Those are two different situations.
There isn't enough paying for shit that's gonna make a mod run in an unmodified console. You can find people who have bought every single Pokémon game ever, and they still want to play romhacks and randomizers and such.
There's something to be said about how willing people are to pay and whether they admit it or why. But sounds more like you don't want to believe there's any other reason to do it.
A lot of people resort to emulation simply so they can play mods too.
You gotta have a crazy amount of hours in that game. That tree is complicated to read, nevermind to understand.
I'm all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.
And yet people still say "if you don't like ads, pay up" as if getting ads in a subscription is not a matter of time, like it's happening to streaming.
I'm not extremely against all of copyright because I believe artists should have some protections (though the law sucks at this), but I also believe that once something becomes a decades-old billion-dollar franchise, non-identical imitation should be fair game. Can you imagine what would happen if companies could simply say that they own whole genres?
You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.
I didn't max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.
That's not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.
I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn't gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.
China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it's still not enough, and it doesn't seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.
Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.
Media today might be less sexist but I think part of it is also that it became drastically more sex averse. Mortal Kombat is gorier than ever for anyone to see, but god forbid anything shows a nipple.
People used to bring up Kratos in these discussions but before these new games he seemed far more likely to bite someone's face off than to kiss anyone. There's a difference.
I think there is space for both sexualized and non-sexualized characters, as long as they are treated evenly. This is entertainment, they don't need to be all business serious.
I dread that in trying to be perfectly respectable, the medium might err to the side of prudishness and sexual repression.
If you simply start at the base and just get going, the branching paths quickly add up to an enormous amount of options. If you don't get any decision paralysis from a tree with literally over a thousand nodes, you might just be a superhuman being.