For the same reason that people wear nice clothes in real life, why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game? Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life? Likewise, you can resell RL items, there’s a market for that. Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?

That’s not to say that games where progression is locked behind time gates where you need to buy 1000 Realm Warp Crystals or whatever just to actually play the game aren’t a toxic hell. But that doesn’t seem to be what the article is pushing against.

Paying for items that impact the game balance turns them into spending competitions: whoever pays the company the most money wins. Games designed like this are not even worth playing. I fell for one of these money sinks once, never again.

> The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals

Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game. Cosmetic items are interactive. They are unlockable, collectable, wearable items.

Further, visuals do impact the gameplay. You could argue about the difference between "gameplay" and "visuals" but each supports/influences the other and both are critical elements of almost every videogame. However you divide up the parts of a game, they all affect each other. Generally speaking, having all of the elements working together makes for a better game.

Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.

> why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game?

Nobody is surprised by this.

Yes, I really hate this argument that cosmetics are not gameplay. Visuals are a huge part of what makes a game, no one would be happy if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.

Not a meaningful comparison. A game without textures would be hardly playable at all. The same can't be said for skins or accessories to your character/vehicle. You don't get eye-cancer with the default skin. If you feel you need that virtual Louis Vuitton bag to fully enjoy the game then well be a sucker and pay for it and pretend the game was just a little more expensive. I've yet to encounter a game where I feel like I'm missing out on anything with the default player model/skin/car.

So where do we stop? This is just one more way, in addition to the thousands we already have, in which peer pressure and status symbols manifest.

I don't really muss with my car too much anymore, instead I just click "Equip Now" every time I can and slowly modify it over time.

It'd be fine. No textures doesn't mean everything is gray.

I don't disagree that they do add something, but theses ones are not something that I want, nor that I need.

> if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.

I do have to pay for the textures and shaders... I did pay for them as a matter of fact. I didn't pay for the one not included, as I didn't want them. Some did want them, and did pay for them individually. Just like I didn't pay for Elden Ring but plenty did...

Now, when you bought that game, if you were expecting a specific amount of content, and you didn't get that content without paying more, I agree completely, that would be false advertising and that would be definitely wrong.

False advertising is definitely an issue in video games, there's so much overpromising and under-delivering but IAP isn't the issue there (though it definitely can be the reason for your false advertising). Until that part is handled correctly, the market did alleviate most of the false advertising by having an abundant amount of reviews and to me that's a not so bad way to deal with this.

[1] https://support.rocketleague.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029832...

Back in the days we used mods and texture packs to remove (hardware) expensive textures from the game so we get more FPS. I'm not sure if your argument applies to all games. For many games there is a competitive scene that usually don't give a shit about visuals and would trade most visual features for more frames per second.

https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/sales-and-events/arpeggi...

If these had no “gameplay” effect or “competitive advantage” based on environment, why do nation states spend money developing them and equip troops differently based on biome?

And why have some games had to patch their PvP to “outline” opposing players with a visibility border in the patches that follow certain “cosmetics”?

A more subtle advantage can arise from hitboxes in both hitscan and projectile games with customizers or cosmetics that change the mesh. There’s a reason some games are predominantly female characters in close fit gear.

Finally, even games that insist no gameplay or competitive advantage, are fully aware of “the meta”.

In Fallout 76, for example, PvP players learned to hotkey the “Nuka-Cola” drinks with special benefits. In a for money store, Bethesda allows you to purchase a robot junk collector that gathers Nuka-Colas for free. Rationale is it is just a QoL (quality of life) benefit, but in reality, it allows stockpiling a combat advantage to last longer in combat than the opponent. Same store also allows you to purchase “repair kits” for weapons and “bubble gum” that suppresses the survival mechanism around eating/drinking for an hour of game play.

Again, Bethesda’s claim is QoL not pay-to-win, but weapons repairable mid-battle away from one’s base certainly affects winning, and level of hunger/thirst affects damage multipliers and action point refresh (aka ‘mana’).

Lines keep moving.

It seems to me that it definitely has a psychological impact for some folks (myself included) in both off-line and on-line competition.

The real problem is that loot boxes are gambling, and are addictive, period. It triggers something in otherwise rational people, especially children, that makes it feel good to spend money on mostly non-gameplay-altering cosmetics.

As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic26...

If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.

And of course it's a vanity component (at least for me, though other posters have raised other factors). Everyone's different with different preferences and as long as there's not a problematic spending aspect I think it's fine...but this links back to the gambling issue. Personally I only buy cosmetics in a few games I play a lot and that don't use loot box mechanics.

OP is just ranting about people who pay more getting a better experience, making paying such a central part of gaming. They just hate this, which I agree with, although I know others don't.

In a way, getting a better experience just for being able and willing to pay more is a basic feature of our society. Why should we expect videogames, being as expensive and lucrative, to be radically different from the rest of society?

I'll just continue appreciating those games who are, those who actually work more like art. If I ever decide to try a F2P loot-box generator-style game, it generally puts me off quickly.

Because it determines whether free players can still compete with paying customers.

There's no problem with a paid weapon skin that just looks cool since everyone is still on a level playing field. If that paid skin gives the user double damage then you've created 2 classes of players and one of them is superior. In such cases, the only reason free players even exist is to serve as fodder for your paying customers. They're there to get wrecked.

Because unlike the real world, we expect games to be inherently fair and meritocratic. In a competitive game, we expect that no matter how somebody looks or what they may say, the only thing that matters is their ability to perform. This is comparable to why people get upset about, say, the speed-enhancing swimwear for the Olympic games but don't have any problem with that swimwear existing.

