relevant: for a primarily multiplayer game, would you rather have microtransactions and pretty common free content updates or 10 dollar map packs every few months?
the problem is that in theory this sounds nice but of course companies are doing both. Battlefield 1 has a litany of weapon skin microtransactions as well as microtransactions to skip level progression, but also has 15 dollar map packs. and since they've gotten away with it, so will battlefront 2, and cod ww2, and so on and so forth.
what i don't like about microtransactions is value. I'd be okay with paying 5 bucks ingame if i got more content. But that's just not feasible right now because of the game market - they'd have to sequester pieces of the game and charge for them. So instead, it's cosmetics, which conveniently take little time and effort to produce, and also people will defend them by saying "they don't REALLY have any effect".
If I play shadow of war and love it to death, maybe I'm okay with paying 5 bucks to buy an orc. But if i'm even slightly disatisfied with the game, I feel like I'll be more inclined to look at that Orc and think, "i bet this guy was free originally".
we're in a transitional period, because like it or not "games as a service" will be the norm, at least for the big budget AAA multiplayer games. And the unfortunate side effects are these natal microtransactions that feel inconsequential because the games are not built around them having meaning. And as people have pointed out, do you really like unusual's in TF2 because they're cool, or because of manufactured necessity - if everyone had a flaming Team Captain, how cool would they look then. Personally? Not as cool as sniper's radical default hat .
