ever since putting in over 1000 hours into fallout 76 I've become hyper aware of how those type of online service games make you the product being exploited by them, they're so manipulative and fucking evil and the fact Fornite's so popular makes me slightly sad that people are mostly okay with being subtly manipulated by habit forming design tricks because the game's fun plus since everyone's playing it anyways since the new season started so might as well right?
I know that the fight to get people to be conscious of how these games manipulate you was over before it even began but it still makes me sad that this is gaming now for a lot of people, logging into a game to get handed shiny treats like skins and to grind through a fucking seasonal board with a battlepass. games can be so much more than that (and a lot of them don't play evil psychological tricks on you either)