One of the central functions of games is to level the playing field, or at least to reduce the dimensionality to such a degree that it is possible to be focused on all influencing factors in a game within the confines of that game. A closed-system, when we're usually all stuck playing in an open-system. Since all real-world closed-systems actually exist within an open-system, of course there could be external influences, but gamers generally have an expectation that attempts will be made to make a game as self-contained and closed as is possible. Pay-to-win games break this contract to make those unwilling to pay into unwitting tools for the enjoyment of the paying customer. They are open-systems under the guise of being closed-systems.

Granted, the category referred to as "Games" now includes many different things, including "Experiences" that aren't really games at all. And there are so many games today that it's pretty easy to find games that are actually games at their core. But there's also plenty of games that are marketed as games but turn out to be significantly about art / fashion to such a degree that they can no longer really be classified as games.

I've got call out Roblox for playing the meta-game here in a way that all gamers frustrated by pay-to-win will appreciate. It takes the idea of a closed system being broken into an open system, and makes that (making F2P games) into a closed system that breaks into an open system: you get to pay-to-win at creating pay-to-win games. A beautiful pyramid scheme that even your 11-yo child can enjoy being exploited within!

That of course assumes that the game isn't sold to me with these "better" visuals as included.

see: Halo Infinite

Want to be black? that will be $10 please

This is an interesting point. I think it begs the question, what _is_ the goal of a game? 10 years ago I would have said that broadly, the goal of a video game is to create an experience the player will enjoy. Perhaps now it's more simple though, maybe the goal of the vast majority of games today is to create a model in which money is willingly transferred from the player to the publisher.

The reality is that commercial experience games - where the goal is trigger the imagination and guide the player to a rich experience - are much rarer than commercial extraction games, where the goal is to create addictive engagement and spending patterns which can be monetised.

This isn't nearly as true for tangible commercial board games, especially those that promote strategic and imaginative thinking. You can get started in chess with a chess board and a rule book. You do not have to keep spending money on nicer-looking pieces, and your board will not be monetised with pop-up ads. (Chess sites may be, but chess kept developing for hundreds of years without them.)

D&D and more obscure games like Carcassone are similar. You can spend extra on expansion packs, but even if you buy everything the expansion space is small and bounded. The physical costs of board game dev and distribution keep that true.

Electronic games have a virtually infinite potential expansion space, so the economics are drastically different. The temptation to turn every last thing into a monetisation engine is hard to avoid - to the extent that monetisation design has become a meta-game in its own right.

Not only that, sometimes they can affect the basic mechanics too. For example, some guns in Destiny 2 the range is measured from the end of the weapon model, and some skins extend the model out so the gun is further from the player. This in a one v. one scenario can give you a slight edge on one shot kill distance if you have the skin, so you can shoot earlier than an opponent without it.

the more regularly occuring thing is probably that parent's don't properly set up their kids phones and then they buy a few hundred or worse thousands bucks of something they shouldn't. but again those occurances are rare and don't cause really cause any actual damage, especially since you can get refunds for this stuff if it gets expensive very easily. kids regularly do stuff a lot more expensive than that. in fact kids themselves are a lot more expensive than that as a baseline.

the supposed exploitation of things like loot boxes has literally zero evidence behind it. all you will find are a few genuinely bottom of the barrel studies (as in that australian government study from some years ago, should literally be taken as an example in a book of how not to run a study).

and the constant comparison to gambling is really tiresome, because it's obviously not the same. people play themselves out of all their belongigs regularly with actual gambling, because their goal is to make a profit with gambling and their last gamble will surely turn it around. such a thing isn't possible even in the few online gaming markets remaining where you can resell your items for real money because its a big hazzle to liquidize all your assets.

Yup, I think this gets lost in the "visual-only cosmetics are fine/gameplay-affecting is bad" position. The problem is that in most cases, even if the cosmetic is purely visual, games are now being designed around "how do we incorporate cosmetics" which is constraining the types of experiences that are being made and the mechanics they allow.

Battlefield 2042 is an example of a game that completely upended its traditional mechanics to pull in the concept of "operators" (like R6: Siege) because they knew they could make more money selling operators. And at some level that's gameplay affecting, maybe not the ideal picture of what happens when MTX gets involved, but that's always the temptation - "we'll make it gameplay-affecting, but it'll be fair". Once you bring money into the picture you are reliant on developers to take the high road - not just today, but for as long as the game is active/you're interested.

Its predecessor, BFV, was skin-based and it was still controversial not just that you had random Fortnite-style nazi characters running around the Pacific Theater or Japanese Rambo Lady running around Norway, but because they started to introduce tons of animations so that players could at least see the skins they paid $20 a pop for - and that is a basic game-design thing that affects everyone regardless of whether you yourself pay up or not.

At a more basic level, the single-player RPG is essentially dead because it's the most difficult to introduce MTX mechanics into those genre of games. And sure you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are using "cooperative" or "inter-session" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX. You've got forced Denuvo on everything. Etc etc.

And again, even when it's done right, there is still an incentive to make the "free" mechanisms grindy so that players feel the urge to pay IRL money. LOTR: Shadow of War was an example of that where the game could technically be finished without MTX, but at a certain point the game ramped the difficulty so hard that it was virtually impossible, certainly impossible without suddenly turning the game into a second job. Many games similarly force hundreds of hours of grinding or... you can just pay and go play with your friends! You can get bait-and-switched once you are into the game and emotionally attached - and that can even occur after release/after reviews have been written, or even just so far into the game that most reviewers don't reach it in their 5 hours of gameplay on their pre-release copy.

