I agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement:
> [that] gameplay should never have been in the game
How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective?
This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?
There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk about making something so unpleasant that people are willing to pay to get rid of it.
Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a conversation about edification and people choosing to waste their own time. What we have here instead is a system where people are signaling with real money that the experience is unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding what's best for people against their will or forcing art to have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about building an experience that's monetized around players openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to them.
Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value, but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos. It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.
> [that] gameplay should never have been in the game
How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective?
This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?