Defending such practices is what allows it to happen to begin with. This isn't some free mobile game. Why would I want ads in a game I paid full price for?
That being said I don't think TFP intended the line as such.
Neither do I considering the mention of the other, non-DLC sets. We all expected the sets shown off in the dev stream and otherwise to be in the base game. Three of them weren't, but rather held back for "cosmetic DLC." I'm 100% positive TFP knew it would be more than just a little controversial to sell such for an online game that has otherwise done everything right until 1.0 -- "make a product, sell the product," hosted on community run servers as in the golden days of gaming, which is actually as recent as the turn of the century, etc;. -- and have no idea how much the new console deal had to do with it, if anything. I'm just as certain they'll ignore the controversy that has sprung in the community over it because it's become accepted practice both in the industry and, obviously, among the player community. That's what normalizing means. The practice has been normalized to the point few ever question it anymore. So, I'll just consider it a sign of somewhat good, but failing health that many in this community still do as some are obviously not seeing beyond Joel's voice lines. The conversation has shifted toward and away from industry practices for obvious reasons.
Well without any microtransactions they couldn´t provide the servers at least not for very long, Fallout76 is MP online only.
The "live service" model, adopted from the "F2P" mobile space, proved extraordinarily financially successful for a few traditional gaming companies, so the pressure was on studios everywhere to produce one whether they had any experience doing so or not. BGS and Arkane, for example, had no in-house experience with that and were ordered to do it themselves anyway. Ergo, the dumpster fires of FO76, Redfall, et al. as well as extraordinary turmoil within those companies. Any "redemption" of games you see in the triple A space is the result of those companies recruiting outside assistance from "monetization experts" to try and salvage the model for them. I hear Todd Howard himself plans on retiring soon.
Gee, I wonder why.
But it gets even worse. An Ubisoft executive has said players are just going to have to get comfortable with the idea of not owning the games they buy. "We're seeing expansion on console as the likes of PlayStation and Xbox bring new people in. On PC, from a Ubisoft standpoint, it's already been great, but we are looking to reach out more on PC,
so we see opportunity there." Uh-oh. (I always say, "uh-oh," when a CEO "sees opportunity.") Ergo, Steam's recent clarification that no one owns the games they've bought on the platform over the years, etc. and so forth and so on. All corporate entities in the triple A space are following suit, even claiming players want to "live in [our] games" (Emil Pagliarulo), etc. and so on.
It's obvious the trend toward subscription services in gaming and streaming TV are parallel, overlapping avenues of corporate overreach/greed and, given the tech bros are as thick as thieves, even Zuckerburg's' notion of a "metaverse" has a made its way into the gaming space with gaming industry executives announcing the death of single player games, claiming the future is always online games and otherwise.
They seriously want us to live, work, shop for "virtual" goods and everything else online. It's insane...and unconscious to us for the most part.
Given there's little to nothing we can do about those trends, atm, I'd honestly be a little more concerned with the tech bros' "network state" plans and the "Dark Enlightement" movement among them. You see, they can't get to Mars, atm, so they're trying to establish their corporate network states here on Earth and, unbelievably, even having a moderate degree of success. I imagine their dreams of taking over existing states, e.g. the US, won't be quite as successful, but you never know.
