Half tempted to ask for someone to buy me that Russian Steam ver. of Youngblood, but iirc, region switching has a 7 day cooldown right?
The more baffling thing is Koikatsu Party being a top seller despite being $60.
I would pay good money for a western-styled dress-up game with extensive/realistic wardrobe options, don't even need the lewd stuff (I mean I'm fine either way) so I can sort of understand it.
There is no GaaS market: GaaS is a method, not a genre.
The market is player attention. You want players to come back frequently (if possible, daily) and launch your game to complete daily quests, play time-limited content, etc. because that it the best way to
I notice that all those "player retention mechanisms" are turning me away from those games to begin with. I start some of those F2P gacha games now and then, but I always drop them quickly because those daily login rewards etc always start to feel like a chore or an obligation quickly and I can't be bothered with that nonsense, so more often than not I ignore those games without giving them a try at all.
I'm a "one and done" type of gamer. I value a complete package that I pay for once for that has a defined end (i.e story) and lets me consume it at my own pace. (Incidentally this is also why I'm not big on rogue-like/lite games. Shame most of the card games seem to go that way, I really like card games
).
Games have always had, broadly speaking, 2 "loop" patterns: Endless, and linear. Endless games back in the day like Everquest, Age of Empires, Quake / Quake 2 MP, etc. didn't have GaaS stuff, they just were the games they were and had no real end in mind. People have always played these games, and mixed them up, gone back and forth, jumped on new things, etc. The difference now is the "GaaS" mechanics have escalated the stakes for players of those games, and the games themselves are designed
around the GaaS model rather than GaaS being an enhancement. You, as a player, are punished for going to play something else for a day or a week, whereas it used to be it didn't matter.
Take Destiny 2. I enjoyed playing through the quest lines and story and such of Destiny 2, but the GaaS is layered on super fucking thick, it is grindy as all get out, and has effectively stopped me from playing the game, because as much as I enjoy the basic gameplay I don't want to spend 20 hours to progress 3 steps on 1 weapon quest, while juggling multiple daily / weekly bounties (as an aside, the inventory / bounty limits in D2 are obnoxious as well and a huge turn off), so I have effectively no reason to play and I am "punished" by not playing constantly so why play at all? The grind is so insane that every opportunity you don't take to chip away at it is essentially wrong.
Now take Battlefield V. I would argue the actual gameplay of BFV is not as polished or easy to get sucked into as D2, and BFV also has some GaaS traits, but they are on the opposite end of the spectrum - the dailies are essentially pointless, the weeklies reward an entirely new weapon or special skin can usually be done in an evening (I did the new one this week in 4-5 rounds last night). I will keep on coming back to BFV because it doesn't punish me for not playing, I could miss some weeks and really make no difference to anything.
GaaS isn't a genre, correct. But GaaS are inherently all competing against each other more than directly against non-GaaS games because of that model. Even gamers that only play one or two genres have a glut of choices for GaaS games of their genre more than likely, and that's an issue. Wolfenstein Youngblood is competing against those games, because it is a GaaS game, and frankly there's a lot of bad design decisions overall in the game (co-op game that's a GaaS with leveling and level gating? That's multiple ways to punish you for not playing consistently). I am always and have always played multiple non-linear, non-ending games, and will continue to do so, but GaaS are the worst of the bunch by far and I'll continue to avoid them, but that's personal preference. For most people it's just a choice of which 1-3 GaaS games can they juggle at a time? Because once you leave one for any length it's unlikely you go back. That's the market Youngblood is jumping into, and that's the market more and more games are trying to get a piece of, and it's not infinite.
I don't think "endless" games are inherently a problem, I think the GaaS model is the problem, because it warps the design of those games.