Greentext

If I’m playing a game where it feels like spending money like that is the only way to have fun with it, I just drop the game.

A big part of the "hook" in GACHA and other whale-hunting games is the initial hook of a fun and engaging setup. Genshin Impact and Sword of Convallaria both stick out to me as initially very fun and captivating games. They draw you in with the cut scenes and ramp up the curve like a normal open world JRPG.

But the longer you play, the more you start tripping over resource requirements and timers on abilities and the need to do "daily" activities that involve logging on every day. All of this is fun in the early cycles but feels more and more like work by the later stages of the game. Dungeons start looking more and more basic - big empty rooms with a bunch of respawns in the center. Fights feel more contingent on having a bigger number than any kind of strategy or skill.

If you've played older traditional JRPGs before, it'll start feeling weird because you know you should be expecting the game to pick up towards a dramatic conclusion after 100 hours of play. But these games just... go on forever. There's no payoff. You get tired and bored and you leave.

But if you haven't played older traditional JRPGs, you're just falling into this skinner box of induced anxiety. The game becomes habit-forming. The induced reflex to trigger a feature or use a power that's increasingly paywalled encourages you to open your (parent's) wallet.

Actually, I don’t even really bother with any games that I understand to have p2w aspects or any mtx that aren’t just cosmetic.

There's a networking effect to a lot of these games. Up front, you're strongly encouraged to get your friends to join in. And friends playing a game together can have enormous staying power. I know people who have been running the same D&D game for 20 years (literally the same characters and world, going on into the level 200+ range as they just crank those numbers higher). I know a couple that's been doing WoW for their entire relationship - they started playing when they started dating and now they've got their ten-year-old son along for the ride.

I think part of what gives these games staying power is that they don't require you to empty your savings account to participate. But I think its naive to discount the addictive power of a community space you're comfortable socializing in.

These places are predatory. I can't discount them just because I'm not one of the ones that got eaten.

Don't tell Soulslike players that. They think that even the slightest concession to accessibility makes the game unplayable garbage, even if you choose not to use it.

The real problem with the "improved" SMB from the post is not that it has ways of making the game easier, it's that the "fixes" amount to a microtransaction hellhole, complete with intrusive prompts.

I'm all for games with configurable difficulty. Nobody thinks less of Doom for having difficulty settings. But everybody does think less of games that pair frustrating mechanics (like difficulty spikes or countdown timers) with bypass MTX.

To use the default controversial genre, I think that a soulslike with difficulty settings would work just fine. But a soulslike where your healing flask only restores one charge every ten minutes unless you buy more charges from the store (but store-bought ones can exceed the normal maximum) or where game-breakingly OP equipment is available as MTX would not go over well.

That is just bad game design, and nothing inherently to do with having easier modes. There is a long, long, history of games having easy modes, and still being some of the most challenging games made, when you select the harder ones.

I agree completely. Idk why they do it. They got filthy rich off kids 5-10 playing the shit out of NES games.