I'm in your camp. I'd posit an additional piece of my thinking.
I feel like gaming, even with microtransactions, is probably one of the most affordable pieces of entertainment you can have.
During covid, the height of my old-man gaming, I was probably playing an hour or two each day and 4 hours each weekend. That's about 700-800 hours a year I play. If I spent 200$ in skins on COD's battlepass, that is still an incredibly cheap amount of fun I've gotten for a whole year when the entire world was closed and I couldn't get out and have fun. I really don't see why people complain so much. Coin-operated arcades were literally a microtransaction model from the 70s and 80s!
I'm paying 25 cents an hour on a game with a lot more labor involved than an old arcade game.
I think I saw that some of the old arcade games were actually rigged to get harder at certain points to get more quarters/tokens put in them, then there was the countdown timer after you died where you could continue if you put more money in.
Video games are for-profit companies and these days they are in heavy competition with each other and all the other distractions around.
I can easily spend about $40-50 to go to a movie with the family and if the movie sucks it feels like a waste of 2 hours. Same amount of money on a game will get you 10x plus more time of entertainment.
I feel like gaming, even with microtransactions, is probably one of the most affordable pieces of entertainment you can have.
During covid, the height of my old-man gaming, I was probably playing an hour or two each day and 4 hours each weekend. That's about 700-800 hours a year I play. If I spent 200$ in skins on COD's battlepass, that is still an incredibly cheap amount of fun I've gotten for a whole year when the entire world was closed and I couldn't get out and have fun. I really don't see why people complain so much. Coin-operated arcades were literally a microtransaction model from the 70s and 80s!
I'm paying 25 cents an hour on a game with a lot more labor involved than an old arcade game.