I'm one of the few people that don't care if devs decide to add MTX in their games or not. The cost of making games only goes up and the $60 price tag by itself just doesn't cut it anymore. If 343i feels like they need a battle pass or an in-game storefront to offset the cost of production somewhat then by all means more power to them, if I like the game, then I'll support them by purchasing MTX. Until games cost $100 or more I wouldn't expect micro-transactions to go away.
The $60 price tag is not some immutable law passed down from on high, its an arbitrary price set by publishers. N64/PS1 era games were actually quite expensive relative to both the value of the $ at the time and relative to their development costs. Companies today could increase prices, or manage their spending or just not go out of their way to build only the biggest and most expensive titles they possibly can. Player's shouldn't be forced to subsidize management incompetence and the publisher's do not have an inherent right to profit.
To make matters worse publishers have failed to actually demonstrate that they are losing meaningful amounts of money due to the $60 price tag, they just gesture towards increased cost of development while ignoring all context and their own failings.
It isn't about just making a stable, healthy profit for these companies. They expect endless growth at a faster rate year after year, which is not actually a reasonable thing to expect, yet they continue to try and squeeze out more and more money out of the same audience until they squeeze too hard and there is some pushback such as with lootboxes.
Make no mistake, lootboxes are far from the only manipulative money making practices that are widespread throughout the industry and it only gets worse when you get to F2P models. Sowing discontent among the playerbase in order to get them to spend money is what the Free 2 play model is built around.
I wish folks would stop uncritically accepting gaming industry talking points.
