Gamers LOVE Microtransactions!

There's a fundamental flaw with the "we voted with our wallet so this is what we get" mentality. It assumes that each user's "vote" is valued equally. This is not the case. Whales "vote" with tens or hundreds of times more value than everyone else. This isn't a democracy, they're not out to be "fair" to everyone, that's not how any of this works from their persective.

Remember that statistic about 0.2% of mobile games' user base generating HALF of their entire revenue? If console/PC gaming is anywhere remotely near that, then no duh, they're just going to cater to whales, and everyone else will either have to put up with it or walk away. If focusing on the 1% at the expense of the 99% will them more money, then that's exactly what most business will do.

The answer is quite simple... there will be a market for the whales and there will be a market for the far larger number for the rest of us... at the moment the AAA publishers are mostly going for the money from those whales - well good luck to them, the few more sane publishers and indies will take the much larger pool of money being left behind with those who will pay the capital cost of the title but not, or only a little of, the maintenance; the whales will have to play multiplayer with each other and so have no better time playing because all the people with no money won't be playing their games and the they'll all be at about the same level and the rest of us will be playing with each other in a fairer (though no more level) playing field - they can have their prestige of playing the fashionable and drug addictive titles while the rest of us call them names or ignore them (this assumes that either the number of whales is similar on PC and console as it is on mobile or that the mobile games, PC and console markets become (or are treated as) one or that both of these become true... I'd actually even put money on the last one!)

ALSO, let me be very clear, THIS IS NOT A VOTE (with wallets or otherwise), THIS IS A CAPITALIST BUYOUT (by people with much more money than sense - the people with sense are the ones buying shares in the publishers servicing them and then pulling it out again as the game market starts to segment and the whales and their pushers realise what a horrible mistake they've made).