This is absurd. So you also don't use any software products which are a) free to use or b) habe a free tier?
That’s closer to the “free tier” stuff, and a very different model to modern “freenium” games.
The full game included a Part 2 and Part 3.
I think the latter business model is very respectable because it’s not sneaky and it isn’t manipulating me nearly as much. You can have hardly any money at all, play on a crappy computer, and still have a huge amount of fun in the game. You could even be very competitive. And all for free! Not even at a cost to your privacy! And you can optionally “donate” money to the project if you want to support the game and get a neat cosmetic. How is that not a great business model for me as a consumer?
I want to pay once for a game the same way I want to pay once for a car. Elden Ring is a perfect example.
I understand others feel differently. To each their own.
These "games" are HIGHLY MANIPULATIVE. They use bullying, false cult inclusion, peer pressure, gambling reward ration, false emotional and time investment, and outright slot machine tactics to extract money from players.
They are worse than Las Vegas gambling by a country mile, since at least Las Vegas gambling is open and honest about the fact that the house wins and has established rules.
The social bullying that comes from "fake players" that are paid employees of the company is among the most disturbing aspect of these games. They exists to "shake down" players to upgrade with paid upgrades, to sow conflict, etc.
The rules of these "games", including the value of in-game currencies of dizzying types, is routinely nerfed/devalued at rates similar to the more comical instances of hyperinflation in the real world.
These "games" are at the extreme end of the spectrum for now. What is truly disturbing is that practically every "platform" of gaming drools over the revenue streams they produce. It is a sad dark gravity hole that is sucking the entire industry towards it. It is the depravity of capitalism in action, the almighty dollar destroys any idealism.
Aside from that, the appalling ad and currency extraction tactics used by virtually every "free to play" kids game is perhaps more distrubing, not because of the extreme tactics of the MZ games, but because the target audience is young children with demonstrably biological inability to properly regulate the addiction and investment behaviors involved.
Rather than a 10 second toy ad "hooking" a kid, you have a program that can spend an hour or more "hooking" a kid with tactics that aren't as immediately apparent to regulators in their manipulation.
Fun fact, in the US it was not permitted to advertise to children on TV at all between the late ‘40s and early ‘80s. It was only because Reagan reversed these laws that advertising to children because permissible and common on tv.
Many other countries still prohibit or limit advertising to children today.
Any kind of store experience inside of an experience is just as annoying as any other kind of popup ad except it usually causes the devs to change the nature of the game to cause people to lean toward using the store, making things grindy like enemies have more hit points or have greater difficulty than they would have otherwise for example in candy crush there are levels that are unbeatable unless you pay for help.
Free software is not the same as a freemium game, they don't make the software more difficult to use, make the responsiveness of it slower and have it riddled with popups in the middle of use, or even fake you out with being unable to complete something until you pay. It would be like photoshop allowing you to design something then not letting you export print or save but only right as you were about to complete it, and this wouldn't happen every time, maybe on like the 5th time you use it, it's that kind of annoyance.