this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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The kind of corrolary to this is that any game that is stagnating eventually becomes just a fashion show of cosmetic competition.
With MMOs, you can see that by the end stage of its lifecycle, no one is even really playing the game for the sake of playing the game, the community is probably insular and ossified, and is just literally competing in terms of style.
With MTX games full of cosmetics from day one?
Yep, the game is functionally dead on arrival, expect little to no meaningful free game updates, lots of stuff will just be broken and probably never really fixed...
...because the whole point of such a game is just to be a platform, a marketplace, for selling you 'digital goods', and it just uses the form of a game, and often all the dark patterns, to lure you in and keep you addicted to it.
EDIT:
Upon further reflection:
A Gacha game very much is, imo, a psuedogame, in the same way a pseudoscientist is fundamentally an impostor, only superficially behaving as the true thing behaves, which it fundamentally is not.
I think that's only part of it. Take a game like any monster catching one. There is going to be a meta, a "tier list" that tells you that these monsters are the best of the best. And that's fine. But the problem is when the game is poorly balanced so if you don't play the meta, you can't complete the game. If I can't beat the game using what I like, the game is just telling me that I shouldn't play it.
This is true as well.
I just tried to give a bit further, linguistic type breakdown for watson in another comment.
Yeah its... kinda hard to nail down precisely how this term truly, fully works in English, at the moment.
Which itself is extremely meta, in a different sense of the word meta.
It's the same sense of the word. In language terms, meta is self-referential. In gaming terms, the metagame is the game within the game.
Often, games turn into a rock-paper-scissors format where three different strategies fight for dominance to the exclusion of anything non-meta.