Previous games in the series were famously “there’s nothing to do” games. You could make money, but there were limited things you could spend it on. You could collect items and furniture, but there were limited options each day. You could pick weeds, but there wasn’t much in the way of “rewards” for that; it just made your town more pleasant. Instead of grinding, you spent most of your time just dwelling, hanging out with your neighbors, walking along the river. And then after a little while… you stopped playing the game, and did something else. In many ways, the game wouldn’t let you turn it into work.
Contrast that with the latest entry, where you now have a smartphone. On it is a bottomless todo-list of arbitrary, menial tasks. It has a little notification light whenever you get a new task. Completing a task gets you a reward, and then a new task takes its place on the list. There’s crafting in the game; you no longer have to wait for the store to refresh its items, you can grind for resources and then build whatever you want. And then because you can terraform the entire island, there’s a massive source of goals to set and then grind for.
And the thing is… most people like this game. It’s brought the most mainstream success the series has ever had, by far. And because it doesn’t have any financial aspects, we can’t call the developers exploitive, really. It’s just this (imo) toxic, demeaning direction the whole industry seems to be taking. Even series like Assassin’s Creed are now stuffed full of resources to collect, loot to hoard, “rewards” for the hundreds of grueling hours you put into mindlessly wading through wave after wave of enemies. More and more games are trading genuine play and affective experience for finely-tuned, dopamine-peddling, addiction. Because that’s what sells. The only saving grace is that the industry is growing so fast, there’s so much diversity, that there are also lots of games that don’t do this. But I worry about how the trend is affecting/will affect people’s mental health, not even getting into the financial side.