Those MTX mechanism are still shaping gameplay mechanics even if they are "purely cosmetic" - and in many cases they are not, they are definitely gameplay-affecting by design (in major AAA/e-sports titles even, this isn't just random mobile crapware, R6:Siege is one of the most popular e-sports titles, LOTR is a mega-IP, etc). Games being designed around "how do we pump the player for cash most efficiently and with the least ability for them to hack around us" is itself a problem either way though, that's a corrosive mindset for game design as a whole that is enabled and encouraged by allowing MTX at all. Either you keep that camel out nose and all, or as soon as that nose is under the tent it's always going to be an insidious urge, and in many cases an explicit mandate from publishers to the studio.

Also, yes, in anything where you interact with another player, your interactions are shaped by the other player's responses to you, which is determined by your cosmetics. I posted this deeper in the thread but to bring it back here:

> As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.

> http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic26...

> If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.

Paper that might be enlightening for those who haven't partaken: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:901463/FULLTEXT0...

(I should add that as medic, I had a golden medigun for a while too, and that was an extremely bad time for me, because every single roamer was absolutely gunning for the medic with the $100 item. Sometimes it pays to have some restraint in your plumage when you happen to be a particularly delicious and defenseless target...)

I have such mixed feelings about TF2, because it was such a fantastic game, but it pioneered all these exploitative MTX mechanisms. The game itself was actually one of the better examples of how to do MTX properly (cosmetic only, tradeable by players, etc) but it immediately showed there was a lot more money in MTX than in making games, and opened the door to other actors to exploit much more heavily (compare the Overwatch model and its non-tradeability/gacha mechanics, R6:S with its gameplay-affecting operators, etc). It's also disgusting the way they've just continued to let the game rot without even basic bugfixes, it's been completely overwhelmed by hackers for 4 or 5 years now because they just won't patch their shit. Nor will they let the community patch their shit, like Team Comtress 2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBDMZ-9-Dw

What? Co-op/PvP has been a major part of From Software's souls games going back to Demon's Souls in 2009. They can also be played entirely offline if you wish and have zero microtransactions or Denuvo.

Have you ever heard of thing called fashion souls? A lot of times I wear armour (pick and choose pieces) because it looks cool not because it have bigger numbers.

If I were on an actual team of people, I'd expect cosmetics to only matter for at-a-glance identification of a specific player.

Most games you will play with 23 other randoms who you will never see again after a couple hours. And that is actually the problem - on an actual competitive team your entire team would be decent and everyone would be there to play seriously and get stuff done. But in public games you need some kind of fitness signal to figure out which players are going to be a waste of a team's scarcest resource. How do you tell that from a bunch of players jumping around a spawn room like monkeys for a minute during the setup countdown? Cosmetics. Plumage.

(and actually Valve have gone out of their way over the years to remove other potential signals, like sprays and chat...)

Plumage evolved in nature for a reason, it's still functional and important even though it's "cosmetic-only". Games are a social phenomenon and plumage is still important to them too and that still affects your gameplay too.

I usually play Deep Rock Galactic, which has some non-cosmetic ways to judge people's experience. Promotion(like prestige) of a class is indicated by a border color and number of stars, and indicates someone has played a character for promotion25 levels. Bronze stars are okay, silver stars should be decent.

'Blue Levels' are also present. They serve as an indicator of how many times that player has leveled up any* character. So, someone with blue level 100 and only one promotion star should still be considered experienced in terms of game sense, but not necessarily an expert on their character.

Someone with low 'blue levels' and no stars is just a greenbeard, and should not be expected to be great.

There is a similar player level mechanism in TF2 but not tied to classes at all, just a blue level type thing. That works in the starter room, but it's not a solution for the "I have two seconds to choose which of these players to uber before that soldier finishes bombing me"/"I need to pick one of these players to pocket to try and stay alive to keep the uber up for the team".

Plumage works, you can instantly make a call that this is a default player and that one has cosmetics, or recognize the cosmetics of a person who has played well previously/who you gave a chance and they did something antisocial/stupid. Trying to identify a player name, finding them on the scoreboard, and then re-syncing with what has happened in the game in the last 5 seconds just isn't practical.

Like, TF2 has been f2p for 10+ years now, random HNers aren't going to come up with the magic solution here, this is how the game plays regardless of whether you think it should be. It's not a problem, and it's actually one of the least-exploitative MTX mechanisms on the market, but you can't eliminate the effects of cosmetics on gameplay in many situations because plumage is such an important social cue.

https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:901463/FULLTEXT0...

Visual design is such a core aspect of (good) games to begin with, it's basically impossible to divorce that from the gameplay effects it has.

https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3499&context=...

If you want an example of cosmetics that don't affect anything - Battlefield 1 has a fixed selection of guns and then each gun has some skins. Nobody else can really see the particular skin at range anyway so no real gameplay effect. This was done deliberately to allow the character design to be visually distinctive - a british medic runs around with crutches on their back for example, and the british scout wears a cape. Can't have that with cosmetics unless they're so trivial that nobody can tell they're there (BF1), or you go to great efforts to preserve character silhouettes (TF2). In BFV it's much much more difficult to tell the classes apart - any class can run around with a medic hat on for example! An elite skin can be any class - you have to visually identify what guns and items they're carrying, which is more challenging even if it's "just cosmetic" - a mere cosmetic gives you a tactical advantage, you know what your enemy is carrying and they have to guess about you.

And that's obviously because BFV was much more oriented around MTX sales, while BF1 focused on an "expansion pack" model.

So MTX clearly affects that aspect of game design even if it's "only cosmetic".

The holster is rare, and maybe you recognize that it's rare, but they could have just gotten it out of a drop and kept it. The Heavy with the funny flip-flops and sunglasses is probable more recognizable at-a-glance, but could have bought a bunch of cheap cosmetics for a few dollars on the market.

