Games

Yes, thats the point.

Here you are, considering whether it is worth a dollar to show off your fashion to those you compete against and or cooperate with.

This is literally how it starts.

I cannot say with certainty that you in particular will become addicted to buying more and more cosmetics, but I can say with certainty that many, many people do, especially when combined with the feedback loop of peer pressure.

Further, there are many other alternative funding models that would easily allow for lots of in game content to be added to a game, and then you can make it unlockable via achievements or specific missions or something.

Any one who tells you that games /have/ to do microtransactions to exist in some cases is basically nearly always lying. You can prove this easily by saying: What if all these game studios cut the pay of their executives in half or down to 1/10th?

Its not like they need the money, and its not like they usually even make good decisions in terms of game design, when you are talking about larger studios or those beholden to large funding entities for recognizable IP rights, or some new unique graphical technology or something.

MTX is also astonishingly easy to recognize as a deplorable joke from those who have been playing a wide breadth of games for a while.

A phenomenon that originally started in MMOs and has since spread to other genres is this:

When content becomes stale, when gameplay becomes boring due to those who are not good st the game leaving and those who are good basically becoming near god like, these situations often devolve into the game simply becoming a fashion contest.

What this actually means is the game needs something new to keep it interesting, or it needs to be gently put into retirement phase, perhaps open sourcing some server material for the truly dedicated to be able to continue playing it.

What MTX represents, with the knowledge I just outlined, is that you basically have a cookie cutter core game whose general gameplay loop is known to appeal to a certain demographic, but you /know/ the only new real content you can expect is the fashion contest, maybe a broken or OP item or weapon from a patch that will be heavily rebalanced by the next patch.

You can also know the game will never add anything that really radically forces players to re evaluate the way they play it, because that would alienate the core player base.

So, any game that embraces MTX heavily from the get go is thus usually always a very boring game anyway, at least to those who are interested in novel and challenging experiences, and there will be many slight variations of the same game with slightly different art, characters, or gameplay, but usually very similar core mechanics and general experience.