It started as good tech to make GPUs last longer, but now is a crutch that even top notch hardware like a 4090 needs to actually achieve playable performance with ray tracing at high resolutions. And that hardware is already way overpriced, imagine the price of something that could do it natively.
Not like holding out matters now, they just raised the price in Japan for the 3rd time, second wind said the controller got 5 dollars more expensive, you can only save with used nowadays.
Neither did Hello games when they continued to work on NMS, it didn’t have any monetization beyond buying the game, but they still did it in the end and it paid off.
It was originally advertised as f2p, at some point they changed their minds and decided to charge for it, clearly it didn’t go well since people already associated it with free.
This is the truth people don’t want to admit, but Final Fantasy XIV being successful carried square enix through their darkest days when everything wasn’t making a profit. Cygames using all the money they got from the granblue gacha to finance an action rpg and a fighting game, etc.
They serve as a safety net, we lost mimimi last year, I don’t think anyone would say they made bad games, but they just didn’t sell enough so they closed.
Genshin-likes are being very popular in the east, this year we got Wuthering Waves (which is actually much better), and 2-3 years ago we got Tower of Fantasy (which was terrible), now the same studio from ToF announced Neverness to Everness which is the same concept of an open world anime action rpg but in an urban setting, suspiciously years after Project Mugen had been announced which is has the exact same premise.
Doesn’t change the fact that the few fans it had can’t play it ever again, game is still killed because it had no support for community servers, just matchmaking.
I for sure would prefer to host my own The Crew and not getting a refund.
Anthem kept the servers going longer, it got some updates and EA even promised an entire rework akin to No Man’s Sky, but EA being EA they never delivered it and just cancelled everything lol.
No? Welcome to gachas, don’t even pretend girls don’t want to be put on the wall by their daddies, there are plenty of thirsty traps with the dudes on TikTok.
These are games made to sell you waifus and husbandus, they are appealing by design. I recommend you to watch the newest Jane Doe trailer on the Zenless channel, this is the target demographic.