you could see how in many respects Red Dead Online, which on the face of it had all of these great locations,

all of these things that should have been really fun to do. So much of it is really just about getting you to keep playing.

And it's less and less about, you know, the experience being particularly enjoyable

or allowing you to maximize the potential for all the things that you can in theory do in this world.

It wants you to sink in a lot of time first.

And if you don't want to do that, there is a go-around, just like in everything,

which is you can give them a lot of your money, real money, to use the in-game currency

to get the better guns, to level up, whatever it is.

So, I mean, that's just one example. but the pay to play element of games, increasingly,

you know, the whole kind of enterprise of a game, the whole structure of a game gets bent

around it.

And it really ends up undermining the user experience.

So I think, you know, you can actually scale that up to something like the Metaverse, and I just have a really hard time imagining it actually working.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of free-to-play games, because I mean, that's really what they call it, right?

It's interesting because you're calling it pay to most out of it, you have to sink in tons of time in this grind, or you can pay to kind of avoid the grind.

I mean, I had that experience with Halo Infinite recently, so I played that.

And actually, I think, a surprising amount of time into the multiplayer in a way that I didn't imagine.

You know, I didn't really grow up playing Halo and I wasn't really like a huge Halo fan, but, you know, I played through a bunch of the Halo games recently, or I guess back in the fall, and then I played Halo Infinite.

And I started playing the online multiplayer and I found, you know, this is actually really interesting.

And they had these like events and things like that. By participating in these events, you get like special like player skins and models and things like that. So it doesn't change

how you play, but it could give you, you know, cool, like customization options. But the problem is

that this becomes, like, kind of onerous. You get, like, a task list every week of objectives that

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