Putting my personal issues with the format (fuck mobile games, fuck episodic formats, fuck infinite writers) and it's peculiar ability to pull competent creators out of eroge aside, I'm against monetization at this level on a moral standpoint first and foremost. The use of paid gacha and cartoonish moustache twirling predatory business practices/philosophies to take advantage of people just make my skin crawl. In my eyes, the whole thing is just a glorified digital pachinko machine and it belongs in a casino where it should be subject to the same regulations as the rest of these kinds of games.

This kind of stuff alone should be enough to turn anybody with a brain against it, but the problem with using the aforementioned tactics is that they actually work. It's had the effect of sucking otaku into its fucked up spiral of casino-tier paywalled experience and it's also doing a standup job of convincing people that spending vast sums of money on a "game" is the new normal.

It's impossible to deny F/GO's influence - look at how all encompassing it is. It's taken over otaku subculture and that does NOT spell a bright future for me, so I'm gonna continue to criticize it for as long and as loudly as I possibly can because it's bullshit. I don't want to live in a world where soshage is the dominant format for otaku media and I genuinely hope that every single company that changes their primary output to chasing soshage bucks goes out of business.

For the people who have been memed into thinking that soshage format/profits is necessary for an experience like that, I invite you to play Rance 10 at some point for a direct rebuttal to that line of thinking.

R10 retails for ~8000 yen, and it's a one time charge! And you get *everything*! The game has even more text than F/GO, except you don't have to wait for months between chapters. You can roll FREE gacha as much as you want and enjoy that system worked into a style of gameplay that requires you to use your brain and think up strategies for whatever teams you end up with. It's got an insane shitload of artwork, and I am SURE that the story is of a much higher consistency and quality than anything you'll come across in F/GO. And on top of all of that, Alicesoft is a much smaller company and certainly isn't pulling millions of dollars per day from any of their products.

So don't fucking tell me you're getting the best bang for your buck out of F/GO, because that's demonstrably false - what you're actually doing is gambling with the future of this subculture and the odds are NOT in our favor.