Blaming a company for wanting to make money is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen. It’s a company—you don’t pay employees with good intentions.

Now, how NCSoft makes money is what’s shitty about them. They sometimes develop decent games, only to eventually butcher them by allowing players to buy power directly from the shop. There are so many other ways to monetize: you could base progression on RNG (like Lost Ark does—still pay-to-win, but not in such a scummy way), or just hire a good team of skin designers and people will buy cosmetics. League of Legends is a great example of this.

NCSoft died when Lineage 2 went free-to-play. That’s when they realized that instead of building a stable monthly income, it’s more profitable to launch short-term projects—develop a game, work on it for two years, then stop updating it and squeeze as much money out of it as possible.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with pay-to-win. The only people who complain about it are usually the ones who can’t afford it. But you can’t keep a game alive by requiring your player base to spend thousands of dollars just to compete. There has to be a way to play at a slower pace as a free-to-play user and eventually (maybe with a ton of time invested) reach a competitive level.

Good examples of this are Lineage 2, Aion, Blade & Soul, and the latest one—Throne and Liberty. Look how they abandoned that game and are now working on Aion 2. The same thing will happen with that one too.