I guess I just don’t understand motivations in the F2P market. Like, I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a game, but I have no interest in being nickeled and dimed – I can’t tell you how many games I’ve noped out on because of that shit. Like, if Factorio charged for cosmetic add-ons, that would just be ludicrous. Either you made a playable game for the price of entry, or you didn’t.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments.
The whole concept of in-game purchases is just foreign to me. I wasn’t even willing to pay 99 cents for a few extra lives in Candy Crush. This market being worth billions is frankly unfathomable.
Gaming and streaming? No idea. I’ve been on a 5G hotspot for two years at this point, and it acquits itself well enough. Generally 150-450mbps. At no point have I thought “this cheaper thing simply isn’t serving my needs.”
But I can’t hit the broadside of a barn in a shooting game. Seriously, while still on a landline, my college roommate bought me Red Dead Redemption 2, and the first task was to shoot the broadside of a barn, which I could not do.
Thankfully, he views that story as being recompense for his financial outlay. I mean, I’d never played a shooting game.
You do realise that long ago MSFT switched from being a desktop software company to cloud and telemetry, right? Win10 and Win11 were free, and Azure isn’t exactly driving them into the ground.
For quite some time, I’d watch YouTube playthroughs of about an hour and realized that in most cases, that was all I really needed. If shit starts looking grindy in an hour, you likely made a bad game.
I’m grateful for these streamers. They save me from wasting money.