This is not just something for the mobile gaming industry anymore. A few choice examples: - Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people w

This is not just something for the mobile gaming industry anymore. A few choice examples: - Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players - EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible - Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime *not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!