Making things worse in a free offering by a company to profit from premium offerings by the same company its the pinacle of capitalism, reminds me of a recurrent joke I have with a friend while playing Call Of Duty, that they will get greedier and soon will sell not only character's skins but also shaders/textures for the maps, oh so you want to see something better than placeholder textures? We have the DLC just for you!

More likely outcome: ads on static textures and between lobbies, oh but you can pay to turn them into _theme of the week_.

Don't give them ideas...

Environment destruction gameplay but there's always another ad under the ads, except when it's a lootbox.

I can imagine worse, too! They haven't even really started turning that knob yet.

The Video game metaphor stretches pretty far.

Madden has a monopoly license for NFL content. For a decade the biggest complaint was how they gate kept rosters behind the yearly re-release. Eventually they allowed roster sharing but they put it behind the most god awful inept UI you could possibly imagine such that practically casual gamers wouldn't bother with it.

Then Madden came out with Madden Ultimate Team (like trading cards MTX) and have been neglecting non-MUT modes ever since. They don't explicitly regress the rest of their game, they just commit resources to that effect.

Its like malicious compliance. They don't embrace, extend, extinguish, but they get a similar effect just with resourcing, layoffs, whatever.

>there are better options

Do you mind naming some NextJS alternatives without potential vendor lock in? Mulling a change in my fe.

For example, Remix has got a lot of traction recently. It is also backed by Shopify where the business model does not conflict.

https://remix.run/