Endlessly repeating one-armed bandit gameplay, throw battle passes on top and boom Bobby Kotick can show shareholders how successful the game is.
Why gaming sucks in '23 …it's the money.
Diablo 3, especially with real money used to buy equipment, turned the CharOp into a core aspect of the game. If you didn't pay attention to that aspect the game could be mercilessly hard. So I couldn't just mindlessly play, I had to pause half way through the dungeon to go further tune all my gear across a dozen different dimensions.
The extra cognitive load means there's more steps between me sitting down and engaging something fun. If I have an hour to play a game having to spend ten minutes out of that time dealing with loot is just a tax on fun. It's bad enough that unless I play every day I have to wait some unbounded amount of time waiting for updates because of the forced online component.
https://www.dexerto.com/diablo/diablo-4-couch-co-op-platform...