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@akatsukilevi @ChristiJunior @MoeBritannica @poopernova I just want to, for the absolute insanity of it, run you through what is seen as the current day baseline for monetization in games, the "gold standard", Fortnite. Some people don't really realize what it actually looks like.
In storage size, you luck out a little, it's smaller than most at only 60 GB, however the game instead streams assets rather than downloading them. Be prepared to pay for the reduced storage cost by the game draining all your bandwidth to download assets for 2 buildings and a tree to look slightly more high quality than they did before. You can reduce the strain of streaming, at the cost of increasing the game size over 100GB and still having to deal with streaming on select assets.
Lets say, after playing the game, you want a skin because you decide being stuck as cheap default models (intentionally made to look dull and generic) is somewhat boring. Cheapest a skin can run you is 800 vbucks, but they don't sell that individually, so you need to buy 1000. You have just spent ~$9 USD just to get one of the cheapest skins in the shop that often has less quality than the more premium ones and doesn't come with any of the fancy features. Of course, once a kid manages to get one thing, his friends and his own mind will hardly stop him from wanting to get more, even if it's not a good idea. For sake of this whole thing, I will ignore battle passes, as while they technically are a "deal," time is also a currency and each battle pass requires quite a large amount of time, more than enough to buy everything in the pass were it a shop item several times over if you were to work a job with all that time you need to spend grinding. They also run constant ads for shop items during the time you grind, put notifiers that new shop tabs have arrived, etc.
Money off the table? Well, what other options does the game provide for free cosmetics? They sometimes run "winterfest" (very clearly Christmas themed but we can't associate with Christmas because religion evil) free skins during the holiday season, which are all always wearing santa hats and present decals. Not ideal, most also look bad. Very rarely they offer skins for free through a grinding event, that requires you not only waste dozens of hours of your own time, but also you need to play with a friend you invite to waste dozens of hours of their free time too (or you make a puppet account and waste more time yourself). Sometimes they run skins that don't require the friend stuff, but those are always just the bland default skins again.
None of this is even getting into the damn near predatory FOMO that is forced onto children through how the battle pass system worked up until ~5 months ago (and it still applies to all those old exclusive items and passes). You needed to spend all your time grinding and paying money to get the skins, otherwise you wont get all the skins and their super variants and items, and they never return. Don't have time for any other game when Fortnite forces itself into your life like a damn 9-5 just to be able to get the shit you paid real world money for.
This is the current standard Western Game Devs hold themselves to. Not outdoing Nintendo's top sellers, not making games better than the ones they created in the past, no it's either a political hit piece game or "we need to make the next Fortnite." Spend $9 for a playermodel change that would be a standard free feature and common decency to include had these games been in a more civilized world (a fuckton of Fortnite playermodels get ripped from the files and uploaded to the GMod workshop for free lmao). A lot of money/time, or both wasted for no real net gain. The gameplay isn't even that good, it's very evident Fortnite's gameplay is from a 2011 PvE project that experienced the worst development hell and was hastily thrown into what it is now, updates not fixing issues but instead sidestepping them.

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