And in the case of keeping an uber ready, won't you have to stay pocketed long enough to learn if someone is a good or less-good choice? Even if it's raining hell on your position, you'd have a rough view of the Heavy and a kill feed that highlights the assists you're getting from them. What more is there to look for?

As for the Battlefield games you mention, my biggest issue in 5 was that all of the player models seemed to blend into the background. Most of the time, I wasn't able to spend brainpower trying to figure out who is which type of class, simply because I was too busy trying to figure out if some dull, misshapen blob was part of the map or trying to kill me. Combined with the general feel of the game (poor, imo), I was never motivated to spend enough time on it to get into anything serious. Haven't bought another Battlefield game since, and BF5 was on a steep sale at the time.

The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix; spheres, tubes, different physics, goals in the center, figure 8 map(?), embankments (like map in season 1), etc.

I guess it's simple and works but it'd be cool to see new gameplay related updates.

I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.

As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.

Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)

Permanent ownership of what? If the game servers shut down or you get banned[1] for some reason your permanent ownership is meaningless. Also how are NFTs different than the existing systems like the Steam marketplace in terms of functionality?

[1] Oh yeah, NFTs require you to have an online account for the game. I would argue my unlocks in SSBM are much more permanent than any game NFT because there's no account for Nintendo to ban that could cause me to lose access to them.

Personally I view games as art that's closer to food than a painting: ephemeral, may disappear after being consumed.

Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.

Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.

> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.

Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.

Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.

Minecraft still gets significant updates.

> I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.

I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the opposite—that games make 90% of their revenue in year 1 because nobody continues working on them. If you keep working on it, however, you can continue to get sales, because the more you work on it, the better the game becomes, and so people buy it just to see what everyone else is talking about.

Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/

I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.

It doesn't help that most things NFT-related are scams, hype bait, etc.

They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.

You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.

(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)

Agree totally. NFTs for games make quite literally no sense. You are buying an asset or whatever from a central authority (the developer/publisher) that only exists or makes any sense within their game/platform/ecosystem. What value could a token bring there? The only value add I could see is that your ability to buy and sell the asset is now out of the hands of the publisher... except it isn't since they still control access to the asset and can therefor constrain your use of it in any way they see fit.

This is really a problem with most of the NFT related ideas floating around. Once a central authority is involved your token ceases being meaningful and just becomes, like you said, an ID in a database somewhere.

Plenty of games get regular patches and updates (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition being one I recently played) and back in the day, games would release paid expansions. No reason that Rocket League couldn't sell a map pack, for example. Sure, its a similar idea as freemium (pay for more content), but at least the expansions used to be sizable packs with lots of content. Old school expansions, as well as expansions like those of The Witcher 3 or the FROM Software games (which are often lauded as better than the base game), that cost about 1/4 the price of the base game for a decent content boost extend the life of the game, provide the developer with continued income and feel a lot less scammy than fremium games do.

Now: Pay for game prior to its release, launch day, people will tell you the bugs are actually features, studio milks franchise forever.

There's a lot of games that have a sort of boring standard (SC2's 1v1 ladder maps are all same-y, nobody competitive plays Smash with items on, etc.) and the fact that you see this pop up repeatedly in unrelated communities should probably tell you something.

IMO, when you have a game with sufficiently deep mechanics, wackiness tends to obscure that depth, resulting in an experience that's less interesting rather than more. Like if you added Mario Kart abilities to football/soccer and suddenly the winning team was getting regularly blue shelled, I don't think it would improve the experience, even if initially it'd be hilarious.

Now maybe it's still worth it to have "party game" modes in some cases, I'm just saying that these modes might not have legs, so to speak, and thus may not be worth the dev effort if hardly anyone plays them.

Anyway that's why I also used SC2 as an example. Blizzard's attempts to add more wackiness/variety to the 1v1 ladder maps have generally been poorly received.

Now, SC2's co-op mode has a bunch of wackiness and did great, but note that this is very VERY separate from standard ladder/melee games. It's not just "oh we changed a few rules" or "we took the base game and added wacky items" it's a much more fundamental rework than that, it's an entirely new 'vertical' for the game. And yeah, that kind of thing could probably work for a game like Rocket League.

If your primary audience is casual, like in the case of Nintendo games, then it makes all the sense in the world.

Obviously you could argue that Psyonix ought to be appealing to a casual audience. That's a separate conversation, and I'd argue that RL is a fundamentally bad fit for that sort of game, but given what they have been going for thus far, not introducing crazier modes makes a lot of sense.

The complication when it comes to adding new features is that Rocket League is built on top of a bespoke scripting engine that was discontinued after Unreal Engine 3, so they have to fully recreate RL in UE5. Because of this they don't want to put any additional resources into new features for UE3 since it's wasted effort once the game transitions to the new engine.

I did like that game mode where the ball would gravitate towards the goal!

The only genuinely new one they've done for years was the NFL mode, which they presumably got paid for and wasn't very good.

They do that pretty regularly. Not in major ways, but the rules of football do change over time.

I personally am glad the developers have realized they have a game like this and haven’t killed their game through adding more for the sake of more.

They tried. Wasteland, Neo Tokyo, and Starbase ARC were non-standard maps. Players complained about it, and now they are changed to be standard.

They tried that with the original wasteland map and there was huge pushback from the community and people demanded the maps be standardized.

They still keep adding other game modes some of which are only there for a few days.

It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.

Obviously that would be a problem on the PC but games would remain popular and publishers would get paid without either of those things. Games as a whole wouldn't go anywhere. They just make more money this way.

