Real-money fees are a vicious detriment, no matter what dangling carrot they fund. Same shit as “exclusives” - it’s not some kind of gift. Your money, your time, your content, something, was taken away to be presented back to you.
You know what poor gamers did before this criminal business model was possible? They played games that were genuinely free. The internet used to be awash in them, thanks to Flash. And before that there was native shareware and freeware. (… and piracy.) All of which had some risk of giving you old-timey viruses that just made you reinstall Windows, but fuck, is that worse than the in-your-face effort to get your credit card and charge you $30 for an imaginary hat?
And you know what games were released via shareware? Doom. Quake. Great games that made you want to save up to get the full version. But even if you couldn’t do that you still got a solid playing experience with the free version.
I feel like those of us who grew up in the 90s got to see a young utopia internet. I kind of wish we could hit the reset button and go back to those days.
Even when demos stopped being an entire third of the game, there was no artifice about being complete. There was no way for them to take unlimited amounts of your money. The Coconut Monkey wasn’t the cutesy face of gambling for scimitars. Lara Croft wasn’t the freebie in anyone’s gacha waifu collection. You just got some chunk of gameplay - often quite replayable, when you were hard-up! - and a come-on to buy the whole shebang.
Now you get a broken version of the whole game, and if you want it to work right and feel good and have everything, that’ll only cost you literally thousands of dollars. People beat Everquest for less money than modern garbage can take.
Mostly I agreed with this but I think it’s hard to call the monetization that allows “whales” to subsidize other gamers a good thing once you remember that “whales” are people whose gambling addictions are being exploited for profit.
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