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Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can't count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you'd lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!
there are plenty of modern games without micropayments, play smaller indie titles.
Or indeed some bigger games not from shitty publishers.
God of War, for example. A lot of Sony's exclusives (and many are now on PC) are completely MTX-free. Even EA's It Takes Two was free of them.
The issue is that they don't make the return on investment that an exploitative multiplayer game does. So the big publishers prefer to make those.
It takes two is actually one step further, only one player had to own the game. It takes two had what was called a friend pass which as long as you weren't the host of the game allowed you to play with any other player that had already purchased the game. So despite the fact that it was forced Co-op either split screen or online, only one player had to actually buy the game.
In this day and age it blew me away when I learned that because it's just unheard of now.