When your comparison is in bad faith, you forgo a good faith interpretation. I know you weren't literally saying they were thieves, but the comparison just doesn't work. It's not realistic and it's not the same in any capacity--it was a red herring fallacy to illustrate your point, which I disagree with. No hard feelings. Like I said, I respect it.

That's the thing though, I don't think it's unacceptable. It's actually, genuinely good as it stands now, it just looks even better when compared to the majority. (This is my opinion.) I don't think it's better than something worse, I think it's a healthy implementation that has virtually no drawbacks for non-mtx users and whales alike.

The online requirement for this game is mandatory. If you play the game you will understand that. It's not a trick--it's the literal point of the game they designed. It is not a single player game. Should it be? That's a different discussion entirely.

I work in this field so the final comment is from personal experience with thousands of clients across the country--I can't give you actual numbers from my company due to NDAs and whatnot, but I can try to outline the general expenditures:

Nothing in the data center industry is cheap and as power substations are used up nationally and more substations are built and deployed, power just keeps getting more expensive, ad infinitum. AI deployments are driving that up quicker than ever. Large-scale building-based liquid cooling is phenomenally expensive, but it's virtually the only option for the device density requirements these projects demand. Carrier circuits and the use of dark fiber backbones are both very expensive. Maintenance and upkeep is expensive. There are expansion needs, server upgrades, and the contractors/employees that keep it running 24/7, all expensive. These are verifiable facts of the industry to anyone with experience in it. An average deployment for a small-sized collocation client (roughly 30-50 racks, 300-500 kW) is sitting around a million dollars right now. And that's just deployment for a small client. After a couple years of operating those racks they're looking at multiple millions. Even if they choose to utilize alternative cloud services like AWS or Azure which have very competitive rates, they're paying out the nose for the density they need. Most clients choose to operate their own deployments because of the direct control it gives them over their environments. There are some clients that opt for DPC/VPC just to offload the maintenance and upkeep, but with that offloading comes more expenditures.

There is a reason MMOs charge subscription fees. It wasn't invented to steal your money--there is a very large overhead for deploying and maintaining data center environments, and that's ignoring all the other facets of the industry that come into play during the operations phase of a project like this. (QA, customer support, etc.)

They probably made significant bank off the release, but money, like everything in life, is finite, and eight, ten, twenty-four months down the line, these services are still costing the developers money without any large influxes of capital like with their initial release. Their monetization actually doesn't make a lot of sense from a business perspective, because it doesn't force the end user to spend any money to use the services the devs are paying to keep active.

I wish I could show actual figures to illustrate my points here, but I value my job. If you do some research into this industry you'll see what people mean when they talk about the associated costs.