Couldn't hate them any more if I tried, its pretty much the final form of this dead hobby murdered by greed called gaming.
Despite closely watching it go down I still don't exactly know how things have gotten bad enough to the point where now there are many who genuinely consider these way below minimum viable product AI generated 0 effort mobile casinos to be more worthy of their time and money than real games. If you put a gun to my head I'll play the worst shit (thats my point, by any standard it doesnt get lower than gatchas/mobile, the worst PC/console AAAs are by definition automatically above them even if they are truly horrible) any day before I touch any gatcha/mobile/chinese casino, be that Veilguard, Concord, AC Shadows, nearly anything.
I've also held my ground on microtransactions from the start, its all greedy, exploitative and just downright evil and should not exist in any form, base game + expansion and thats it.
If its single player just mod it in for free, if its multiplayer just don't play a game that rewards anything other than skill, its rigged otherwise yes cosmetics included (thats how we got to today in the first place, and to pay to win which many games are as much as their playebase and developers try to deny it), remember when it actually mattered to earn skins? You wanted to be good enough to be that one guy in the lobby with that rare skin, now you know its probably a moron whos gonna tank your team if they're wearing some overpriced clown skin, probably doesn't even know how to play properly or they're a tryhard who'll cry if you're just trying to have fun and not taking every single match extremely seriously like its a top tournament, whales are always unpleasant to play with.
Due to basically every new game having them in some way or another I can somewhat "accept" (complain slightly less often about it instead of 24/7 like with gatcha/mobile/live service/always online) it if at the very least the overwhelming majority of all content can be earned by any regular "free" to player reasonably (requirements of unlocks are not adjusted at all to encourage purchases so they can be "safely" ignored, they shouldn't and can't ever really be tho) or if a complete edition is released on a deep sale a few months/ years down the line where I can get everything for 10$ that morons burned thousands on, this one is my preferred way for these games to go. Every game is objectively downgraded by the addition of MTX and improved by their removal, no exceptions. That's really what it comes down to, maybe in a pre-digital age where stores only stocked the latest full priced games paying 10$ for something useless like a skin in a favorite game could've been worth it to some people but now when you can buy all the best games ever made for 5$/10$ on Steam sales its genuinely baffling to me what type of person could find any value to justify paying the price of, many actual games, even brand new high end AAs if you look at the pricing of modern microtransactions in AAA games (or even up to the price of consoles/good GPUs and above if you look at the pricing in gatchas/mobile specifically).
Gregem People claim gachas gave a home to mmorpg addicts who lost touch with their main games for whatever reason, and I agree. Given how progression works, it's a natural fit as a replacement, even if gameplay is lacking.
There are lots of debates about where exactly microtransactions can be traced back to, the horse armor is the most popular one but in my opinion its MMOs, I never got into MMOs and partially I kinda regret that just cause hearing people talk about old WoW and such, does sound like I missed out on something, it kinda sucks not having any experience of my own with them, but that is where big spending really began to be normalized that I never could understand. I think some people are leaving out WoW on purpose from the timeline just because of nostalgia or whatever and thats why the horse armor became the first accepted MTX, even tho most MMOs had MTXes for a long time that weren't all that different to todays.
There are plenty of F2P and pay once MMOs so that unless I can inspect old Blizzard's finances myself I'll refuse to believe that the subscription was actually necessary, it was just Blizzard being greedy because they knew they could get away with at the time they could do no wrong. Same as Xbox Live Gold, looking back at it its such an obvious scam but at the time nobody cared because gaming was so good and the "oh servers have ongoing costs" sounded good enough on the surface as an excuse so everyone just went with it.
But as games started to degrade in quality while also raising the prices a ton and introducing all these anti-consumer practices idk why people still continued to go with it. Most likely going mainstream especially these extremely greedy type of games has the most to do with it, those of us who weren't gonna deal with this type of price gauging just got replaced by a new casual audience who did, how greedy a developer is almost directly linked to have popular their game is, where they just know they can get away with it because there'll be enough new players coming in with lower expectations to keep replacing the old players who they drive away.
