That’s what differentiates free games from free-to-play games. A free game gets you the entire experience for free. A FTP game gets you a barebones experience unless you spend money.
Big studios typically don’t release actual free games, obviously because there’s no money to be made that way.
Street Fighter 6 recently came out, to pretty high praise from reviewers and the general public.
The game has a “Year 1 character pass” that adds 4 new characters. Eventually, there will be a year 2 character pass that will add more characters. If you’re not buying these, you’re literally not getting the entire game. When you play online, you will face opponents playing characters that you can’t even play yourself.
There are lots of games that have similar features where not spending the extra cash means you’re literally not getting as much content as everyone else. It’s not just about cosmetics anymore and hasn’t been for years now.
Check out Unpacking. It’s less puzzle, and more organizing. Super casual, satisfying game about literally unpacking things into your apartments and houses as you progress through life.
I have experience with MTG but only a passing knowledge of Pokemon. My understanding is that it would depend entirely on what your deck does. Are you using pokemon that are expensive to use? Do you have any means of getting energy besides just drawing it? Do you have ways to draw more cards? All these things will come into play to determine the ratio you need. With experience you can guesstimate these things, but to be sure, the only way is to play the deck a bunch and adjust depending on what you feel you need to add.
So those cards have been around forever, and no one complained about them.
There have definitely been complaints about gambling in relation to collectible cards. I don’t think anything has come of them in legal terms, but many complaints have been voiced.
Many would say so. Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic the Gathering, have worked very hard at balancing the two sides of the coin. On one side, they design cards such that power levels determine the demand (and thus price) for rarer cards on the resale market, and on the other they argue that the cards have no intrinsic value so that buying packs can’t count as gambling since there’s technically no expected profit for the buyers.
The game has been fun for me, since I’ve been an Ark player for some time, and it feels like Ark with Pokemon instead of dinos.
So far, it does lack some of the depth, but it’s also much less grindy and feels less “serious,” and also more straightforward. It seems like the game has a path that you’re expected to follow, unlike Ark which just throws you into the world and expects you to die a thousand times while you’re learning.
I wouldn’t pay $100 for an entire game. It grosses me out that someone is expected to spend $100 on cosmetics. Like obviously not everyone, but that it’s even possible is rather horrifying. Especially since it doesn’t stop there. You can buy multiple packs, and it’s fully expected that some people will.