The main reason I still play is to continue improving, and I don't think I could ever do that effectively if I was limited to only playing against people in my local sphere. My rank typically puts me somewhere in the top 1% of players (and honestly, I'm not even that good. The skill ceiling is insanely high), online match making may be frustrating sometimes but it's the easiest way to find opponents who will push those boundaries.

Would a hosted server work well for people who are much lower ranks who are primarily playing to just mess around with friends? Probably. I would quit tomorrow if online matchmaking went away though.

There are many different attempts at business models in games. Splitgate started with your suggestion and has since gone free to play. Numerous MMOs have tried subscriptions and have gone free to play. It's a sad state of affairs, but for every successful Minecraft, Stardew, or Valheim, there's thousands of failed attempts.

The point I'm trying to make is that these things have been tried by one game or another, and there's good reasons why the "run your own server" model died for the most popular games. Ignoring that is, I think, discarding a lot of historical evidence and nuance against blanket "why don't they just do X" arguments.

If there's a better way, it won't be a return to the past. It will be something new that no one has thought of yet.

Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.

But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.

> It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.

Dead to who? It still has players, but it's "financially" dead, which is what the studio cares about when making these choices.

Keep in mind again that this is about the game surviving not about squeezing all the money possible out of their playerbase - after all the topic was about hating what video games have become.

Also, games are supposed to be a form of escapism, where the gameplay matters, not who you are and how much money your parents make.

You can argue in favor of the game itself being free allowing people to save 10 or 20 bucks. But gameplaywise Microtransactions inevitably make the gameplay experience worse, without exceptions.

Nothing that can be purchased in the game affects gameplay, it's all just cosmetics.

The biggest issue I have with free to play is there's virtually no barrier for smurf accounts.

I have bought some items, but only by trading free drops for keys/credits.

As far as I know all custom cars have the same hitbox as one of the freely available cars.

The complaint isn't about depreciation but rather the inability sell the items at all.

No and thats why its silly to say rocket league items have no impact on gameplay, ofcourse its nicer play with hot wheels car that has animated decals than grey corolla.

I would like game to be more like "if you get this good, you get these cool items" instead of something like "if we put paid rewards right next to free rewards, then 15% of our playerbase is going to buy paid tier." :/

I had no problem with dlc cars, it felt like I was supporting the game, now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.

Epic Games. Why are we surprised by this when they saw a cash cow when they bought it, and have done nothing but turn it into another Fortnite?

I think this type of game needs its own genre. Fortnite, RL, GTA Online, Warzone... They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".

I was a huge RL fan in 2015/16. It started going down hill sometime after that and EG has run it into the ground.

that's called "live service". In theory. A lot of games try to skip the "build a game that's actually fun and reasonably complete" part and just race to dump it on the market as soon as it's barely (or not even) playable and think they'll add content later. That's not live service, that's early access, and it's killed BFV and then BF2042 after it, Anthem, etc. EA is very very bad about this.

But yeah, when you hear a publisher say that a game is going to be a "live service", that's what it means, they want to do the fortnite model and squeeze ongoing revenue from the player base by whatever means. Sometimes it's cosmetic-only, sometimes it's not (R6: Siege), sometimes it starts one way and then becomes gameplay-affecting 6 months or 12 months down the road when they've got a player base who's attached to the game.

Of course, just like changing the game to add P2W elements after the fact, sometimes they won't. Valve basically abandoned TF2 about 5 years ago, they are still raking in money from it (it's still a top-10 game on steam...) but they won't even keep up with anti-cheat let alone continue development. Or even continue live service. No live service, only pay. And nor will they even allow the community to fix the game on their own, like Team Comtress 2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBDMZ-9-Dw

The game exists as a monetization engine. Some amount of fresh content is required to keep feeding the machine, but the goal is generally to let the machine run while dropping in bits of content and purchasable junk for the players to consume.

It's a viable business model and it allows players to enjoy the game for many years to come. What bothers me a little is that these revenue extracting schemes are usually very complicated and are probably complicated because it allows them to extract as much money as possible from a small subset of players. Like casino's and mobile games.

Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher.

Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice.

Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.

Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics.

Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.

Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?

The first issue is that like I originally mentioned, microtransactions disproportionately affect neurodivergent individuals because of the addictive mechanics used to implement them. The concept of 'whales' is a term used to refer to big spenders in a game economy without fully examining the reason they are spending so much. For example, where you can only buy one copy of Elden Ring, you could easily buy a new copy of Forza every year and buy each car, which may be a compulsion if you have OCD, for example. The same argument could be (and should be) made against tiered subscription services in games. If there is a lootbox mechanic involved, the issue is only compounded further as it is an introduction of gambling mechanics. In some cases, it can be worth examining the presence of envy economics 'Oooh I want was they have! How much is it? Oh I want it more now I know!'.

The second issue is the scale difference is ridiculous. The amount of dev and artist time to produce a game sits at around 1.5 to 4 years and sometimes much more. There is a large number of artistic assets that are used in combination with code when making a game and those assets are paid for using the proceeds from the game sales. When micro transactions are produced, a fraction of those assets are divided out of the main game (or less often, added later) and can be produced on a 6 month cycle to be sold separately. To be explicit, the amount of assets made in a microtransaction is FAR less than those used to make the game, but often the price of the microtransaction does not reflect this (again, refer to Forza and the $200 car dlc for a minimum-$100 game). This means that either the publisher or the developer team (including art team) is receiving that margin, and if you think the developers are receiving a proportionate amount of that margin then I have some bad news for you.

To be clear, I think game monetisation is OK. But that does not mean all forms of monetisation are OK, and it definitely does not mean that diluting a product in a harmful way is OK.

No, because the market for second-hand clothing is extremely oversaturated and clothing, particularly "fast fashion", simply does not last long enough to live a useful second life any more.

