[ygjb]

Optimizing for player base is at odds with optimizing for paying player base. I am a "whale" as a consumer - I really enjoy video games, but my time is at a premium. I have more money than time, and I am happy to use it to accelerate my access to free to play games, especially for cases where I am playing games with my family, who generally have more free time than me.

Unfortunately in many of the games that my kids enjoy, I have noticed that the optimization path for the freemium model includes increasing the time sink required for access to game mechanics and content, and increasing the rewards for paying actual money for access to mechanics and contents.

There are some free to play games that find a good tension between this early on, but longer term, I find that the games because less enjoyable because it is too time consuming for others to keep up with my "pay to play" approach to skipping the time intensive portions of the games.

> Saying Fortnite is “optimized for profit” makes very little sense, since nothing you can do in the game requires purchases at all.

Sure, from a mechanical perspective. My son uses a portion of his allowance to keep current on his emotes and skins because his friends apply social pressure by teasing the kids that don't have them. It's been a great opportunity to teach him about peer pressure, and the relatively harmless of this version of it, in contrast to more harmful ones related to drugs, alcohol, or risky behavior for teenagers.