* status games - I have this old/hard to get/expensive skin and you do not.
* social games - me and my buddies all dress identically/similarly. Gang colors, the All-Shrek Squad, GTA’s roving gangs of purple/green alien gangs...
* role play games - does dressing up like Superman make you want to play the game differently than dressing up like Little Bo Peep, or like Freddy Krueger?
This has very little effect on a single player game (though I know I sure do spend a while making my character look cool in games with character creation and visible equipment) but “choosing your visual style” is an important part of social signaling.
And of course selling this stuff to the captive audience in your popular game is a pretty nice way to keep a small army of artists busy cranking out stuff, so you don’t have to worry about firing them while the next big project is in the planning stages. Or to just have a giant cash cow of a gentle IAP funnel with a few bits of whale bait here and there.
(Can you flood a subnet with DNS A responses, or does that not work due to sequence numbering?)
At a price that doesn't actually fund the quality you expect.
Graphics and art got harder, but gamers didn't get any less broke or salty. So you gotta subsidize with Whales.
I'm even more outraged when I see popular video games that are clearly targeting children to become addicted and buy in-game currency to progress (or worse- not do anything at all like Fortnite skins). I played fucking The Legend of Zelda on my Nintendo and it was great. What ever happened to creating a product and selling that product once? If it doesn't suck we might buy the next product(s) you make.