However, seeing my favorite franchises go down the drain when I would have loved to keep immersing myself in those worlds still makes me bitter over the direction the AAA gaming industry is taking. So I get that people complain.
Kena Bridge of Spirits and Tony Hawk 1 + 2 HD are amazing games and have no DLC.
It's a very complicated problem to solve, on some level adults have the freedom to be self-destructive. In another business case, dating apps are known to knowingly allow fake profiles to roam to encourage people to subscribe. And even after that, you have various freemium add-ons.
Between this, and a very scary experience, I haven't used an app in years and I actually meet much higher quality people now.
But adults have a right to spend their money whichever way they choose, if you enjoy spending 200$ or $300 a month on free to play games, and chatting with bots, enjoy yourself.
The bigger issue with much of this stuff is there's no clear cap on how much money you can spend, so the bulk of freemium revenue comes from a tiny percentage of consumers.
Like an addict will steal to finance their addiction, you'll have cases where someone will just steal their mom's credit card to buy Fortnite skins or Tinder boosts.
I think a good compromise would be to restrict games with free to play mechanics to adults, as in if you're not at least 18 you're not allowed to play games with loot boxes. Once you're an adult, gambling is fine.
At the same time, I also respect the countries who have just banned this form of gambling outright. As it appears the Netherlands has.
https://screenrant.com/lootbox-gambling-microtransactions-il...
Yes. As it stands many of these games are simply an end-run around gambling laws. It would be nice if games with these mechanics were clearly labelled (ESRB is showing its conflict of interest here) and rated 18+.
I personally think the legal age to gamble or drink should be 18, but to comply with state law it's not unreasonable to say restrict boxes to those 21 and over.
Everyone is playing Elden Ring. If I wanted to play it, but disagreed with the same things, I couldn't play other games and get the same experience.
If you gets years of enjoyment out of a game you spent $20 on, I think you've come out ahead in all measures. I think that's the most important thing to not lose sight of. Now, I totally get expressing disagreement over the direction of a game, but at the end of the day it's probably unreasonable to expect to enjoy the experience of a particular game (or any single thing, really) forever. Games change, gamers change.
If there's a golden age of video gaming, we're living in it now. The sheer quantity of quality, innovative games out there is almost absurd.
The daily amount of creativity, talent and technical ability blows my mind!
The indie scene is, indeed, vibrant - but there's a limit to the kinds of games that can come from a small team with a small budget. Meanwhile, extensive monetization is creeping into more and more big franchises and studios. See: the recent Gran Turismo 7 controversy.
Who needs modernity?
And other genres that are extremely popular that didn't exist a few years ago. Also, there are good new RTS titles out there, even if there's nothing with the popularity that Starcraft or whatever had back in the day.
> Other genres (MMOs) have been almost completely taken over by games with freemium models and there are few options available if you're not into that.
The most popular MMOs right now is likely FFXIV (not freemium), followed by WoW (not freemium). (Or it might still be the other way around; either way...) There are a lot of freemium model MMOs around, but most of them launched with a subscription model, failed to compete with the dominant subscription model MMOs, and fell back to freemium to try and survive. Taken as a whole, the genre is absolutely dominated by the subscription model; that's where the players and money is. And while no, there aren't a ton of subscription options, that's largely an inevitable consequence of the business model, which has vicious network effects.
There isn't a freemium MMO developer out there that wouldn't trade a kidney in a heartbeat to become the next Everquest/WoW/FFXIV. Conversely, if WoW ever went freemium, it would be universally recognised as a sign of abject failure and a last attempt to try and stabilise the game financially before the servers get shut down.
> there's a limit to the kinds of games that can come from a small team with a small budget
The limit exists, but it seems to be ever receding into the distance. Valheim or Rimworld are both stunning, developed on a shoestring budget by tiny teams.
> Meanwhile, extensive monetization is creeping into more and more big franchises and studios.
You don't have to play games from the big franchises or studios.
I guess the Ouya tried to replicate this but the ease of development hurt the console in my opinion. Too much software mixed with the same 24 hours in a day that everyone has leads to much of it never being experienced.