A video game skin however does not degrade, it will look the very same (or better) even in two decades.

IMO the big change is to do with the lifecycle of games. Previously you release a new title, maybe a few DLCs, and then you move on. The game is done, you have to do something else, a sequel, a new IP, whatever. That was true for all games, multiplayer included. Now (for multiplayer) the idea is to try different releases until one sticks, and then try and make that game evergreen. The dream being something like League of Legends, which has been printing money for over a decade.

Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate I suppose.

> ... so it is a bit like gambling ...

I hate what video games have become.

I think this is more than anything, an app store sickness.

It has spread a little to consoles and desktop, but I can still buy a 100% offline, single player game, which has the main purpose of entertaining me.

It has a story, a point to it, a mystery often, fun things to do which aren't mining or grinding away.

I pay 80 bucks for the privilege, and am quite happy to do so. It is worth it, giving me many hours of entertainment.

Some boast "oh I finished the game first run through in 8 hours" Really? Such players just ignore all the scenery, don't really explore, don't grasp the full mystery, just... fast fast! Gotta get this over with!

I play and take in the scenery, and games like the Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn are fun, take 50 to 100 hours to play this way.

Just reading things in-games, clues, discovering how these worlds got this way was 1/2 the fun of the game!

So stop playing on your portable addiction device. Its hold is more devious too, as it is always in your pocket.

Your PC, console, are with you on the bus. At work. In the kitchen.

Return to us, good sir. Return to real gaming.

again this doesn't impact the gameplay at all and I'm happy to earn some money. was able to buy another title on steam with the money accrued

That doesn't mean it isn't fun to do so, although there's a very high chance you'll come to regret the number of hours pumped into such games and the way they kept you engaged in their dopamine loop.

It's not a bit like gambling, it's exactly gambling and the predatory nature of it is what I hate about video games.

people bet on soccer too but that shouldn't stop you from getting excitement from it.

In my home country (Belgium) and my neigboring country (Netherlands) a lot of games their lootboxes are not available for us for the reason that the game-creators do not advertise the dropchances like the lottery, casino's and other gambling games are forced to do.

The reasoning is that the items that come out of the lootbox have a monetary value (as you need to pay to unlock a lootbox) so they fall under some of our gambling laws.

In my eyes, good riddance and I hope more countries will follow.

So Valve, EA Games,... just disabled opening lootboxes for us as they seem to be afraid to advertise the "drop chances" (but we can still buy and sell them)

it just so happens that I seem to get good cases that I was able to sell for a bit of change but it is not like you can play 20 hours every week and make consistent money.

With CSGO third parties were essentially selling games for actual currency instead of credit with Valve and using skins as currency for gambling on esports matches. A few of them also came up with other gambling games that didn't even involve esports.

It was also a great vehicle for money laundering: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/30/counter-strike...

Wild times.

Nintendo charged $9.99 for this game. The response was absolute evisceration in the ratings. Mobile game players EXPECTED a F2P experience that would waste their time with energy charge ups, loot boxes, etc. and were upset when Nintendo didn't do that. In response, Nintendo switched to this type of experience for their next release, Fire Emblem, which performed much better.

The Wikipedia article for Super Mario Run explains in detail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Run#Commercial

A select quote - '[Nintendo President] Kimishima said that "we honestly prefer the Super Mario Run model", though in a June 2017 investor question-and-answer session, he said "in the future we will consider not only a single set price, but other methods that incorporate a wider variety of elements that allow as many consumers as possible to play"'

And most people didn’t get that you could buy it and not worry about needing to buy berries or diamonds for real world money. Not worry about your child spending hundreds of real world dollars when playing on your phone.

People just hated the fact that they had to pay for the cheapest priced Mario game ever.

I can't say I'm not biased here, I basically hate 95% of all the mobile games I ever tried, or at least stopped playing after an hour - so a 10$ purchase for me would simply never happen, because I don't like the platform. On the other hand I did do the "paid unlock" after trying it out for a few. (Ignore this if they had a demo, I never tried it, wasn't it iphone only?)

Ironically, this used to be the norm when the iPhone's app store came out. For example, Super Monkey Ball was $10 in 2008. Over time, there was a race to the bottom, and then F2P became the norm when Apple introduced IAP.

Kind of crazy that the whole market was defined by shovelware

People already figured how to not allow kids to pay real money in games. They don't worry about that. You just don't attach card to account or require password.

Just look up "Super Mario Run" on your favorite store and what you will see is "Free", not $10. In fact, I am not sure if the actual price is mentioned anywhere on the store page.

So of course people expected a F2P experience, because that's exactly what's on the store page. If Nintendo was honest, they would have published it as a paid app, with the price clearly visible on the store page. Maybe with a separate free and clearly labeled demo, as it is standard practice for one-time payment apps.

Users were annoyed by the bait and switch. Nintendo should have charged $9.99 in the store and been done with it. Instead they tried to straddle some line between freemium, paid, and demo.

In addition, Nintendo added always-on DRM so that even those who fully paid for the game were dealing with silly issues that you would only expect in a freemium game.

“While still using the freemium model, Nintendo eschewed requiring players to keep paying to access more levels, instead offering the game as a free demo with the first three levels unlocked and requiring a one-time payment to unlock the rest of the game.[12] Part of the reason for this pricing scheme was to make it transparent to parents who may be purchasing the game for their children so that they would not incur further costs.[42] Fearing piracy of the game, Nintendo added always-on DRM, which requires that players have a persistent Internet connection to play.”

Super Mario Run: $60 million total by July 2018

Fire Emblem Heroes: $656 million by January 2020

An order of magnitude. Incentives are everything.

