Microtransactions don’t have to affect gameplay any more. The video games industry has successfully sold this narrative (“Please ignore cosmetic microtransactions mkay?!”) while also raising a whole new generation of gamers that value ingame cosmetics to a social-interactions-affecting degree.

There’s a reason kids laugh at one another over default skins in Fortnite or lack of cash in Roblox and so on.

Plus just as importantly, they normalize mtx on an industry level, making selling of other types of monetization easier in the future.