tick for the DLC's you don't like and those won't be installed when you install the game. If the game is already installed, it deletes this content off your hard disk and you have to redownload the DLC content if you want to play this content again, which can lead to a hefty download if the DLC Data is more than just a license file (e.g. Levels and Textures etc).

Here's a quick and dirty bat file you can run to quickly eliminate cheaty DLC's just copy all below to notepad and save as disabledlc.bat (or whatever you want to name it) in your SleepingDogs folder and then run it. Check Zommuters post above for which DLC's are disabled and add your own if needed. Make sure these commands are placed below each other as shown below.

del 1E6323E1.dat
del 576E446C.dat
del AC8D6F78.dat 
del E58008F5.dat
del E80C9CFE.dat 
del 3E97A062.dat 
del 67EE992C.dat 
del 41CADD1F.dat