Touch controls and IAP impose serious constraints on the mobile game market still. There are some gems, but it seems like the golden age of gaming is occurring outside of mobile games.

Iirc, they released a 3DS game with DLC, where you could haggle the price down in-game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty%27s_Real_Deal_Baseball

The moment something is known to become or becomes free to play is the moment I lose all interest.

The dishonesty in the system itself is what makes this unbearable for me.

Developers need to eat, Managers need to eat, Marketeers need to eat... And sometimes psychologists doing evil mindtricks and supporting gambling addictions need to eat too... Or buy a lambo, or two.

I don't care whether it's only cosmetic or not, I have and will never support that business model

How is it dishonest? F2P does not automatically mean using dark patterns or openly making it Pay2win. Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game and still allow the developers to eat.

Do you consider demos also dishonest?

To have zero impact on the game, they'd have to not be a part of the game. Or have ever existed at all, really.

But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them? Also, don't you think convincing someone to buy nothing sounds like something a con artist would do?

> allow the developers to eat

How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)

Because they're fun.

Some people are willing to spend $5 so that their Rocket League car is the Batmobile. It has no effect on the mechanics of the game (Your car's hitbox is still the same, and it has the same speed/acceleration), but makes the game that much more enjoyable for the player.

In Splitgate (F2P FPS), I bought the battle pass for $10 because I wanted my assault rifle to look like it was made of cardboard. The damage and accuracy didn't change. It's a purely cosmetic effect that I thought was amusing.

> How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)

Don't act like you think you know what was meant. It's annoying and smells like bad faith.

Now, since you don't want to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to play the game on a level playing field, you will probably want to spend money to unlock these things. This will costs hundreds of dollars, far more than you would pay for an actual real game. Even if you unlock them the free way, there's a high chance your account eventually gets banned. As, once again, the studio has no experience in anything other than skin design, and have no idea how their game actually works and will cave in to every single basic cheating allegation and social crap like "he was in my game therefore he stream sniped me". Again, if you have ever played a game in the last 30 years, you would be well aware that most people in charge do not understand very basics like how you could infer an enemy is near you because you heard him behind the wall, or he triggered something on the map somewhere that tells the other player that trigger was indeed triggered across the map.

> zero impact

Obviously false unless you have never played a game before.

That’s closer to the “free tier” stuff, and a very different model to modern “freenium” games.

The full game included a Part 2 and Part 3.

I think the latter business model is very respectable because it’s not sneaky and it isn’t manipulating me nearly as much. You can have hardly any money at all, play on a crappy computer, and still have a huge amount of fun in the game. You could even be very competitive. And all for free! Not even at a cost to your privacy! And you can optionally “donate” money to the project if you want to support the game and get a neat cosmetic. How is that not a great business model for me as a consumer?

I want to pay once for a game the same way I want to pay once for a car. Elden Ring is a perfect example.

I understand others feel differently. To each their own.

These "games" are HIGHLY MANIPULATIVE. They use bullying, false cult inclusion, peer pressure, gambling reward ration, false emotional and time investment, and outright slot machine tactics to extract money from players.

They are worse than Las Vegas gambling by a country mile, since at least Las Vegas gambling is open and honest about the fact that the house wins and has established rules.

The social bullying that comes from "fake players" that are paid employees of the company is among the most disturbing aspect of these games. They exists to "shake down" players to upgrade with paid upgrades, to sow conflict, etc.

The rules of these "games", including the value of in-game currencies of dizzying types, is routinely nerfed/devalued at rates similar to the more comical instances of hyperinflation in the real world.

These "games" are at the extreme end of the spectrum for now. What is truly disturbing is that practically every "platform" of gaming drools over the revenue streams they produce. It is a sad dark gravity hole that is sucking the entire industry towards it. It is the depravity of capitalism in action, the almighty dollar destroys any idealism.

Aside from that, the appalling ad and currency extraction tactics used by virtually every "free to play" kids game is perhaps more distrubing, not because of the extreme tactics of the MZ games, but because the target audience is young children with demonstrably biological inability to properly regulate the addiction and investment behaviors involved.

Rather than a 10 second toy ad "hooking" a kid, you have a program that can spend an hour or more "hooking" a kid with tactics that aren't as immediately apparent to regulators in their manipulation.

Fun fact, in the US it was not permitted to advertise to children on TV at all between the late ‘40s and early ‘80s. It was only because Reagan reversed these laws that advertising to children because permissible and common on tv.

Many other countries still prohibit or limit advertising to children today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising_to_children

Any kind of store experience inside of an experience is just as annoying as any other kind of popup ad except it usually causes the devs to change the nature of the game to cause people to lean toward using the store, making things grindy like enemies have more hit points or have greater difficulty than they would have otherwise for example in candy crush there are levels that are unbeatable unless you pay for help.

Free software is not the same as a freemium game, they don't make the software more difficult to use, make the responsiveness of it slower and have it riddled with popups in the middle of use, or even fake you out with being unable to complete something until you pay. It would be like photoshop allowing you to design something then not letting you export print or save but only right as you were about to complete it, and this wouldn't happen every time, maybe on like the 5th time you use it, it's that kind of annoyance.

Someone was suggesting that F2P is inherently dishonest because "developers need to eat" and clearly there are unethical moneymaking behaviors happening.

Kiro is saying "No, it isn't inherently unethical, and there are people like me willing to spend the money on cosmetics and lootboxes to cover the development of the game".

You are making the same logical fallacy (or simple opinion) that "There is no way for F2P is ethical".

If you're a bored prince with billions of liquid cash and even more billions of yielding assets, do you really care about 10-20k of weekly outlays?

