PlzGivHugs

Its unfortunately a pretty common thing, especially for gatcha games. Look at the whole Limbus Company debacle from a few years back, for example, where people protested outside the studio because the summer skins weren’t sexy enough (for a game that hadn’t previously sexualized characters heavily) and got an unrelated artist fired because she was a feminist and thus was surely the one who made the decision.

With gatcha games, its a bit of a perfect storm with the extreme investment expected in these games, the monetization of characters, an industry that leans into this, and the fact that these games tend to be made in and marketed towards east-Asian regions where generally, sexuality is more accepted but sexism also more common and played largely by young, immature men.

Edit: Notably also, a lot of the men getting super invested in games like this are also vulnerable, which means a lot are likely to also end up in groups like the incel “movement” as well as being more likely to be swept up in any existing toxic culture around the games themselves.

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Its possible I’ve just been lucky enough to avoid that part of the playerbase. Then again, my perception my also be skewed from spending so much time in Dead By Daylight, War Thunder, Minecraft and Counter Strike. At least in Dota, it takes some effort to kill more than a couple teammates.

Honestly, by online gaming standards, I’ve found Dota pretty tame. Prehaps its just because I stick to more casual modes and have a high behaviour score, but I rarely see much more than a “GGEZ” at the end of a game, or players tipping mistakes. I think its been at least a month since the last time I saw someone hack, intentionally teamkill, or throw. Obviously, its still a competitve online game (toxicity isn’t rare), but the only other online game I can think of where I experienced less toxicity was Deep Rock Galactic.

Well, they implemented some graphical improvements and options, as well as workshop mod support so now would be a good time for a replay.

In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.

That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.

A couple of major factors:

Users who expect low prices - This partly because of the history of mobile games being smaller and/or ad-funded but also because the vast majority of people playing games on their phone are looking for a low barrier to entry, time waster, not specifically a game.

Lack of regulation or enforcement - other gambling heavy fields tend to be at least somewhat regulated, but mobile games are very light on regulation, and even lighter on enforcement. This allows them to falsely advertise their games and how they function (both in terms of misleading ads, and lying about chance based events and purchases in-game).

Monopolistic middlemen - On other platforms, theres more direct competition (IE, Sony and Microsoft’s generally more direct competition) or companies that prioritize long-term growth and stability (IE Steam or Itch.io). Apple and Google, on the other hand, largely compete on brand perception and hardware specs. These means that their app stores, where they make most of their money, have zero competitors. Seeing as they have no reason to make the stores better, they can instead promote whatever makes them the most money; that being exactly these manipulate, sketchy, virtual slot machines.