Markets are powered by billions of instances of “what someone wants” but that doesn’t mean the resulting market movements are always a good indicator of what everyone wants as an environment. Sometimes aggregate human activity results in a crappy experience for most participants. “The market has spoken” is a glib, ideological phrase that can be used to dismiss any discussion about ways we could steer and improve markets to make them do a better job at facilitating human happiness and flourishing.
All that the market discovered is that there is a huge number of "whales" that can be exploited. The "fun" will begin once the whales have squandered their money and will either leave entirely or, and that's the scenario I fear, some (or someone's relatives) will raise a sob story in front of their local newspaper or politician... ending in a repeat of the early 2000s with videogames being blamed as a whole for the excesses of a few, and religious and other moral fundamentalists getting ahead.
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool.
My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
My critique, pushing as much of the blame onto the gamers, was meant to point out that everyone/no one is to blame.
The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong.
This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.