Or reduce the scale, if you have 100k annual salary, do you miss that $3 a day you spend on coffee or $5 a week you spend on mobile gaming? ... or $15.99 a month you spend on Netflix?

Everyone has a thing and a threshold they are comfortable spending on. Some people want 4 wheels that will take them from A to B and other people are willing to spend $500 a month to get a Tesla.

We focus on digital goods because they have a perceived cost of zero to manufacture and are transient (one day the game will no longer work) but fail to spot that the value we heap on many material goods are social and most of us do not buy goods for life (hence why r/BuyItForLife is a subculture rather than conventional wisdom)

They don't consider the opportunity cost or feel the pain of lost potential, but get a rush of "feeling rich" whenever they spend $50 on a T-shirt they'll wear once.

It's cross-cultural, natural psychology, and I doubt it'll go anywhere.

I actually live a fairly frugal life, and I think acknowledging this is important: "do I really want or need this or am I just making myself feel better for a few hours?"

Just like some people dropping 100k in Vegas in a weekend are paying for the experience and VIP treatment and others just need one more bet to replenish Johnnys college fund.

I could see <18s getting into trouble but are there adults legit bankrupting themselves from paid-for cosmetics?

How common is the pattern for paid-for lootbox cosmetics (as compared to buy-it-now) cosmetics? Wouldn't say I'm particularly deep in either the RL/Fortnite ecosystem..!

But Pay-To-Win games like Clash of Clans? I don't have any research, but if I was a gambling man, I'd bet at least a few thousand.

So speaking from experience: there's probably a finite sum you can spend on Clash Royale. I found the beginning highly addictive and I did spend hundreds when I probably shouldn't have, but the acceleration/frustration and advantage you can buy is very quickly eroded by skill. Once you have a maxed deck, it's pretty hard to buy victories and any new card might buy you some wins but will quickly get nerfed, and players better than you will still beat you (and matchmaking will converge you onto that 49% win rate).

I doubt I'm a typical player but at this stage I've probably extracted more value (by time) from clash than they've extracted from me - even if I spent 2k (a very very generous estimate), amortised over 5-6 years of play, that's not a lot of money (30 a month which is a AAA game every other month, less than a coffee a day) and has definitely given me more than that in enjoyment. And at this point my expenditure has completely plateaued.

Can I see people staying in that honeymoon phase moving from game to game? Yes maybe - I suppose by law of large numbers it's more likely than not Clash Royale peaked at like 100M players so 1k having issues is believable.

I'm all for regulation in this space (it's pretty crazy that it's not that regulated) but without data, my own personal experience feels like this is not nearly as dangerous as gambling or alcohol/drugs. The game milks you of money but doesn't create those boom-bust cycles that the traditional vices do

Getting addicted to an F2P game and losing your time, while sad, is not within the scope of this discussion

I mean, sometimes they are kids (or the developmentally challenged)[1] but adults [2] too. There are more sad stories. One I recall was a developer who invited their superwhales to a launch of the new beta expansion in person. (All expenses paid) They sent one a plane ticket, but the the player never showed because they couldn't afford to get to the airport. I wish I could find that story online.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48925623

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-s...

> losing your time, while sad, is not within the scope of this discussion

I very clearly and explicitly said "money they didn't have" in my first post and was talking about financial costs.

fair - I missed that context when reading the immediate response replying to.

Thanks for sharing your anecdata - the industry is definitely in need of regulation something I've long believed. The ubiquity and ease of access is probably the most dangerous bit. It's astounding that mobile games were able to copy/hire all the knowledge acquired in building slot machines to create an industry that doesn't even have to pay out..!

Me and the kid got into Roblox entirely for free. Beyond all the games she enjoys even without any paid features, we got a dead-simple game creation platform with world-class MMO built in. I thought that was nice enough to warrant buying a few gift cards for her and the peers.

We got into GI for free as well. I was apprehensive at first because I heard from friends that GI is an evil gacha game preying on addict personalities. But once we started it we enjoyed the artwork and the game so much through the hours of main quest lines and beautiful content that I thought it was as good or better than Zelda BOTW so why not kick back at least the BOTW purchase price?

For P2W it's a treat after I've been grinding freemium for a while. It's like opening a beer on Friday after work. I don't spend 10-20k a week but I do occasionally spend that amount on one game during its whole lifetime. However, that also means I've gotten thousands of hours of enjoyment out of it.

But yes, while I'm only a 1000x (1000x compared to someone who just pays $20 upfront) there are certainly people who are 1000000x and much bigger whales than me. I can't speak for them.

The World of Tanks/Battleships/Warplanes series, are free to play, with progression through experience ( you unlock higher level machines based on xp points you accumulate through playing and success at it), or through paying to go up the ladder faster or unlock special machines. You can play the free version just fine ( a paying user against you doesn't have a serious advantage), and the developers make enough money from the paying users who enjoy the exclusive machines or earning xp faster. Why shouldn't i enjoy a free game i know someone pays for ( and that someone needs me there too, if there aren't adversaries you can't play)?

That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay.

Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.

It is an ongoing massively multiplayer game which also incurs server costs, so I don't think asking for a voluntary subscription is too much.

Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.

I'm not big on games, and even less so on mobile, but I remember that the ones I've tried to kill time during my commute, I could basically play them for 5 minutes if I didn't want to buy gems or whatever.

This, to me, looks much more like the "shareware" / demo versions of old than "free to play". And I think I'd see them in a better light if they were upfront about it.

To compare this with an "open source with paid features" product I'm familiar with, Elasticsearch, they're much more clear about it. At the time, it didn't even support TLS, no authentication, etc. You were of course on your own if you couldn't figure something out. But you'd know this upfront, and you didn't have to reboot the cluster every 10 minutes or 100 searches.