F-Zero GX - As far as pure racing goes, GX is perfection.
Kirby Air Ride - The actual racing mode is... mid, honestly. But City Trial? One of the most interesting and unique game modes ever conceived. Sad this game never got any kind of successor.
The ESRB didn't require any developers to abandon their business model though. It was created so that the industry could continue doing what it was doing.
Well what do you want the solution to be? I think it's easy to say that games should be transparent about what you're paying for, my stance is that gacha should be outright illegal because of that. But I don't think it makes sense to go after any and all kinds of randomness in games.
They're different issues. The fact that people can and do financially ruin themselves over gacha is a lot more serious, and trying to conflate that with something like Balatro ultimately muddies the message.
I think gacha is a predatory business model that should be illegal, and yes that includes Genshin. But no it does not include Balatro, because Balatro isn't gacha.
While there certainly are problems with other games, at least every game you mentioned is fully transparent about the price tag. Balatro doesn’t exploit whales by concealing how much it'll cost to get anything.
If devs have to actively maintain software to support new versions, I would argue that is not better than how consoles handle backwards compatibility. Especially since games tend to be tend to be treated as finished products that devs stop updating once they move on to their next project.
compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.
But that isn't the case anymore, and I expect it never will be again. This generation's transition period has been so heavily reliant on backwards compatibility. Hell, plenty of titles still just launch on PS4 since PS5 can run it anyway.
The only exception has been the Switch, and that's because it was necessary just this once to break away for a new architecture. I can almost guarantee Switch 2 will be an evolution of Switch 1.
At this point the big three are locked into their current architecture. They need backwards compatibility, if a new console ever tries to break from that it will flop as a result.
I figure we're coming to the end of discrete generations sooner or later. We're 4 years into the PS5's lifespan and plenty of games still launch on PS4 because they don't need PS5 hardware, and PS5 will run them anyway.
It doesn't make sense to upgrade to a PS5 Pro if you've already got a base PS5, just as it doesn't make sense to buy a new smartphone every year. But I can see the idea being that whenever you feel due for an upgrade, you buy whatever the current model is.