These games need to have player ratings where after each game you give the other players a thumbs 👍 or a 👎 and eventually you only get paired with people in your same rank so the good players get paired with good players and shit players get paired with other shitty trolls.
I mean, when you have a few thousand two-bit internet media sites surviving off advertisement spam and hiring any freelance writer that can put together three paragraphs for $5 that’s what our media becomes.
Even if it were an exact clone I don’t think a single company should have a monopoly on the idea for almost 30 years. Pokemon red was released in 1996, 28 years ago. Why should they still be able to be the only company that releases pokemon-type games?
There should almost be some sort of technological transfer to nearby empires, like cultural influence. If your neighbour is at 10000 tech points or whatever while you are at 1000, you should be able to leech some tech points from your neighbour to develop faster.
Transfer rate increases with the disparity between nations and decreases with distance.
So a super advanced empire on continent A will contribute to nations on continent A and B, but those on continent A get more of a bonus than those on B.
This aligns fairly well with reality as neighbouring countries would transfer students to universities all the time, less so the further the nations are apart.
If they don’t make any money they won’t bother with microtransactions at all.
So it’s either $0.01 for cosmetic items or they don’t make cosmetic items at all because You’ve already paid for the game, and making new things just costs them money.
I wouldn’t mind if it were priced to actually make sense.
Like why would anything cost more than $1? Or even $0.01? Just greed and stupidity.
Microtransactions for cosmetic items that cost 25% or more of the base game itself are just insane. A whole game, or 4 cosmetic items, that must have taken sooo much effort to design those items to cost so much.
The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it’s sort of fine, because they don’t benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.
It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.
In the case of Minecraft the issues you listed are pretty much present in almost anything entertaining, video games or not, including in-person events and social functions.
As with anything moderation is key and people just need to learn not to let it control them. Some people are incapable of that though.
There are definitely certain things that game companies need to avoid doing but multiple goals, a little bit of luck, and online cooperative play is not it.